SEO Case Study: How To Remove A Penalty Within A Month

In this case study, I’ll show you how we:

Keep reading to learn the exact strategies we used to achieve those results.

A Closer Look At The Case Study Site

This client works in the world of video streaming niche competing for highly-competitive terms.

However, when the site got badly hit by a manual penalty. They were no longer visible for their main term: “Online Movies” or brand terms.

This led to a significant drop in search traffic, rankings and overall visibility.

It also meant that Google no longer trusted the site to send it traffic.

So, our main goal was to recover the search traffic and rankings by:

1. Fixing the backlink profile
2. Getting the Penalty removed
3. Improving domain authority
4. Improving & developing trust signals

But it wasn’t easy.

We had to overcome a few challenges along the way…

The Biggest Challenges We Had to Overcome

We took this site on as a part of our Google Penalty recovery service.

As I said earlier, the site got badly hit by a manual penalty due to their poor backlink profile.

Indeed, their previous SEO agency had built them links from public PBNs using black hat SEO techniques…

So our challenge here was to create a link removal campaign focused on identifying and deleting all the spammy backlinks previously built.

But this wasn’t enough.

We also had to write a detailed reconsideration letter to Google in order to get the penalty removed. And it worked! The penalty got removed within a month (which is generally unheard of).

To recap, these were the biggest challenges we had to face :

Now, I’m going to show what we did to overcome these issues and get our client’s search traffic and rankings back:

Creating The Plan Of Attack

Here’s a breakdown of how we overcame the challenges:

Thanks to this plan of attack, we were able to remove the penalty within a month, get the traffic level back and get 114 number 1 positions, 980 top 10 listings, and 1,534 top 20 listings!

Not bad, right?

Just take a look at all the results below.

The Results Are In

On top of the penalty removal programme, we installed a link-building campaign that offered links from quality niche relevant domains.

A combination of our own linking strategies and white hat links from recognised sites meant that we could drastically increase the Trust and DA of the site.

By removing the penalty and replacing the poor PBN links with links from top quality niche relevant websites…

That meant the total volume of keywords that jumped into the high-ranking positions were:

You can see how we’ve been increasing the referring domain count of the links month on month since the April penalty.

This has led to traffic outperforming pre-penalty levels.

Wrapping It Up

There you have it:

The strategies we used to remove our client’s penalty in LESS than a month.

If you have been hit by a manual penalty, just remember those simple steps:

If you follow this advice, you should get rid of your penalty in no time and even see your search traffic increase.

If you need help after being hit with a penalty, then send us an enquiry form.