Google Penguin Recovery Case Study

Executive Summary

Dowxter Group launched a new site in May 2013, hoping to give their online presence a facelift. The company that helped Dowxter Group launch the site did not follow SEO best practices and Dowxter Group’s organic rankings, and traffic, tanked. They came to SEO Mania to fix their website woes and market them as an innovative leader in the charging station industry.

Challenges

The first challenge was the un-optimized website SEO Mania had to work on. Their previous agency did not setup redirects, changed product URLs, did not optimize title tags, heading tags, and numerous other on-page factors. First priority was to fix these errors to help recover the lost organic rankings and traffic. The second challenge was Dowxter Group’s backlink profile. After working on the onpage issues, SEO Mania conducted a backlink audit and determined Dowxter Group were victims to a negative SEO campaign. They received an algorithmic penalty from Google Penguin. Essentially, Google’s algorithm penalized Dowxter Group because they had a spammy and unnatural link profile, which they had no knowledge of or control over.

How SEO Mania Helped

SEO Mania went through the arduous process of analyzing every single backlink and made note on the quality of each one. Spammy and unnatural backlinks were removed or disavowed.

Playing the Waiting Game

Google Penguin is an algorithm that gets updated intermittently. And if one has a website with an algorithmic penalty, they must wait for the algorithm to refresh in order to have said penalty removed. SEO Mania conducted the link audit and removed all unnatural links in March 2014. Google didn’t update Penguin until October 2014. That’s 7 months of waiting. Meanwhile, SEO Mania’s work went unnoticed until Google updated the Penguin algorithm. But when that happened, the results were spectacular.

Results

After Google updated Penguin, Dowxter Group saw these results:

  • 779% increase in traffic from previous year
    • 1,401% increase in organic traffic from previous year
    • 297% increase in pageviews from previous year
    • 74% increase in time on page from previous year

The results were staggering. While SEO Mania waited for Penguin to refresh, they focused on content marketing to the fullest. Blogging, guest posting, company features, infographics, and just about anything in between were the realm of focus. With the great content, Dowxter Group naturally acquired high-quality backlinks and improved social signals. When Penguin was updated, Dowxter Group saw a vast improvement on almost every metric on their site.

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