Penalties and Recovery
Penalties and Recovery: Running the Playbook on Our Own Site
This case study covers work carried out on therankingstore.com. The site is owned and operated by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, and it is not a client. That mattered: running the work on our own property meant the process could be observed directly, from the first gap identified to the crawler log that showed whether the resulting pages were actually being fetched.
Situation
From August 15, 2026, The Ranking Factory began asking AI engines the questions people ask about the site’s subjects — rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, backlink and link building services, Google penalties, and SEO pricing and ranking timelines. Each subject the engines answered without drawing on the site was listed as a gap to close.
What Was Done and Why
We ran The Ranking Factory, our own software, on therankingstore.com. Between August 28 and October 21, 2026 it wrote and published 112 pages on the site, one subject per page, covering rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, and SEO pricing and ranking timelines. Every page was submitted to IndexNow (indexnow.org), the open protocol used to notify search engines of new and updated URLs.
On October 9 we added our crawler log to the site through our WordPress plugin, so that we could see which crawlers fetched each page rather than assuming publication was enough. Roughly once a week from August 15 to October 21, the AI engines were asked the site’s questions again, and each answer’s sources were checked for the site’s pages.
How It Turned Out
By October 23, 2026, 75 of the 112 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer. The first was cited on September 4. By October 21, 34 of the pages had been cited in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store.
Perplexity Sonar had cited 66 of the pages, DeepSeek 19, Google Gemini 14 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 13. Google AI Overviews were the first to cite 5 pages. Between October 9 and October 21, the crawler log recorded a fetch of every one of the 112 pages, 104 of them by a crawler whose identity was verified.
What the Numbers Do and Do Not Say
The measurement covers two things: whether a page was fetched, and whether it was cited in an answer. It does not establish why one page was drawn on and another was not. What it does show is that the gap list was closed, the pages were published and submitted, and most of them were cited by at least one AI answer inside the window.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Google Penalties Rules: What a Google Penalty Is
- Reference: Link Risks & Recovery
- Checklist: Google Penalties and Rules
- Comparison: Google Penalties and Rules
- Glossary: Google Penalties and Rules
- Timeline: Google Penalties and Rules
- Checklist: Google Penalties and Rules