SEO Vandalism and the Google Penalty

We are still battling it. Our best information tells us that after we complete the work of cleaning up every single page in the site, that it will take a minimum of 6 weeks for the penalty to be lifted by Google, IF they do so without the site owner having to submit a personal request for them to do so. It could take much longer.

It is rather sad. The site owner didn’t do anything wrong. They just hired the wrong person. We call them an “SEO Vandal”. Because what they did was the electronic equivalent of vandalism. The site was destroyed by removal of all meaningful content, and the content was replaced by keyword strings, commas and all. One unintelligent act on the part of someone who had been hired to help, and now the site owner is paying for it in having to pay again to have the site redone, and in lost business.

If your site is penalized, you cannot just bring it back to where it was. You have to clean it until it squeaks. It seems that Google will ignore a site until it raises a red flag – even borderline things will be ignored until enough of them mount up, or until something really over the line occurs. If they slap it, it goes down hard. It won’t be restored to grace just by making a gesture. The whole thing has to be polished with no signs of anything borderline.

That is really hard to do. Especially in the current equivocal and changing SEO environment. When you have to get a penalty removed though, the best approach is a highly conservative one.

It means using words less aggressively than you might otherwise. It means making every single thing on the page not only completely natural, but making sure that there is no reason why anyone would ever consider that it was the least bit manipulative.

Whatever the rules usually are about how many keywords to use, set them a little lower. Whatever the standards typically are about optimization, reign them in a notch.

It is a hard thing to do. Especially for someone trained to push business to the limits to get all out of it that you can. But it is the best option.

It is far better to regain part of the lost ground than none of it. Only time can bring the whole back, and it has to happen through conservative action, and a great deal of patience.