Recovering from a Google penalty

[wsmith727]

Hi there,

So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage.

I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site.

I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out.

Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell.

From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?).

I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing.

I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase.

Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Will

[effectdigital]

The erroneous advice you got was that Google handle reconsideration requests within a few days. Usually it does take a few weeks and in extreme situations it can take months. Usually when it takes months, it's because you have repeat-offended over the same issue. If you get a penalty for link-spam and then do more link-spam, each time you submit to be reconsidered they leave it longer and longer

It's also down to Google's internal resources. The sad fact of the matter is that, although losing Google does heavy damage to your site... Losing your site, doesn't do heavy damage to Google. If there are other matters which Google are pulling focus to internally, it can take quite some time to 'be seen' as it were

It would be strange of Google to mis-apply a penalty of some kind. Usually if you have hacked content, either those pages get nerfed or your whole site gets nerfed. Having one page get nerfed which was not part of the assault, is extremely unusual

I know that one thing you can do, is to create a free account to query Google's 'safe browsing' API

• https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/

My next step would be, to ascertain the URL of every page on your site that exists now or has existed within the past 12 months (just to be sure). You can get historic URLs out of the Wayback Machine, Google Analytics (by making a table that combines host-name and page / landing page - unfortunately they won't give you protocol... so hope that hasn't changed for you in the past year!) or Google Search Console. The live URLs, just crawl with Screaming Frog or similar.

Once you have a complete list, get a developer to build a rough script that will query all your URLs against Google's safe-browsing API. That would tell you if Google still sees a problem. It will tell you where Google sees the problem, if it does indeed see a problem in this area (and whether it sees the problem on live or dead pages)

When you have that to hand, you'll be in a much better position to know whether you still have an issue or whether you just haven't been seen by a Google rep yet. When they decline a reconsideration request, usually they do tell you

I think that the safe-browsing API, whilst free to access - is limited to 10k queries per day. Don't try and get clever and get around it, if you are already having Google problems (you don't want MORE!)

Another thing, it never hurts to link to an 'open' (link access required only) GoogleDoc (their version of word) within your reconsideration note. In the GoogleDoc you can much more fully explain, even with screenshots - what the heck is goin' on!

You need more information right now. Sorry I'm not giving you an instant solution, but I am telling you exactly what I'd do in your position