A few months ago we were hired to assist a company that operates in a competitive niche to figure out what was wrong with their website and how to go about fixing it. Upon analysis it was quite clear that the website had been manually penalised by Google for an unethical link building campaign. We followed up with our partner on this matter and were told that they did indeed purchase links. Being familiar with this we researched what Google Webmaster Tools was reporting and we looked at the whole website from a technical and content point of view too. There were a number of inconsistencies, badly redirected pages, traces of an old website, terrible inbound links amongst a number of other things. Between the manual penalty (!) and the technical problems, we were able to make a considerable number of changes and it appears as though we're coming out on top.
We are now a few months into the project and we're starting to see a really nice turn around. The website is starting to rank again and the organic traffic is increasing quickly. Here is a graph of the organic traffic:
If we can keep this momentum going we'll hopefully be back up to previous numbers in the next couple of months. Furthermore, we have some historical ranking data showing that the website really started to come back to life during the month of May.
The table below shows how the keyword set is finally being placed back into the Google index. The previous report we ran (a week prior to this) was similar so over the space of a couple of weeks Google re-accepted all the keywords into its index again across the 4 countries.
The table below shows that further to the indexing, the keywords are being given more visibility. This table was a week after the table above and was compiled a couple of days ago. We can see that the keywords have remained in the index and are now starting to move up in the ranks. Next week is going to be interesting when we run the reports again, hopefully the upward trend will continue!
It's been quite an exciting project, there's nothing better than being presented with a website that has been penalised and your job is to get it out of the sandbox and back up to the top. Seeing the organic traffic grow, watching the leads increase and seeing the website start to rank well again is an incredibly fulfilling feeling.
Who said SEO was dead? *chuckle*
If we can keep this momentum going we'll hopefully be back up to previous numbers in the next couple of months. Furthermore, we have some historical ranking data showing that the website really started to come back to life during the month of May.
The table below shows how the keyword set is finally being placed back into the Google index. The previous report we ran (a week prior to this) was similar so over the space of a couple of weeks Google re-accepted all the keywords into its index again across the 4 countries.
The table below shows that further to the indexing, the keywords are being given more visibility. This table was a week after the table above and was compiled a couple of days ago. We can see that the keywords have remained in the index and are now starting to move up in the ranks. Next week is going to be interesting when we run the reports again, hopefully the upward trend will continue!
It's been quite an exciting project, there's nothing better than being presented with a website that has been penalised and your job is to get it out of the sandbox and back up to the top. Seeing the organic traffic grow, watching the leads increase and seeing the website start to rank well again is an incredibly fulfilling feeling.
Who said SEO was dead? *chuckle*