Penalty Recovery Case Study for UK PHA
The Brief
The UK Public Health Association (UK PHA) experienced a complete loss of rankings for most of their main keywords. Overall, the site experienced a 90% decline in traffic and a 98% decline in organic traffic from Google. The company’s previous SEO agency had used a wide range of outsourced, spammy and damaging tactics to try and move the websites rankings which eventually lead to the UK PHA receiving a manual penalty from Google.
Our Strategy
Now that we knew the cause of the drop in rankings (a manual penalty), we could put together a strategy to both reduce and hopefully completely remove the damage done by the previous agencies spam tactics. The main issue was that thousands of spam links had been created and pointed at the site which also resulted in an over optimised anchor text profile. One team worked to remove as many of the low-quality links as possible whilst another looked at ways to earn new, high quality links with a diversified anchor tech profile. The whole process was well documented and included when we submitted a reconsideration request in Google Search Console on behalf of the client.
The Results
2 weeks after the reconsideration request was submitted and 6 weeks in total after our google penalty recovery service had begun, we received a message in the Search Console account notifying us that the penalty had been revoked. Just 3 days later and rankings were returning and traffic slowly but surely increasing. The reconsideration request and penalty removal had worked and in some cases the site even ranked higher than before the penalty was applied due to the new, high quality links created. We signed a new client and the team at UK PHA learned that outsourcing their SEO work to the cheapest company is rarely the way to go. Our in house, specialist approach allowed the site to recover completely and start a value offering, user and Google friendly SEO campaign.
"We can’t thank Reboot enough for their monumental effort in helping us remove this penalty from our site. I really think that without their decisive action, we would have had to close down within a short period of time."
The results
