Mission Growth
Penalty recovery

A B2B SaaS platform recovered from a hreflang penalty

A language-redirect change cloaked status codes and duplicated pages. We reversed it, rebuilt hreflang and won back 28 of the 34 positions lost.

Partner
Multilingual B2B SaaS platform
Industry
B2B SaaS
Market
Global

Headline result

+28

Ranking positions regained

+28

Ranking positions regained

44.9316.86

Average position, non-brand keywords

~1 month

Time to turn around

From the fixes going live to rankings climbing back

Overview

One redirect change, then a ranking collapse

A multilingual B2B SaaS platform added a new language. Another team stored each visitor’s language in a cookie and redirected every later visit to that language folder, even where no translated page existed. Users saw the page, crawlers got a 404, and the default content appeared again under a second URL. Paid ad links were rewritten the same way. Within a day, average position for non-brand keywords fell from about 11 to 45. We reversed the change, rebuilt the language setup and brought rankings back.

What we did

How we reversed the penalty

    • Traced the drop to a cookie-based language redirect shipped by another team
    • Confirmed three violations: status-code cloaking, duplicate content and rewritten ad URLs
    • Had the change rolled back before any other fix

Success factors

What made this work

  • 01Finding the root cause instead of treating symptoms
  • 02Reverting the harmful change before rebuilding
  • 03Serving crawlers and users exactly the same thing
  • 04Fresh signals for Google through content, links and schema

Proof

Direct from the source

Semrush average position chart: steady near 12, then a fall to about 45 the day after the redirect change
Semrush average position: steady near 12, then down to 44.93 after the language redirect went live. Client name hidden.
Semrush average position chart: a fall to about 48, then a climb back to 16.86 after the fixes
Semrush average position: the low point near 48, then a climb back to 16.86 once the fixes were indexed. Client name hidden.

Conclusion

One misconfigured redirect can undo months of SEO work. Reverting it, serving crawlers and users the same pages and sending fresh signals won back about 83% of the lost ground: average position 16.86, against 11.35 before the change.

Next step

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How it works

  1. 01

    30-minute audit call

    We map your funnel against your goal and pull live data from your channels.

  2. 02

    Lift estimate

    You get a written estimate of where the lift is, with a 30-day plan to capture it.

  3. 03

    You decide

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