About the Company

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Our client is one of the largest ceramic tile manufacturers in the US. From its humble beginnings in Dallas, Texas, in 1947, it now fields a fleet of plants and showrooms across the country. Its reach is such that one out of every three tiles sold in the US is Daltile-made.
This largest ceramic tile manufacturer owes its success largely to its efforts to offer products that 'people can trust'. It keeps pace with time, rolling out innovative flooring solutions and trailblazing trends. It keeps manufacturing and marketing largely in-house. This helps our client to cut costs and pass the benefit on to the customer.
Our client is also committed to protecting the environment and safeguarding humanity's future. A stickler for standards, it ensures all its plants use sustainable production methods. By reusing and recycling materials, it champions the cause of sustainable development.

The Challenges We Faced

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They approached Zonaid with a serious problem. Its estimated traffic plummeted from ~2.5 million (M) visitors a day to below 1M day in November 2020 (see graph). Our traffic-recovery team swung into action, and it wasn’t long before they found out what was going on:
1) Their website was hit by a devastating Google penalty (and as such...)
2) Traffic for keywords (except for branded ones) disappeared (because...)
3) Google had fully discounted the website’s link profile
This type of penalty is punishingly hard to repair. What's more, our client wanted a recovery fast, for the lost traffic meant lost revenue for them.

The Strategies We Used

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We wanted to clean up their link profile, but not at the cost of a further fall in traffic. This meant removing only those backlinks harming the website. The strategy was to:
1) Identify bad backlinks (Team 1)
2) Request removal of bad backlink and record responses (Team 2)
3) Create a disavow list and draft reconsideration requests (Team 3)

Phase 1

Team 1 prepared a list of all the dofollow backlinks and tagged those websites holding a huge number of backlinks. It then started manually checking each for their nature and relevancy. It passed details of spammy websites to team 3 (disavow team). As for irrelevant websites, details were passed to team 2 (link-removal team).
(We made a reconsideration request in January. But, Google said their website still had some unnatural backlinks)

Phase 2

The team at Zonaid then started working on:
1) Finding links from websites already penalized by Google
2) Locating links from websites in other languages
3) Finding links using too many of their primary keywords as anchor text

The result

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By March 2021, we had scrubbed clean their link profile. We infused the website with epic content created by our UI/UX team and attracted many links.
The disavow team, by then, had compiled a full list of bad backlinks. We promptly uploaded this to Google, along with a reconsideration request. We requested Google to review their website again.
It worked like a charm! A few weeks after the submission, their website’s traffic began to pick up. By April 2021, the figure was back to 2M visits a day. Thanks to our team effort, we could recover their traffic in a mere four months!