How to tackle google penguin algorithmic penalty?

[conversiontactics]

My Website ranking went down mid of april, I sent a Reconsideration request and the reply was :

“ We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture.”

My site was classic asp and i change that to a new word press theme

I change the site structure and created new fresh content on the entire site focusing on user experience.

But still no positive result in the ranking.

I further did a test and created 3 new landing pages that target long tail keywords with low competition.

Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages.

Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route  I would like to if anyone could help me  should i buy a new domain  and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back

My link profile according to open site explorer is 190 links from 74 domains and domain authority is 31.

Can anyone help please

[MarieHaynes]

Regarding the 301s, I originally thought you were talking about redirecting your penalized domain to a new domain.  I'm not 100% sure on what you are doing here, but as mentioned by Ian, don't redirect 404s to your home page...create a custom 404 for that use.

If you've got pages you want to get deindexed, you can tell Google in your webmaster tools to removed certain pages from the index.

I didn't have time to do a complete check of your backlinks but you can be pretty certain that if you've been hit by Penguin you've got an issue with backlinks.  If you look at your site in OSE, and order the links by anchor text you can see that you've got a high percentage of anchor texted links as opposed to url links.  That's where I'd start - get some of those anchor texted links changed to url links for a start.

[conversiontactics]

Thanks for your answer,

I think will take few months after i have remove those links.

Will it have any impact if i do some infographics and artciles, the things is how can you make radiator cabinets interesting?

[wrttnwrd]

Hi Ausaf,

I wouldn't have the home page be the 404 page. Create a separate page. The odds of something getting mixed up are far too high.

Remove any links that are even remotely spammy. That includes all the links you have with 'classic radiator cabinets' as the link text - you're far too optimized to that term and Google's bound to pick up on it, if they haven't already.

[conversiontactics]

apart from my brand keyword , I do not have any ranking at all.

used to ranking on first page for keyword

radiator covers

radiator cabinets

but now no where to be found

[conversiontactics]

Thanks Marie,

i have removed all 301 redirect from htaccess, Now any 404 page goes to home page with notfound 404.

http://www.classicradiatorcabinets.co.uk/

do you know how long will it take to get these .asp pages to de-index from google,

I cant see any spaming link apart for 2 directories zezoo.com which they have already removed. I am not sure which links to remove?

Thanks again for you help.

[MarieHaynes]

Well that certainly sounds like Penguin!

We're still really in the infancy of knowing how to recover from Penguin.  Most SEOs would tell you (and they're likely right) to get rid of as many spammy links as possible (or change to nofollow, or possibly change anchor text to your url as opposed to a keyword.)  And then, it will also help to get good natural links to your site.  One thing that is important to know though is that we don't have many good documented stories of recovery so no one really knows exactly how to recover.

If the vast majority of your links are unnatural (i.e. lots of anchor texted keyword links) and you think it would be impossible to get rid of them or change them or dilute them out with good links, then yes, starting over may be the best thing to do.

btw if you think you can recover, then do a cleanup and wait...you can't recover until there is a refresh of the Penguin algorithm.

Whatever you do, remove the 301 from the old domain to the new!!!!!  A 301 will carry 90-99% of the link equity from the old domain so you are essentially just pointing those spammy links at your new domain and you'll go under again with the next Penguin refresh.

And one other thing...if you are starting new and if your content is the same as the old domain, make sure you remove the old domain from the index otherwise you'll have duplicate content issues.

[eBoost-Consulting]

I had a site tank in January 2012. Non-branded search traffic was down almost 50% that month (the previous 6 months had all been very steady at the higher traffic level) and that has remained ever since.

I did some analysis in Analytics and found the unique keywords driving traffic went down from around 3,800 to 950. Our big keywords and rankings remained and actually got stronger but the long-tail traffic almost completely disappeared.

This type of scenario seems in line with Panda rather than Penguin as other commenters have noted. What would be the best way to address a situation like that?

[conversiontactics]

Hi Marie,

Thank you so much for your reply , I wanted to say " good answer" but it wont let me cause i already done 3.

I just checked on google analytics, the traffic drop occurs exactly on 24 april., Organic traffic went from 70 to just 9 visit.  One mistake ive done is i already set 301 redirect , should i remove them or should i change the urls, and wait for them to get index again. Just want to try it before starting all over.

Thanks very much for your reply.

[MarieHaynes]

I'm probably just repeating some of the great answers given so far, but here's my thought.

Are you absolutely sure this is Penguin?  Your traffic drop would have to be on or immediately after April 24 if that was the case.  If it was prior to April 24 then this is not Penguin so I wouldn't be so quick to go deleting links!

There was a Panda update April 19th and April 27, so if your drop coincides with one of these dates then I'd be doing more research into Panda which is primarily about on site quality, lack of duplication, etc.

How new is your domain?  If you were only up and running for a couple of months and then had a traffic drop it's possible you had a honeymoon boost and your site is now back down and that would have nothing to do with a penalty.

>>Once these pages got indexed the start appearing on first page for couple of days and then gradually the started to go down in ranking now they are not in the top 10 pages.

That can be a normal traffic pattern.

Now someone told me to buy a new domain and start fresh before i follow this route  I would like to if anyone could help me  should i buy a new domain  and start fresh or should i wait till i start getting my ranking back

You really need to figure out what the problem is first.  If you have a Penguin penalty and you've got too spammy a backlink profile to clean up or dilute with good links then, yes, starting over is a good idea.  Don't 301 the old to the new cause you'll end up in the same place.  If you've got a Panda issue then you should be able to recover without starting a new domain.  Whatever you do, don't just slap the same website up on a new domain.

It's also important to know how big of a traffic drop this is.  I've seen people freak out at what would be normal day to day changes or seasonal changes or something like a 5% drop in traffic.

There are other possibilities too such as malware issues with the site.  Or a robots.txt or accidental noindexing, etc. etc.

So, to sum up, can you determine the exact day that your drop happened, and how severe was it?

[TheSEODR]

Do you know the exact date you traffic went down. You could have been hit by Panda. There were two Panda updates before and after Penguin in April.

Try this analysis to get a better understanding if you were hit by Penguin or Panda:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/penguin-or-panda-how-to-determine-which-google-algorithm-update-impacted-your-website/43751/

[conversiontactics]

I wish i could do that but i just wanted to know if there a way out of it. Is there any other solution.

[conversiontactics]

Thanks for your reply, I did check but i cant see any obvious spam network links coming to my site nor 1000s of links from one domains, there were a few which i have requested them to remove although they have replied that they have removed but it is still showing on webmaster tools.

[DarrenX]

You know what, Ausaf, one of my sites was in a similar situation.  In April it tanked, and there was no warnings from Google and no obvious reason for the fall. No deathly hallows links to my site that I could find. It may be that certain sites that were providing you juice were devalued by Google, and caused your drop. Quality link building might help.

I tried everything I could think of for 2 months, tried to get questionable sites to unlink, added new content, fixed a few minor html errors, and nothing budged it. The site just seem to fall further.    In mid June I just started a new site with a well chosen domain name, rewrote the content, carefully built a broad variety of new links... and voila!  I'm back on page 1 (result #3 currently). I was previously #1, but I tell you after 4 months of this I'm glad to be on page 1.

Sometimes its good just to start over if you're able to.

I know that 2 months is nothing in SEO time, but when you're running a business it's an eternity. I couldn't afford to wait around a year and hope.  If the other site comes back, great. If not, we have plan B.

[wrttnwrd]

Are you sure this is a Penguin penalty? If so, the only fix is to find and remove all incoming links that appear even remotely spammy, and it doesn't sound like you've done this yet. Penguin is all about incoming links, not onsite structure.