How did you first find out that your brand had been hit by a Google penalty?

Like most SEOs, we have a habit of checking our main SERPs a couple of times a day. On the day in question, we realised quite a substantial drop in ranking had occurred without any big algorithmic changes. Luckily the “Manual Actions” page in Webmaster Tools was available because we didn’t receive messages or emails until a couple of days later.

Did you find out on the day, or were you informed at a later time?

On the day. There was no particular chatter about an update in the usual spots or the SEO forums, so we checked out Webmaster Tools and there it was.

What was your reaction when your Google penalty landed?

Frustration, most certainly – but we weren’t particularly surprised, we knew there was some questionable back linking done to our site in the past that could come back to bite us – it was always a matter of time. The main problem was having to explain what had happened to non-marketing managers; this proved challenging.

Did any of your other competitors get hit at the same time?

No. Two of our websites got hit, and they were in totally separate niches. We believe that in some way or another we were flagged for a manual review and Google must have carried out an assessment of our complete portfolio of sites.

When looking at the link profiles of your organic competition, do you think that Google’s decision was fair?

Fair in some ways, and not in others. Our websites dropped because of their backlinks, and websites with even worse link profiles – and awful content to boot - took our place. There are a lot of questionable websites still doing extremely well in Google.

What channels did you explore to maintain your market presence?

Luckily we had de-risked our strategy by launching multiple websites; this meant that even though two of our sites lost their rankings, we still had a number of others that were providing us with organic traffic. We were also running PPC at the time, we found that by increasing our spend slightly we could generate enough leads to compensate for the temporary reduction in organic lead generation.

What (internal/external) resources did your brand use to rectify the issue?

Funnily enough a lot of SEO agencies that we had liaised with in the past seemed to call us in that week post-penalty. We are an in-house team though, and we saw this as an important learning opportunity.

We downloaded our link profiles using a combination of the most popular site explorers, we then manually audited our profile and flagged any links we thought breached Google’s webmaster guidelines. We attempted to obtain the contact details for each of the unnatural links identified using a combination of our in-house records and the Whois Lookup Tool. We then emailed the relevant site owners/administrators to request link removal and disavowed the remaining links at domain level.

Who or what had the most beneficial impact on your team in order to rectify the issue?

When building any links in the past, either internally or externally, we had processes in place, meaning we kept the contact details of everyone we worked with. This meant that when we did get penalised and subsequently looked to clean up our link profile, we were able to get a good percentage of our links removed with relative ease. It was only the older ‘legacy links’ that we struggled to remove and subsequently disavowed. SEO blogs and forums were our main source of information throughout.

How long did it take you to get out of the penalty and at what cost?

One of our websites was out within a month – after the first reconsideration request. An older, more established website was downgraded from site wide to partial match after the second reconsideration request. By this time, our strategy had shifted towards a content based approach on our main branded website (which we have never done any link building on) and we decided our time was better spent working on this. A penalised website still holds value for PPC campaigns.

What would you learn from this experience?

• Have a plan B and understand the risks you are taking.

• If you want quick results, expect them to be short lived.

• Just because something works it doesn’t mean it’s always going to work.

• Just because everyone else is doing it - it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right thing to do.

• Be proactive not reactive.

• Starting afresh can prove more effective in the long run than trying to rank an old site with a blemished past.

How have you changed the way you think about getting ahead in Google?

We are now committed to a long-term strategy rather than constantly looking for quick wins. We understand that ranking a site in this way takes a lot of time and effort – and we are committed to this.

Our main strategy going forward will be based around content marketing and brand building. We are looking to explore social media and authorship and believe that these could provide us with significant value going forward.

How does your brand intend to increase their search performance in 2014 and beyond?

More content, more interaction, more media. Even if we get fewer visitors overall in the short term, we will be working extremely hard to convert them.