LA Weekly was hit with a manual penalty from Google. Typically manual penalties include Google forcibly removing and limiting rankings in their search results. This causes a significant drop in traffic. Crunchy Links was tasked with auditing their site to determine what needed to be done to get them out of that penalty.
New keyword rankings
Improved Keyword Rankings
Data and testing is a part of everything we do. So we pulled over 500k lines of data to figure out what was going on.
We first looked at the pages that lost traffic, and compared its current situation to historical trends. Then we ran a competitor comparison to check it against industry standards.
By diving into content quality, engagement metrics, backlink profiles, and technical front end performance, we were able to diagnose the biggest potential culprits of the manual penalty. After prioritizing the SEO fixes that needed to be accomplished with their internal team, we were able to successfully get the website out of manual penalty.
