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Case study · Case study

A Google penalty, found and lifted

Design Modo, a resource library for digital designers and developers, was losing organic traffic month on month to an apparent partial penalty.

Service
Penalty removal
Market
United States
The brief

Traffic decaying month on month

Design Modo publishes a wealth of tips, resources and source code for designers and developers.

It came to us with an apparent partial penalty that had been eroding its organic traffic month on month. We needed to find the cause and fix it quickly.

What we did

What we did

01

Root-cause research

In-depth research traced the penalty to outbound links rather than the usual inbound links.

02

Link clean-up

Deactivated the problem hyperlinks.

03

Reconsideration request

Submitted a reconsideration request to Google.

The results

The results

  • Google revoked the penalty a couple of weeks after the reconsideration request.
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