Overcame a Google Manual Penalty 🙌

In January 2022 Google hit our site with a manual penalty. As a business that relies heavily on SEO, this was a heart-stopping notification to see suddenly in Search Console. In my 10+ years as a digital marketer, I've only heard horror stories, never dealt with one personally.

A manual penalty occurs when one of Google's employees -- yes, a living and breathing human being -- identifies your site as out of compliance with one or more of Google's guidelines. In our case, the error message read: "Structured data found on elements that aren't visible to the user". Google also let us know we needed to fix this site-wide.

I feverishly started researching this error and found very little online about how to solve it. While we have structured schema on our site, it wasn't clear which elements that Google was manually penalizing us for not adequately displaying them to the user.

After a bit of digging, I concluded that our review star schema must be the culprit. I worked as fast as possible to remove this schema from our site, and then penned a formal apologies to Google, letting them know our invisible schema was published in error, and that in fact we weren't trying to game search results with blackhat tactics.

Submitting our "reconsideration request" via Search Console felt like progress, but MONTHS passed without any word from our overlords. Organic search rankings didn't fall off a cliff, thank goodness, but it was clear we had been neutered in more subtle ways. For instance, our pages no longer displayed star ratings nor breadcrumbs in search results. And no matter how much content we posted, it felt like there was an arbitrary traffic ceiling placed our site. New articles could rank, but we just couldn't get traffic to grow despite investing more resources than ever.

Then, amidst the darkness, a brief beam of light. On April 21st, three full months since being sent to purgatory, Google shared an unexpected message. Our reconsideration request had been accepted, and in a matter of days, the scary red alerts in Search Console were no more. The manual penalty had finally been lifted!

Although it's too early to gauge how this will impact our business, we're hoping to see a positive impact on rankings, CTR, and ultimately revenue. Let my story be a cautionary one. For anyone experiencing a manual penalty, I hope it also offers a glimmer of hope. A manual penalty from Google is one of the scariest rollercoasters for any online business, but it doesn't necessarily spell disaster.