Eliminated Google Penalties on Nairametrics After Japanese Spam Hack

Situation

Nairametrics, a financial media platform, faced a major challenge when its website was hit by Japanese SEO spam and a DDOS attack. These issues coincided with Googlebot’s crawl schedule, severely damaging the site’s rankings and traffic. As a result, Nairametrics experienced significant visibility loss, dropping from millions of monthly page views to a fraction of that number.

Task

My task was to eliminate the penalties imposed by Google, restore Nairametrics’ SEO health, and bring back its previous traffic levels (3M page views per month). This required addressing the technical SEO issues caused by the attack and improving the site’s structure and content to regain search engine trust.

Actions

To achieve these goals, I executed a series of targeted interventions:

• Strict Canonicalization Rules: Implemented strict canonical tags to prevent PageRank dilution and ensure that search engines only indexed preferred versions of the pages.
• Spam URL Removal: Identified and removed spam URLs via Google Search Console to clean up the index and prevent malicious links from harming the site’s authority.
• Keyword Cannibalization Fixes: Consolidated closely related pages to resolve keyword cannibalization issues, ensuring that individual pages had distinct and focused ranking signals.
• Index Bloat & Internal Linking: Tackled index bloat and counteracted PageRank decay by increasing the internal link density, which helped distribute authority more effectively across important pages.
• Pruning Low-Performing Pages: Removed underperforming or outdated pages to reduce unnecessary crawl demand and improve overall crawl efficiency.
• Knowledge Panel Reconstruction: Reconstructed Nairametrics’ Knowledge Panel in Google’s search results, boosting E.A.T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals.

Result

Within 30 days of completing these technical fixes, Nairametrics experienced a remarkable recovery: The site regained impressions on Google News and Google Discover, leading to a daily performance of 130K page views.

Overall, traffic growth was restored, and the site began to re-establish its authority, resulting in a sustained monthly traffic of over 3M page views.