Google Penalty & SEO Strategies

2 replies
  • SEO
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Hi There.

I am a newbie to the forum (Apologies that my first post is a question!). But i do have 8 years experience running successful online businesses :-). - So i can hopefully help other smaller businesses in return trying to grow with my knowledge also......

Were UK based by the way.

Its a fairly long post so i will ask the key question here at the top, and some back ground of our situation is further below...

If we are in a algorithmic google penalty, can we only come out of this penalty when google do the next major update? I have been told that they haven't done this for 18 months now, and one has been due for a few months......

Back Ground Info

I can't remember the exact date however around 2 to 3 years ago we suffered a manual spam penalty. We were in this penalty and a disavow file was submitted, it lasted around 6 months before google confirmed that they removed the action against us.

At this point we thought we could start to improve organic rankings, however all that happened was organic traffic continued to get lower and lower.

In our peak 2012-2013 we were getting organic traffic over 25,000 per month, this month its as low as only 2500, so just 10% of when we peaked!.

Being a business owner, my actions over the past couple of years have been:
1) Increase PPC budget to a ridiculous level to get web traffic, mostly to keep staff in a job! and to give them work to do.
2) Pay multiple SEO agencies to help us recover - Over 200k in the last 2-3 years!.

To be quite honest, i am rather fed up now of wasting money on agencies trying to chase what is not becoming what seems like "the impossible dream" in ranking on page one. We are down hundreds of thousands of pounds, money which could of been invested in other areas of business or to create jobs locally to us.

Is it even possible these days to rank a website on page one - After penalty?

I look forward to reply and any assistance

Best Regards

Chris.
#google #penalty #seo #strategies
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Odds are Google devalued most/all of OPs backlinks during the slap.

    My advice is try and rank a few test pages for extremely low competition keywords and If that works then move on towards real keywords with real competition. That way you'll at least know If Google is holding you back or competition is holding you back.

    No point in trying to rank tough keywords If the domain is tainted (Google looking over your shoulder since the slap).
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