№ 08 · Modern Leaders & Strategists

Marie Haynes

Founder, Marie Haynes Consulting

The call you make after the traffic disappears.

Marie Haynes trained as a veterinarian before moving into search, and the diagnostic habits carried over. Her consultancy specialises in the least glamorous and highest-stakes corner of SEO: figuring out precisely why a site lost its rankings and what can be done about it.

Dossier

Role
Founder, Marie Haynes Consulting
Known for
Penalty recovery & AI search
Active since
2008
Based
Ontario, Canada
Organisation
Marie Haynes Consulting
Disciplines
Google AlgorithmsManual ActionsAI in Search
Notable work
Marie Haynes Consulting

Manual actions and recovery

Penalty recovery work is unforgiving. You are reconstructing years of decisions made by people who have often left the company, then making a case to a reviewer you cannot talk to. Haynes built a reputation on doing it methodically — link auditing, documentation, reconsideration requests — rather than through guesswork.

Algorithms and AI systems

Her more recent research focuses on how AI systems are being layered into Search. She authored SEO in the Gemini Era and won the widely-watched Wix SEO competition in 2019.

Her newsletter sits at the technical end of the market — patent readings, Google statements and quality-guideline changes rather than tactics.