Pestmall – Google Penguin Recovery Case Study

“When Techmagnate received the Pestmall project, the website had already been hit by two penalties consecutively.”

The Client:

Pestmall is an online pesticide company that showcases innovative products to treat all kinds of pests and bugs. Founded in 2005, the company has grown to become a leading brand name in the pesticide industry.

Ranging from ants, bugs, animal control and lawn care, Pestmall’s products include dedicated products to address specific pest concerns. It offers online shopping of products and doorstep delivery all across the US.

The company has been verified by the International Pest Management Association and has been awarded the “Circle of Excellence” by Bizrate.

The Target Market:

Pestmall targets the US market.

The Requirement:

Pestmall’s requirements from this project were:

• Removal of the Google Penguin Manual Penalty
• Restoration of lost rankings (this case study will be covering penalty removal only)

Here’s a summary of types of links we were dealing with:

The client wasn’t able to share the login information for most links. This meant we would have to contact the webmasters of the linking sites for removal of unnatural links.

The Solution:

• Consolidating the back links extracted from Google Webmaster Tools and 2 other data sources.
• Reviewing back links manually to identify the low quality, unnatural links
• Analysing all the previous Link Building reports to extract any login information that was available. Editing and Deleting the links for which login information was available.

“The entire process of recovery took 5 months and 3 iterations for Google to finally lift the Manual Penalty.”

The Solution:

• Sending requests to webmasters to remove the remaining unwanted, unnatural links
• Populating the disavow list
• Sending out the reconsideration request

The Results

The entire process of recovery took 5 months and 3 iterations for Google to finally lift the Manual Penalty. The first reconsideration request was sent in December 2013 followed by the second in Jan 2014 and the third in Feb 2014.

“It was a massive project and the biggest lesson it taught us was “Patience Pays”! Steady work and constant monitoring helped us make the project successful.”

Snapshot showing the decline in traffic after the site was hit by manual penalty. And rise, post penalty removal on 10th March 2014.

Earlier when the website was hit by the Google Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 2.1 penalty, the monthly traffic saw a drastic dip of more than 85% from Oct 2013 to Feb 2014.

However, once the penalty was removed, there was an immediate increase in daily traffic levels. The organic traffic for the month of May 2014 is 62% more than Feb. 2014. And most importantly Ecommerce Sales have increased by over a 100%.

The Lesson:

It was a massive project and the biggest lesson it taught us was “Patience Pays”! Steady work and constant monitoring helped us make the project successful.