When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), it’s critical to know what Google’s standard for quality is. It’s also important to keep up to date and understand why that standard was established. If you are not sure you can do that yourself, make use of resources from Web 20 Ranker. Since Google’s intentions have always been to make the search experience great for consumers, they frequently update and enhance their algorithms to maintain their standard of quality. Fullidentity, an online company specializing in ID badges and identification solutions, was hit especially hard by one of these updates and faced some serious hardship because of it. Here’s a little more about how Google Penguin almost killed Fullidentity:
A Dramatic Crash and Burn
When Google pushed out the first penguin update in April of 2012, Fullidentity’s daily rate of new customers took a shockingly dramatic hit. If we put this in terms of a street brawl, Fullidentity just got sent to the ICU. After a few more consecutive Penguin updates from Google, Fullidentity was looking at a $50,000 income loss per month. That’s an incredible amount of money to lose on a monthly basis. At this point, Fullidentity wasn’t dead, but they were barely hanging on. Though clinging to hope, they knew that this could potentially ruin them as a company.
What Went Wrong?
When Fullidentity began seeing their financial decline, they knew it had to be due to shift in Google’s algorithm but they weren’t certain what to do about it. Before penguin, Google’s algorithm counted the quantity and quality of backlinks to a page. This gave them a general idea of a particular page’s importance. However, the problem was that it didn’t give a good indication of the actual quality. Because of this loop hole, Fullidentity created a program that would take advantage of this system and focus on backlink quantity. Their program was linking to anything and everything on the web and it worked well for a while. However, at the time of the update, Fullidentity didn’t realize that Google had actually penalized them for having such a large number of bad backlinks. Every effort they made to correct the problem was failing and they didn’t know why.
Fullidentity’s Redmption
After finally being informed of the penalty, Fullidentity knew that they had to take immediate action. Because of the program they created, they were left with over 7,000 bad links that needed to be removed. Unfortunately, the only way to get rid of them was to find a contact for each domain and request that the the link be removed. Every email and response was compiled into a spreadsheet, and after two weeks of around the clock work, it was submitted to Google Wedmaster Tools with a request to lift the penalty. Unfortunately, Fullidentity’s first submission was denied. They continued the hard work, and after doing this for another month, they submitted their request again. Finally, after almost two months of non-stop effort, the penalty was revoked. Fullidentity has officially been penalty free for more than two weeks now and looks forward to a bright future as they have begun seeing some major improvements.
The Moral of the Story
Fullidentity, certainly learned their lesson when it comes to compliance with Google algorithms. They know now, as all of you should know, that there are no short cuts. If you want to have a quality website and a good ranking, you need to put in the work and do things the right way. In the end it will pay off. Don’t let your desire to succeed entice you to search for loop holes or implement quick fixes. Fast results don’t typically last. It’s always worth it to put in the time and invest in what will make the biggest splash in the long haul.