How my site was penalised by Google, and lost 60% of its traffic within 24 hours. How it happened and how to avoid
Disclaimer: The site mentioned is my own, created for tests like these. Me and my team do not pay for links when working with our clients. Sites like these are made to experiment with, create case studies, be creative and strengthen our recommended methods within SEO.
Even if you know a lot about SEO, sometimes you do stupid stuff anyway
The site was created in 2018, quickly gaining traffic
I, as a site admin, followed every SEO rule there is, creating high quality content with the help of some of my best writers and programmers. While it was in the highly competitive entertainment niche it quickly gained organic traffic from Google.
Above shows visitors from Google US to the site, receiving a bump in traffic in November of 2018.
“Traffic increased by 300% - And 80% came from Google”
And then Google traffic exploded
In the beginning of 2019 we were at 60,000 visitors per month (Google US traffic only). And we decided to focus heavily on SEO throughout the year.
Here’s what we did
- Technical improvements, speeding up the site
- Followed Google’s official Pagespeed guidelines, scoring 100/100
- Added Google AMP (A mobile friendly tool by Google themselves)
- Researched keywords and analysed the competition
- Hiring highly experienced freelance writers giving them SEO guidelines and keywords
A combination of luck and having way better SEO compared to our competitors - Google decided to give us even more visibility.
We went from having 60,000 Google US visitors per month to 150,000
And then we made a huge mistake
The traffic kept going even after the season bump as seen above. Year over year was at 300%. And 80% of our traffic came from Google. Perfect!
But one thing was missing, links.
We basically had none and hadn’t had the time to properly work out a plan to increase them either. The question became obvious, would we increase traffic even further if we got high-quality links as well? Having worked with SEO for over 10 years, I wanted to see if we could take a shortcut. I knew the answer was no, but I was curious as to what was offered in 2020 in terms of cheating, so called blackhat SEO. In the end I could learn something from it and make a case for our clients to never buy links. I didn’t realize just how damaging it would be.
Having worked with blackhat before, we knew that buying a few thousands links from a Fiverr gig wouldn’t help us, and so called PBN links are expensive, easily going for $500+ per high quality link. In the end, we went with mid-tier priced links.
We located a service called LinksManagement. For a cheap price we would get relevant links from sites with authority, and their service was a seamless way to start building links. We ended up paying $120 for 10 links.
Everything went fine - Until Google discovered what we had done
The links basically did nothing for the site. Our traffic was still going strong but months after the links had been in place, they hadn’t moved the needle. This isn’t out of the ordinary, Google usually dismiss paid links and simply discount them. No surprises. But then something happened.
Within 24 hours, 60% of our Google traffic simply vanished. How could this have happened? And it wasn’t Corona related as the traffic went away within such a short period of time. We even dug around for any technical issues but found nothing. Penalized for only 10 paid links seemed out of the question.
Google had gotten smart, really smart
We soon discovered that Google made a massive core update to its search algorithm on May 4th. And our traffic dropped on May 5th, the day after. We had obviously been hit by this update.
One of its changes was named EAT - Expertise, Authority and Trust. And trust was the one rule we didn’t follow, we had just tried to trick the hand that fed us.
But why would only a few bad links matter?
Simply put, our ratio of links. Since we had so few links - Almost zero links from authority sites, suddenly getting 10 high-end links sent signals to Google’s new improved AI. We were obviously trying to gain the system and didn’t deserve the huge amount of organic traffic.
So, what now?
First of all, we use this case study to explain to our clients the importance of organic references and links. Buying links might work for a while, it never pays off in the long run.
And secondly, there is a way to recover. It took us five months, but we finally got back on track. I would advise anyone to hire an experienced SEO firm, like ourselves, or look for a freelancer on UpWork of Freelancer. The main and often most common method is to collect the bad links and report them to Google, and time it with one of their bigger updates. It’s not difficult but it’s time consuming.
In Summary
Shortcuts and methods for gaining traffic quickly using SEO does exist, but trying to trick or pay your way to success never pays off.
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