Google Manual Penalty Lifted - Why is my website still decreasing on traffic?

[dbutler912]

Hi there,

I was hoping that somebody has a potential answer to this or if anyone else has experienced this issue.

Our website has recently hit by a manual penalty (structured data wasn't matching the content on the page)

After working hard on this to fix the issue across the site, we submitted a reconsideration request which was approved by Google a few days later.

I understand that not all websites recover and it doesn't guarantee rankings will go back to normal, but it seems as if the traffic is continuing to drop at an even quicker rate.

There's a number of small technical optimisations that have been briefed into the dev team such as:

• Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links,

There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound.

Has this happened to anyone else before? If so, how did you recover?

Any suggestions/advice would be really appreciated.

Thank you

[effectdigital]

I have seen things like this happen before, but they're usually associated with a links penalty rather than a rich snippet spam penalty. When Google remove the authority pipelines for bad links, they don't magically decide to start valuing those linking sites again due to a reconsideration request (so in that area, it's common for people to get into an awful mess of unrealistic expectations)

With rich snippet spam penalties, I have seen some pretty savage ones but usually they are more of an on / off scenario. To see the kind of continual decline which you say you are experiencing, is quite unusual

Technical factors can influence ranking results, but they tend to influence indexation more than they influence rankings (e.g: making URLs which were previously hard to discover, easier for Google to discover, so new ranking positions can be created). Technical changes are (usually, there are exceptions) less good at pushing up existing rankings (which is more the domain of content, awesomeness and link-worthiness)

"- Redirecting duplicate versions, fixing redirects on internal links"

Something that can be done with the best of intentions, yet which can often be done wrong. For example, maybe you own a site and you notice that both of these URLs are accessible (200/OK):

https://www.mysite.com

https://www.mysite.com/

One has a trailing slash, the other does not. So you say to yourself, okay what we'll do is redirect one structure to the other! Seems logical right? But what if one of your structures (non-trailling slash) was more commonly linked to than the other (forced trailing slash)? When you make your change, suddenly most of your most important backlinks are hitting 301 redirects, instead of hitting your landing pages directly. In this hypothetical example, if you had picked the alternate structure (removing the trailing slash from URLs instead of forcing it) then the site may have performed much better. This is just a hypothetical illustration, but it shows that - simple ideas are never simple! In SEO we get paid for our analytical skills because they do matter and people need analysis pieces before making sweeping decisions, without realising the potential ramifications

"There's also work on-page running in the background fixing up keyword cannibalization, consolidating content keyword mapping and ensuring the internal link structure is sound"

Again, you may be shooting yourself in the foot in the short term. I am referring to what you term as "consolidating content" which usually revolves in reducing the number of pages on your website and funneling some content together, into fewer, more in-depth URLs which you hope will rank better. Totally the right thing to do in the long term, but in SEO, many strategies which yield long-term gains also cause disruption which causes short-term tail-off. If you JUST pulled yourself out of a penalty, was it really the right time to 'get disruptive'? I'd say no, it was not

If you are consolidating content, Google may or may not rank your single new page as well (for different keywords) as the two or more pages which were funneled into the creation of your new page. Why? Well, from a technical POV, even when you deploy the mighty 301 redirect, it doesn't always transfer 100% SEO authority from the old URL(s) to the new URL

Google tend to run similarity checks over their last active cache of the old URL(s), against the new page which you have supplied. If they seem % dissimilar, then that % of SEO authority is removed from the equity transfer of the 301 redirect. By similar, I mean something akin to, taking all the content from both (old vs new) page variants and running something like a simplified Boolean string similarity test. I don't mean what humans think is similar, I don't mean what you think is similar. I mean - what a mechanical mind would think was similar / dissimilar (often very different)

If Google didn't run such checks, you could easily by up authoritative expired domains, redirect them to yourself and gain loads of SEO authority for nothing. So Google wants to be sure, is THIS content which is receiving this 301 redirect - the SAME content which earned those backlinks? Might the webmaster who linked to that old URL, decide not to link to this new page? If there's much risk of that, even the mighty 301 redirect gets nuked in terms of equity transfer

Your hope of course, is that your new URL will be so much better than the old one(s), that over time it will earn more links than they did. If you are lucky, some authority from the old page(s) will filter through, but you should certainly expect some degree of short-term tail-off. If you have done this just as you have escaped a penalty, I can see how the convergence of your technical disruption(s) and the late penalty, could be causing you significant issues

Instead of doing types of work which remove URLs from your site, remove pages which could be indexing and narrow your content - I'd be doing EXACTLY the opposite. Creating new pages and content which is connected with new (yet relevant) keywords. Maybe work on the top or middle of your keyword (buying) funnel a bit. Get some digital (editorial) PR going, get some more authority and new pages which could be ranking in Google's SERPs. If you think about it, performing purely reductive work after you have had a massive traffic reduction, really isn't going to serve you very well

Hope that helps