SITUATION:

Seasoned digital professionals will all agree that the number one source of website traffic – particularly for a big, content rich resource – should be organic search. In fact, if everything is in order, 40%+ of website traffic could be originating from organic search.

The problem was, that in the case of one publisher website that I came across – this wasn’t the case. Far from it.

The website in question was severely underperforming from an organic point of view with only around 5% of traffic originating from search. This didn’t appear to correlate with a resource that added up to 20 posts per day.

Something was amiss and the number one suspect was a Google penalty.

APPROACH:

Off the bat, we felt that the issue was in the technical vertical and the data appeared to verify that. Long, technical, story short, we found that the issue was an attribution issue caused by a single canonical tag causing heaps of duplicate content issues on the website.

RESULTS:

We fixed this, verified via search console and the results speak for themselves.