Google Penalty Recovery Comes Back For Cleaning Company Website
The August 1st Google update was one of the biggest Google updates that happened in recent years.
One of our clients, EOT Cleaning, was ranking well for keywords like “end of tenancy cleaning” and “end of tenancy cleaning london” and many more uber competitive keywords. At one point earlier this year they were ranking for so many keywords, which Fernando (myself), did all the SEO work for and everything was going very well.
Then on August 1st things got so bad that the website went down to ranking on the 7th and then even at the top of the 10th page on Google. It was shocking to see the ranks dropping so dramatically and our client was very dissatisfied with our service and the overall situation.
Because at that time we were taking all the leads in the niche from the map pack and by two results on SEPR’s
So why did the end of tenancy cleaning keywords ranks drop?
There were many reasons, but we focused on intensive backlinking and becoming very aggressive to reach the top and outrank the top company “fantasticcleaners.com” and Google surely picked up on it. I did advise the client about getting aggressive but at one point I even thought ok you know what, rather than being on the 4th page for “end of tenancy cleaning” let’s go to the top.
So things happened and we learned that going hard could harm as Google doesn’t like that.
Not only with this particular website we experienced this effect and many sites dropped in various niches, but fortunately not as significantly as this one.
What did we do to come back to the first page on Google?
First, we moved the entire website to eotcleaning.co.uk and did redirect the https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/ to that and did the same for all the inner pages as well. Did that work? – not really!
So we brought back the website to https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/ and dropped eotcleaning.co.uk (It was on it for over 3 weeks so we got the idea)
We moved the entire website back to https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/ and revamped the content, but before that we removed a bunch of direct anchors we’ve done to https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/ for the keywords “end of tenancy cleaning” and “end of tenancy cleaning london”
I mean it was painful to go about doing that not knowing whether it would work or whether it would come back to SERPs”
Removing backlinks is not something I advise, because we did mess up some sites’ rankings due to disavowing the backlinks. Remove the backlinks manually and never disavow as there is no getting them back that way.
I only ever remove links or tweak/change the anchors… Never ever disavow unless someone does negative SEO to your website.
What really helped to get https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/ to the first page for > “end of tenancy cleaning” and “end of tenancy cleaning london”?
Changing the content and updating it on the pages really gave the boost. We got native speakers to go through the content on https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/ and it helped.
And then we worked a lot on the social SEO. Getting social shares manually from our client’s friends, ourselves and from my private SEO group. It really helped.
And then we built over 100 new citations on some good UK directories and this was done by Aslam. You can check the citation building services on this page.
Further, we started to get links back from guest posting on UK websites. Dinesh at ClickDo does manage over 300 UK websites and has a connection with hundreds of people who own UK websites so we started to get links by guest posting on some of those sites. Only branded and naked URL anchors this time.
To be honest we only got very few links as there were many links built in the past for the website.
RIght now the challenge is to go back to the top 3 spots for all of the above terms. We believe we can do it and you can keep an eye on that.
This project is very important for me as an SEO consultant and as the best SEO experts are operating and reaching the top this is also my goal for this client’s website.
If you’re reading this article and would like to support me with some social SEO boost, let me know by emailing to fernando@clickdo.co.uk and I may even give you access to the online SEO course for a discounted price.
What do I plan on doing to get https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/ to the top spot on Google for the keywords?
Do weekly blogging on https://www.end-of-tenancy-london.co.uk/blog/ and it’s written by me as there is a content strategy that Google likes to pick up. Being authentic and real when it comes to content creation matters.
Adding images which should contain alts tags with keywords.
Aslam creates the images and they are branded to support the SEO.
Everything I’m doing can be learned by getting the local SEO blueprint updates version.