CASE STUDY · TECHNICAL SEO & SCHEMA
Lifting a Google Penalty for a Lifestyle Publisher
A lifestyle and entertainment publisher in India had its Google penalty lifted after we audited 5,800+ URLs and applied 709 penalty fixes and 936 SEO fixes across 1,645 pages. The reconsideration request was approved and the site recovered its Discover and News visibility.
- Client
- A lifestyle and entertainment content publisher in India, part of a large media group
- Industry
- Publishing and media (lifestyle)
- Market
- India
- Project
- Technical SEO & schema
- My role
- Led the SEO strategy; delivered with my team at the time
OUTCOMES
The results
Direct commercial and organic search impact delivered during the engagement.
Penalty lifted
Reconsideration approved and the Google penalty resolved.
709
Google penalty fixes, alongside 936 SEO fixes, applied across 1,645 pages.
5,800+
URLs audited for content and technical issues.
Discover & News
Significant recovery in Discover and News visibility, with improved rankings and impressions after approval.
BACKGROUND
The challenge
I led this recovery in a previous agency leadership role. The site was under Google penalties tied to content-guideline compliance, with technical and content errors across its lifestyle categories.
Recovering from a penalty means fixing the underlying problems at scale and proving it, not just making cosmetic changes — so the work had to be systematic and well documented.
Client and agency not named for confidentiality. I led the strategy; the work was delivered with my team at the time.
EXECUTION
What we did
Audit at scale
Ran content and technical audits across 5,800+ URLs, prioritising the categories with the most penalties.
User-comment clean-up
Mapped and removed 2,875 inappropriate user comments and tightened comment moderation.
URL structure and redirects
Fixed URL-structure issues and ran a managed redirect programme.
Editorial and author guidelines
Added editorial and author guidelines, including structured author bios, grievance redressal and data-protection (DPDPA) compliance.
Content revision
Fact-checked and revised content for accuracy, narrative, tone and compliance.
Distributed and automated fixes
Spread fixes across authors and automated the common ones so remediation could move at scale.
STRATEGIC LESSON
The takeaway
Penalty recovery is an operations problem as much as an SEO one: prioritise the worst-affected sections, systemise the fixes, and document everything for the reconsideration request.
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