How Google almost ruined a company with a penalty
For many micro, small, and medium-sized businesses, visibility is important. At least, if you ask them about it. At the same time, however, entrepreneurs are annoyed that the importance of Google and other channels practically forces them to spend money.
Even worse: The value of the expenditure isn’t recognized. While the expenditure is reflected in clicks and people visiting the website, in some companies, reporting may even be advanced enough to attribute visitors to specific actions. However, it’s rarely possible to accurately estimate how much advertising expenditure has actually achieved or where additional expenditures lead. Especially since, with 1,600 updates to the Google algorithm per year, it’s simply difficult to see where SEO is leading.
In short, Companies are actually not interested in SEO and link building or even link risk management .
“I have a good website, and Google needs to make sure we’re found. We’re important to customers.”
“We haven’t set any links? It’s Google’s job to identify bad links and invalidate them.”
The crux of small business
Small businesses with “just a handful of employees” are difficult to convince of the importance of SEO or link risk management. Nevertheless, they are aware of the importance of visibility in search results.
Typically, the managing director assumes responsibility for the website, but it is often managed externally (and in many cases, not even semi-professionally). Investments in AdWords, usually targeting a location + a 15 km radius, are realized with minimal budgets. Facebook, as a social media application, is operated either via a personal account or via a fan page. Link building is either nonexistent or is carried out through purchased links.
The websites are rarely designed by a graphic designer who has studied design specifically. The websites are cobbled together by small businesses springing up from the ground up, and anyone who has ever used a website builder or can write WordPress is starting their own internet marketing business. The main thing is to keep it cheap. The main thing is to have it.
If a content management system (CMS) is used, it is most often outdated.
Conclusion: Small businesses with high competition offer enormous vulnerability to both negative SEO and hacker attacks on poorly maintained websites. At the same time, budgets are very tight, and the need for proper SEO only becomes apparent when visibility is virtually nonexistent.
If a disaster occurs at such a company, things get really difficult.
Where are the customers?
The following example demonstrates how important this becomes: A copy shop in Stuttgart has a handful of regular customers and a whole host of customers who come exactly when they need the copy shop: for printing and binding their thesis, for birthday cards, for photocopies, and so on. What does the customer do? They search for a copy shop on Google, for example. It is therefore important to be found in Google Maps and in Google’s local search when they enter “Copyshop Stuttgart,” “photocopies,” and various other very local searches on Google.de and Google.de (Stuttgart).
If you want to get by without AdWords as much as possible (because it costs money), then top positions are essential.
The company benefits from its good results and a good location in the heart of Stuttgart.
Suddenly, the owner discovers that Google search results open a contest directly from the search results pages and link to a website in Ukraine. Visitors from Google are no longer able to access the copy shop’s website. There are also indications of Trojans.
The impact on the small business is dramatic: no phone rings and, in the best-case scenario, a regular customer still finds his way into the store.
Existing information is not sufficient for the solution
Detailed lists or information about access options for the website, FTP hosting, databases, and other things are only rudimentary. The “administration” and “programming” used to be handled by a student or “friend’s son,” but this person is no longer available. Documentation of the most important access data and passwords, or the system environments? None. How do you find a solution in such a situation?
Access to the website
First, they try to gain access to the website (in this case, WordPress). This isn’t possible because both the design and hosting are the responsibility of the “student,” who isn’t available. Only access to the domain is possible, so at least the domain can be redirected.
Backup previous versions
Without access to the web space, it is impossible to activate an older, unattacked version of the web space.
Access to WordPress
An existing user could only be used as an editor within WordPress. Unfortunately, this doesn’t allow for administrator activities (e.g., securing the site or adding security-relevant plugins that can help identify changed content). Due to a lack of access to the database, we were also unable to integrate an administrator user directly into the database to take over the WordPress installation.
Regain control of your website
Due to the aforementioned circumstances, the owner decided to create a new website on a new domain. This should – at least temporarily – quickly enable visitors to find content that does not link to the Ukrainian competition site.
We then thoroughly optimized the web content for potential ranking in Google. At the same time, we integrated the standard monitoring tools Google Analytics and Google Search Console into the new website.
Redirecting the old page at least resolved the original problem of visitors no longer being able to click on the company’s content. The extent of the damage to the domain, backlinks, etc., and how to remedy it, became clear later.
Check the extent of the damage
Since there was no access to Google Search Console data for the old domain, the visits couldn’t be more accurately qualified. A new property had to be created, allowing Google to capture and process search queries, impressions, and rankings.
While the average position in Google search results was 2.4 on March 25, the search query was down to an average position of 39.8 on April 6 due to the crash. And the new domain also failed to establish itself in the top 10 – presumably due to poor links.
Check for toxic links
A review of backlinks for toxic or potentially harmful links in Xovi proved to be insufficient.
Since we, as LinkResearchTools Certified Experts, don’t rely on data from one source, we checked the potentially toxic content with LRT. And lo and behold:
Compared to competitors for the top spots in Google, the link profile is disproportionately affected by bad links.
The detailed analysis confirmed that backlinks enriched via the competition (possibly also negative SEO) were consistently Viagra, TlD-CC, or other spam.
In this process, all (!!) backlinks were manually reviewed to assess whether they needed to be downgraded. This is the most comprehensive task in the link audit. At the same time, experience and judgment regarding the evaluation are required, because the entire link profile can (and should) be cleaned up at this point.
Many backlinks that Xovi did not detect turned out to be malware.
Gained insights into inventory security
In order to further improve the quality of the existing work, the following measures are now necessary.
1. Link Risk Management + Link Alerts
In the future, existing backlinks will be analyzed regularly so that changes can be responded to at an early stage.
2. Link Building
: Identify competitor links that don’t yet point to the company website. The links with the best link velocity trend (link growth trend) are then acquired as links to the company website. Indirect linking measures ensure that backlinks from competitors are obtained.
3. Local SEO for reach
. Listings on Google Maps have ensured at least some traffic. Now, investments are being made in local directories to increase reach.
4. Regular maintenance
Backups and revisions of the site should be carried out regularly.
Do not underestimate the importance of your digital presence – protection is necessary
Conclusion: The importance of an online presence is evident even for small businesses these days. While “micro-enterprises” have previously given little thought to their visibility because they simply didn’t budget for it, this example makes it clear: budgets for SEO and link risk management are vital (!!)
Overall, a digital presence must be given high priority and attention. A loss of visibility can quickly lead to threatening disruptions that can push a company’s existence to the brink of viability and lead to ruin.
Long-term SEO strategies as the key to success
An unexpected drop in visibility in Google search results can spell doom for many businesses, especially those heavily dependent on organic traffic. To avoid such drastic consequences, it’s crucial to implement a long-term, sustainable SEO strategy. Companies shouldn’t rely on short-term, risky measures that could quickly lead to a penalty. Instead, it’s about building a solid foundation based on high-quality content, a good user experience, and technical excellence.
A sustainable SEO approach means continuously working on improving your website. This includes, among other things, regularly maintaining content, ensuring fast loading times, optimizing for mobile devices, and building genuine, trustworthy backlinks. These targeted measures ensure that you not only rank well in search results in the long term, but also build trust with users.
Those who continuously invest in these areas run less risk of being penalized by Google. Instead, they strengthen their own position and become less dependent on sudden changes in search engine algorithms.