The SEO Penalties case study is a big milestone for us, since it's been OUR FIRST MILLION, in other words, the first site where we hit 1,000,000 daily visits. Before explaining the SEO Penalties case study, here's the milestone day:
SEO Penalties case study: the story of 1 MILLION visits
The project began in mid-2014 and throughout its life has gone through good moments, bad ones and terrible ones. The online marketing world, and especially SEO, is a world of highs and lows where the most stubborn survive, and above all, those who learn from their mistakes.
THE FIRST BIG JUMP
Our first happy moment came after working on the project for half a year and let us pass 400,000 daily visits.
What factors drove this jump?
The work we did on the project was essentially based on two main actions:
1. Solid terminology analysis where each and every publication targeted high-volume, low-competition keywords.
2. Link-building work based on high-authority domains with contextualized content and PBN links to go after keywords with a higher difficulty level.
Thanks to these two actions, we were able to reach a pretty high traffic volume in a relatively short period.
THE FIRST CRASH
Whoever thinks that living off an owned project and working on the internet is easy has no idea what this is about.
It was Christmas 2015 and we thought we were the kings of Google. Traffic was going great, and the project seemed to be heading to the moon after a long stretch of stability, but suddenly the three kings brought us our first big hit. We lost 30% of traffic in a few days, and from there, traffic started falling slowly and agonizingly.
What caused the penalty?
Well, our first penalty came thanks to advertising. Those were crazy times for CPAs and CPMs, we were young and innocent, and interstitials, pop-ups, pop-unders, floaters… were a very juicy toy. The thing is, we got hit with a penalty that, no matter what we did to reverse the situation, kept dragging us into the pit.
But… how did we reverse this? THE FIRST RECOVERY
Desperate times call for desperate measures. After a penalty, often no matter how you fix the error that led to it (especially back in 2016, when Google updates rolled out months later), you can't recover the project. So we decided to do a DOMAIN REDIRECT and clean the project in Google's eyes, "starting from scratch". John Mueller took almost 2 years to confirm we were right (see here).
We'd used domain redirects to leapfrog different types of algorithmic penalties and had them well tested. So after the redirect, what we expected happened:
The project grew gradually and steadily over the following 7 months.
Obviously, after this first crash, with its accompanying scare and psychological blow, we decided to cut the volume of advertising, stop using intrusive banners on our site, and took the chance to add new improvements to help the site grow. It's important to keep in mind that from when we started in the sector until this 2017 period, the niche became much more competitive, professionalized, and Google also reduced organic reach and with it the ability to capture traffic.
What actions did we implement to keep growing steadily?
Link building is a basic piece across all our projects, and we kept working it in a non-aggressive but consistent way. Plenty of authority links with the most contextualization possible and low keyword abuse.
In addition, we decided to implement several improvements on the on-page side:
1. Building an internal linking strategy based on authority, contextualization and UX
From our experience, in high-traffic projects this is a relevant factor when it comes to pushing or holding certain keys in the top results. When you have server-level drops, for example, the site's traffic suffers and, with it, the rankings, same with performance issues in specific sections…
That's why we decided to run a strategy where traffic weighting was an important factor for internal linking. With this, we created our own formula that considered, on one hand, the link juice each page received from the architecture; on another, we grouped content into clusters by most related topics; and lastly, we considered which sections had the most traffic and worked to balance it toward the sections we wanted to rank better.
2. Improving the site architecture
Many of our pages generated multiple links to sections or resources that ultimately didn't have as much organic value, so we placed all our main pages at the first level and built a more organized, balanced structure.
3. Improving the quality of our content
At this point we decided to invest more capital in content quality and quantity, improving both the text volume per post and the publishing cadence.
THE SECOND CRASH: Death by a thousand pinches
After a few months of steady growth, it looked like the impact from the domain redirect and all the actions we'd implemented was wearing off. The following 6 months we experienced what we call "death by a thousand pinches", a slow but constant traffic decline where your project screams for help. This is most often due to a content issue, and this case was no different.
THE SECOND RECOVERY: The Safecont Effect
Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, Safecont played a very important role in this second recovery. Before finding this excellent tool, content analysis on large projects was extremely complicated. We knew we had a content problem on the site, but we weren't aware of the scale of the problem on our hands.
This was a revealing data point and made us realize the problem and, above all, understand the source so we could reverse it.
So we pulled together several spreadsheets, cross-referencing Safecont data with Google Analytics, and after two weeks of hard work, the following happened:
In just 4 days we went from 110,000 daily visits to 225,000, and from there we again changed the project's trend.
THE BOOM
After this recovery, the project held around 200,000 daily visits until Google's last update this past March. That's when organic madness broke loose and in just 3 days we multiplied, from just under 200,000 sessions to more than 1 million.
SUMMARY
What factors may have driven the change?
It's still too early to know the real impact of this latest Google change and which pieces are shaking the SERPs worldwide. But what we can note is what we believe is helping us hit this milestone:
1. Very good WPO performance that delivers good UX on mobile and improves crawling: good load times, lighter pages, good static-resource optimization.
2. Solid control of similar content and thin content: removal of unnecessary pages, de-indexing of sections with no SEO value, expansion and improvement of content on risk-flagged pages.
3. Correct architecture at the authority and navigability level: return to generating good UX signals.
4. Correct linking strategy (anchor structure, cadence, contextualization, geolocation…) and authority sites.
Well, we hope you've found the article interesting and that it can help you improve your projects with concepts or ideas to implement in your strategy.
We'll keep publishing other case studies, so we look forward to your comments.
Co-CEO and Head of SEO at iSocialWeb, an agency specialized in SEO, SEM and CRO that manages over 350M organic visits a year with a 100% decentralized infrastructure.
Also behind Virality Media, a company of owned projects with more than 150 million active monthly visits spread across different sectors and industries.
Systems engineer by training and SEO by vocation. Tireless learner, AI fan and prompt dreamer.