Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?
-
Hello All,
I am an internet retailer www.giftbasket4kids.com hit by Penguin and have made many changes to my site since first being hit on May 2011. It seems I lost my ranking in some keywords on the two following landing pages. I am OK on my other keywords /landing pages.
http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/shop-by-category/gift-basket.html keyword “Gift Basket Ideas”
http://www.giftbasket4kids.com/pages/birthday-gifts.html Keywords “Birthday gift for kids, boys, Girls, Children” it seems all keyword that includes “Gift, Gifts” and “birthday”.
Note: sometime most of the lost keywords come to 2<sup>nd</sup> page for a day or two then they disappear again
I received a Google notice first week of August that there are unnatural links pointing to my site. There was couple of paid banner advertising. I stopped the links and request reconsideration. A week later I got response that there are still unnatural link pointing to the site. I request for reconsideration again and asked Google to let me know which links are in question.it is over 3 weeks I did not get answer yet as I suspected.
I have optimized most of my product (80 fresh content well optimized product pages) and added a lot new content. I am making links differently. I am using Squidoo lens to promote my products. I do not know what else I can do. I have been told maybe I should restart new site! All my other keywords are ok . I do not want to start over. Can I make new landing pages and promote them? Would it work or the site is penalized for those keywords?
I appreciate your advice in advance.
If anyone knows of recoveries of a site like mine? I am looking for an SEO who has experience with relates to sites like mine.
Do I have a chance to recover from penguin?
-
can you please. share you finding with me as what is the problem with link profile. how I can improve it. is there any chance for me to keep the site?
-
Hey,
Quick point but an important one - if you have had an email in Google Webmaster tools you have a manual penalty. Now, that does not mean you have not picked up a Penguin or Panda problems since but in your case, things are worse than that.
With regards to starting over, you can just change domain and kill your old links that way, you don't need to start your whole site over again.
Really though, you have a pretty nasty link profile, so if you get past the manual penalty, you may still find yourself with penguin issues so setting up the site on a new domain may be the best course of action and then doing some good quality link building and content marketing to take this site forward.
Hope this helps
Marcus -
Thank you for guidance. I have already looked at all links. There are no paid links in my profile since May 2012. There are some low quality directory sites with repeated anchor text that I cannot change them. If I make new quality links with different anchor text would it help? If I delete the landing page and promote new page with the lost keyword would it work? Or the site is penalized for the keyword?
-
My advice is to wait for the reply from Google after they look at the reconsideration request, it can take longer then 3 weeks from my experience.
Furthermore if they knock it back again you may have to export all your links in webmaster tools and go over them one by one too see what is paid or non natural, annoying but these are the lengths Google are going to in today's market.
Sites can recover, I have seen a few who have been hit by Penguin and after 3 or 4 reconsideration requests they have come back somewhat in the ranks, it just takes time.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to recover search volume after domain name change?
On the 3rd of November we changed our company name and domain. The new site was not changed at all so the 301 process was quite straightforward. The change over was successful, no downtime, all pages redirected correctly (with a few minor exceptions). However, after a few days we started to see more and more links into the new site from the old site. They now stand at over 3 million. And links from the new site to the old site of over 200K. Links from the new site back to the old, were due to us having left a lot of links tucked away on various pages which were possibly causing loops with the 301 redirects on the old site. We fixed these and now there are no remaining links back to the old site, though we are still showing just over 200K links back to the old site. We are also seeing a LOT more back-links on the new site from old junk sites, which are not showing for the old site. A couple of years ago we went through about a year of trying to track down and remove thousands of spam backlinks. We did what we could, got a lot removed, showed Google the evidence, then Google lifted the penalty and said they had made some changes that meant the links were no longer causing the penalty. I added the old disavow file to the new site, but it doesn't cover a fraction of the sites which are being displayed as providing backlinks... many of which are clearly spammy. Is it possible that Google made some manual actions to lift the penalties but failed to associate these changes with the new domain? Changes that were not included in the disavow file? All help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Exotissimo0 -
Recovering from Blocked Pages Debaucle
Hi, per this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/800-000-pages-blocked-by-robots We had a huge number of pages blocked by robots.txt by some dynamic file that must have integrated with our CMS somehow. In just a few weeks hundreds of thousands of pages were "blocked." This number is now going down, but instead of by the hundreds of thousands, it is going down by the hundreds and very sloooooowwwwllly. So, we really need to speed up this process. We have our sitemap we will re-submit, but I have a few questions related to it: Previously the sitemap had the <lastmod>tag set to the original date of the page. So, all of these pages have been changed since then. Any harm in doing a mass change of the <lastmod>field? It would be an accurate reflection, but I don't want it to be caught by some spam catcher. The easy thing to do would be to just set that date to now, but then they would all have the same date. Any other tips on how to get these pages "unblocked" faster? Thanks! Craig</lastmod></lastmod>
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Penguin 301 Re-Direct
Hi I already know the answer to this but wanted some backup. A friend of mine has asked me to take a look at his site. He was using an SEO company that saw him get hit hard by Penguin. He did the right thing and started all over with a new domain name. I've just noticed that the old domain name is actually setup to 301 to the new domain. This has to be a bad thing right?
Technical SEO | | brightonseorob0 -
What is Google's Penguin effect on SEO?
I want to know about Google's Penguin. Specially, how it works to protect spam links <seo>or other jobs. </seo> How I can protect this problem. Kind Regards John
Technical SEO | | JohnDooley0 -
Strategy for recovering from Penguin
I have a web site that has been hit hard by the penguin update. I believe that main cause our problem has been links from low quality blogs and article sites with overly optimized keyword anchor text. Some questions I have are: I have noticed that we still have good ranking on long tail search terms on pages that did not have unnatural links. This leads me to believe that the penalty is URL specific, i.e. only URL with unnatural linking patterns have been penalized. Is that correct? Are URLs that have been penalized permanently tainted to the point that it is not worth adding content to them and continuing to get quality links to them? Should new contact go on new pages that have no history thus no penalty, or is the age of a previously highly ranked page still of great benefit in ranking? Is it likely that the penalty will go away over time if there are no more unnatural links coming in?
Technical SEO | | mhkatz0 -
Duplicate content - Quickest way to recover?
We've recently been approached by a new client who's had a 60%+ drop in organic traffic. One of the major issues we found was around 60k+ pages of content duplicated across 3 seperate domains. After much discussion and negotiation with them; we 301'd all the pages across to the best domain but traffic is increasing very slowly. Given that the old sites are 60k+ pages each and don't get crawled very often, is it best to notify the domain change through Google Webmaster Tools to try and give Google a 'nudge' to deindex the old pages and hopefully recover from the traffic loss as quickly and as much as possible?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Diagnosing a Penguin Demotion
Whilst ive noyt hit the panic button just yet ive learnt that a specific target term I was optimising a site flor has dropped off the Google radar from forth to zero 😞 The site is www.davidclick.com the target term was "York wedding photographer" and the demotion happened at the end of March this year, below illustrates the carnage.. http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/target-term-demotioncopy.jpg When i first learnt about this I began to wonder if I was a victim of the Penguin update. I suspected i might so I ran a test to see how many inbound links used the target term York wedding photographer and here is what i found... Only one site http://www.singingwaitersx2.com/links/ and at a push this site also http://york-wedding-photographer.blogspot.co.uk/ So my question is have i fallen foul to the penguin update? If yes then is the only remedy to block the aforementioned site links via this technique: http://www.htaccess-guide.com/deny-visitors-by-referrer/ Thanks in advance, David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
General Penguin Discussion
I think that all the threads regarding the Penguin update (including this) need to be merged into 1 thread as it seems the majority of new conversations are all about the same thing whenever I log on in the morning.
Technical SEO | | SEOclient120