How Infidigit helped an Ed-Tech Website to Recover from a Manual Penalty Imposed in 2020

The Client

The company is one of the top brands in the Ed-tech industry in India. It offers online tutoring and educational content for aspiring students. It caters to more than 35 million active users and students on a monthly basis and was one of the pioneers in offering live online classes in 2014.

The Objective

This company got a manual penalty because of unnatural links pointing to their website in late 2020 and was looking to remove the penalty imposed by Google at the earliest. They did everything to lose unnatural links and submitted for reconsideration, which Google did not entertain. With the issues persisting, they decided to partner with Infidigit to remove the manual penalty which was negatively impacting their domain authority.

The Challenge

Manual penalties are the most consequential Google penalties and demand impeccable efforts towards recovery. These penalties can be categorized into 3 parts as those specific to Google Discover, exclusive to Google news, and others that are common to both News and Discover.

The Solution

Manual or automated, when Google penalty hits the site, there is a significant loss of traffic and revenue for the business. Therefore, it is important to prioritize the penalty recovery process. Here are few steps we followed to get around the penalty:

  • Identified Toxic Backlink
  • Collected and Contacted Webmaster Contact Details
  • Reviewed Private Blog Network
  • Reviewed, Created and Uploaded Disavow Files

Based on 3rd party tools like Moz, Ahref and SEMRush we found approximately 70k backlinks which were pointing to their website. After understanding the number of backlinks tracked by these tools, we wanted to understand the toxicity/spam of these clicks. Following activities were performed:

  1. Filtering the Moz’s data with a spam score of more than 30%
  2. Filtering SEMRush’s data with Toxic Score more than 50
  3. Filtering Ahref’s data
  4. Finding Porn, Gambling Domains

The Result

With all the solutions offered and activities performed, the following favorable results were achieved: 

  1. 5000+ domains were disavowed, which were highly toxic and irrelevant to the business
  2. 3,000+
  3. 3000+ domains were removed from disavow file which were relevant and passed good linked juice to the website
  4. Domain authority was regained which was affected and dropped to 40 after getting manual penalty. 
  5. Manual Penalty was lifted in a span of three months of onboarding Infidigit

5,000+

Domains Disavowed

3,000+

Domains Removed from Disavow File

50

Domain Authority

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Penalty Recovery for Ed-Tech Website Case Study