Google Penalty Removal & 100% Organic Traffic Improvement for a Popular Online Pharmacy in USA

Service Provided

Search Engine Optimisation

Case study subject

Search Engine Optimisation

• This US pharmacy (name hidden for privacy issues) was a group with 2 ecommerce websites.
• The 2 websites were penalized by Google for a Manual Action Penalty because of incorrect implementation of Schema markup.
• Because of the penalty, the website traffic was going down. Our goal was to remove the penalty & change the downward traffic trend into an upward trend, thereby improving conversions too.
• The whole project extended for a period 12 months from a penalty removal standpoint.
• There were multiple schema markups implemented on the website in JSON and the key goal for the first phase was to pin – point at the exact issue.
• Since this was a manual action penalty, we were already running on a tight monitoring by Google and any further action which would seem as a black hat technique would put their whole business in jeopardy.
• Intense research was conducted by multiple experts from our team to arrive at several issues, debates were conducted internally and finally we understood the core issue.
• The schema implementation was done incorrectly for product and review & rating schema by the previous agency of the client. The core issue was that the review & rating schema had static content instead of variables fetched from the product information sections. That way, all products always showed a rating of 5, which according to Google was misleading the buyers on the website.
• Now that the issue was identified, next step was to first fix the entire website and ensure not a single page on the website had this issue. Daily coordination with the tech team and two layers of checks ensured that we had fixed this issue once and for all on the website – this was the second phase of the process.
• Finally, the third phase involved sending proof of implementation to Google via Search Console for review.
• Over a rigorous process that extended several months, we finally got rid of the penalty and over the next 3 months, the websites starting seeing traffic come to the usual benchmark before the penalty was hit.
• We undertook the SEO implementation of the website thereafter and did aggressive link building & content publishing to overcome the loss of traffic & revenue over the last few months and exceed the number of median conversions every month.