TL;DR

Organic revenue lost to algorithm issues? We provide the decisive, expert-led investigation your business requires. Our systematic recovery audit is a full check-up, covering technical foundations, link profiles, and shifting your content from ‘commodity’ to ‘authority’, guided by Google’s own Quality Rater Guidelines. 

MMC Digital identifies and then looks to fix the root causes of your visibility issues, bringing clarity to complexity, and securing your future search visibility through hard-won expertise and a structured, focused approach to exceptional SEO.

Pain points

Penalties are, sadly, not just things of the past. Though many experienced (old) SEOs like us will have cut their teeth battling Penguin and Panda penalties (such cute names for such troublesome beasts), manual action and algorithmic penalties are still applied to websites for a host of reasons. If you’re struggling with any of the following, we may be able to help:

• Manual action penalty (stated in Search Console)
• Algorithmic penalty – significant or continuous losses of visibility following named Google updates.
• Slow but consistent loss of visibility with noticeable changes around updates

What We Mean by penalty and algorithm recovery

This has changed a lot over time – we’d be very surprised if you’re still suffering from a Penguin or Panda penalty, for example, and even manual action penalties for link spam are rare these days (though none of these are completely out of the question – there are risks as well as rewards when redirecting lapsed domains), but penalties still happen, and they still cause endless trouble for businesses and their bottom lines when they do. 

These days, you’re more likely to see rare occurrences of manual action penalties for cloaking, spam or scaled content (not always the fault of the brand – some scammers are operating at very high levels these days, and major brands have fallen victim to some black hat SEO attacks) than you are an algorithmic penalty – instead, what you’ll more often experience is the third of the above mentioned issues: a slow but consistent drop in visibility with large movement around named core updates. 

When we talk about penalty and algorithm recovery, we mean a thorough programme of auditing, investigation and rectification work to overcome the issues that have caused the various search algorithms to lose confidence in your site. Though it’s tempting to miss the olden days when such things tended to be limited, the increased complexity of search and the increased investigative requirements of modern penalty recovery are the kind of things that get us out of bed in the morning. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to being Philip Marlowe. We might need to invest in a set of branded fedoras.

MMC Digital’s penalty and algorithm recovery service

Clients choosing MMC Digital to help them recover from penalties or ongoing visibility loss can expect a thorough examination of all relevant platforms and tools to identify the root cause of the problem. This is not a case of ‘we’ll spot something, fix it and move on’, we make sure that we’re getting into the nuts and bolts of your online presence to spot correlatives and causatives, possibles and potentials for the issues faced, so that when we begin the fix, we don’t need to go hunting if something doesn’t work – we’ll be going through a list of fixes until it does.

Google Analytics 4 audit

It may not be as useful as the much missed Universal Analytics, but there’s still a lot of information in GA4 if you know where to look (even better if you’re exporting to a data warehouse to avoid data loss and for easier exploration). We check your data across all pages and page types to check where drops have occurred and when, matching and cross-analysing with data from other tools to determine likely causes and the locations of lost organic traffic.

Google Search Console audit

Google Search Console is now one of the most important data resources for SEO analysis, representing one of the few sources of 1st party data for most businesses. We can check across CWV reports, the (hopefully already investigated) penalties section, click and impression delay and, in conjunction with other reporting, understand the ‘when’ of the issues and the site performance changes that have occurred contemporaneously.

Full technical SEO audit

Very little changes here from our standard technical audit – we thoroughly investigate the health of the backend processes, techniques and tools that are foundational to organic performance – from pagination to canonicalisation, hreflang to navigation, internal linking to external link profile, content performance and more. This is an MOT for your SEO (includes VAT, but it’s a VIP) and aims to make sure that there are no single or proliferation of technical errors that could have caused the devaluing of your site.

Content audit

For many years, the game was content and links – content was what targeted the keywords, links were what gave that content authority. However, over time the balance of SEO has shifted, and the increased complexity and number of Google, Bing and other search engine and AI algorithms has meant that some of that content could be losing visibility – and even detrimental to your overall visibility. Google has recently coined the term ‘commodity content’ – effectively the content it encouraged brands to produce for many years, and on which it has trained its various LLMs.

While we have, for several years, pushed clients to focus on entity building, domain expertise, EEAT signals and ontological industry relevance, there were many agencies encouraging and seeing great results from SEO focused, commodity content – the same stuff that could now see you lose visibility, authority and trust. We’ll audit your onsite content to make sure it adequately showcases your expertise and works for your brand rather than against it.

Link profile analysis

Link spam is seldom published these days – Google specifically states their algorithms are capable of discerning between relevant and authoritative links and spam, but that doesn’t mean your link profile couldn’t be – to use an aging descriptor – toxic. Disavow files are, despite ongoing discussions we’ve seen no definitive proof to the contrary – still somewhat useful, and a natural link profile is still the ideal. We make sure your link profile is sending the right signals.

Google Quality Rater Guidelines audit

We review your site against the human facing guide given to Google’s quality raters. A 180+ page document, this serves as the closest we get to transparency from Google, and though we can’t see what Google is doing, we can use their guidelines to make educated inferences about what it wants the outcomes to be, and we use this guidance, and our decades of experience, to make sure your brand is ticking the right boxes and communicating in the right way to avoid algorithm issues.

Experience expertise authority trust review

While technically supposed to be applicable only in YMYL verticals, we’ve recognised EEAT, or its lack, as at least partially responsible for the success and failure of many SEO strategies. Made up of a lot of on-page, content and off-page signals, a structured and comprehensive approach to developing brand EEAT lets Google know you’re an authority in your sector and whether you need to be ranked. Our audit makes sure that this isn’t the reason for your worries.

What can our penalty and algorithm recovery service do for your business?

You and your team worked hard to earn your online visibility, and the organic revenue that comes with it. When this starts to wane – whether slowly or all at once – it’s a blow not only to your confidence, but also to your bottom line. Our penalty and algorithm recovery service helps you recover lost ground and prepare your online presence for the future of search. We can never guarantee quick results, but we do guarantee that we’ll do everything in our power to get you back to where you need to be.