Google Penalty Case Study: How One Mistake in Our SEO Strategy Got Our Website Penalised

Do you know that your site can get penalised even when nobody in your team thinks they've done anything wrong? That is exactly what happened to us.

Our website got hit by a Google penalty because, somewhere along the way, nobody was checking what we put on it or who was linking to it. That single gap then turned up in seven places, from freelance blogs nobody read and ChatGPT drafts to copied pages, the wrong schema, old hacked URLs, spammy backlinks and a PR agency we never kept an eye on.

In this Google penalty case study, we'll take you through all seven mistakes, why Google held each one against us and what we really should've been doing. You'll find content, schema, a hack we half-fixed, backlinks, a PR agency in here, and a few questions people keep asking us right at the end.

The one mistake was skipping human review. We left it to freelancers, tools and agencies, assumed they'd get it right, and honestly never opened their work before it went live on our site or landed in our backlink profile.

Every problem below traces back to the same gap.

We published whatever our freelance writers submitted, without anyone reading it properly first. Google's spam policies describe scaled content abuse as pages produced in bulk mainly to rank, with little originality or value, and that is what our blog slowly turned into.

We asked a writer for a blog on "Digital Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business." Instead of writing from their own knowledge, they generated it on ChatGPT and sent it over. We published it as it was.

Someone on our side should have sat with every draft and asked a simple thing, which is whether this was original, whether real effort went into it and whether the writer actually knew the subject.

The problem was the order of the work. Our writers would type the topic into ChatGPT, take the whole article it gave back, tweak a line here and there and submit it, which is basically backwards.

You write first, and you write from your own head, so that means what you know, what you've tried and whatever you've dug up yourself. ChatGPT gets handed the draft after that, for typos, grammar and the odd sentence that reads like a tangle, and none of the thinking moves over to it. It is recommended that you keep AI as the proofreader and not let it near the author's chair.

Some of our pages were taken from other websites and only lightly reworded before we published them. If a page is mostly borrowed from somebody else, Google has no real reason to show ours when the original is already sitting right there.

Start from a blank page, credit the source whenever you lean on someone's idea, and bring in something they missed, maybe a worked example from your classroom or numbers out of your own campaigns.

We added product schema with ratings because competitors were getting review stars in search, and we copied the setup without checking if it suited our pages. We believe this also contributed to our problems.

Google's review snippet guidelines are strict about which pages can show stars, and reviews a business collects about itself on its own site are not eligible.

Around a year ago our website was hacked. We recovered it, but some spam URLs and pages the hackers had created were still sitting there, and we never found them because we did not audit the site properly after the recovery.

Some of them carried adult images and links to adult websites. We believe these pages added to the spam and cloaking issues Google saw on our domain.

It is important for you to know that getting a hacked site back up and actually cleaning it out are not the same job at all. Once you're back in, crawl every URL, hold the list up against your sitemap, dig through Search Console for anything you don't recognise and delete whatever your team never made.

We did not monitor our backlink profile, so low-quality and spam links kept piling up without anyone noticing. We believe this affected our site's authority and overall SEO performance.

Go for a monthly review of new referring domains. Anything coming from a site that's irrelevant or dodgy deserves a closer look before you decide what to do about it.

We'd hired a PR agency to get word out about our programs and events, and not once did we ask which websites they were putting it on. Turns out they were copy-pasting the same press note onto loads of low-quality, high-spam websites and pointless subdomains, when a handful of relevant, respected ones would've done the job.

Ask for the full list of publications before anything goes live, and a link to each placement after. Moreover, one strong placement on a relevant site does more for you than the same press note copied across twenty weak ones, which is the same idea behind guest posting on niche websites.

Whatever gets published on your site or linked to it is your responsibility, even if a freelancer, a tool or an agency did the work. At Digital Nest, we now treat review as part of the job, from the first draft to the last backlink.

If you want to learn how to run SEO audits, content reviews and backlink checks properly, have a look at the SEO training at Digital Nest or talk to a career expert about which program fits you.