Penguin recovery - Any suggestions?
-
Hey Guys.
To be honest i havent heard about any case of penguin recovery yet except from the famous WMPU revocery (if u ask me it dosent count really)
Any way I own a few sites.. that got hit by Penguin. I did remove 90% of the "suspected as bad links" and apply to google reconsideration. in return i got an answer after a few days from google saying :"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.... and so on"
So what they saying is that the engine still think that your links are spammy..
what should i do?? i truy removed most of the links but homepage isnt really showing any progress.. he is just no where..
Idaes? Case Studies?
-
I had a site hit by penguin and since recovered it. Once the links that were causing the problem were removed it took about a week to come back. I will have to look at the dates... I think my site was fine on the 1st up date then got hit on the refresh. Not sure why it came back without another refresh.... Maybe that is not how it works. I will see if I still have the data in GA. I have since sold the site.
**I found the GA. An image is attached. I did not receive any type of message in webmaster tools.
-
Let's wait then.
Thanks All!
-
So far there has only been one refresh of Penguin and that was on May 25, just one month after the initial Penguin rollout. At that point most people had no clue what Penguin was about. Since then, from looking at sites that have been hit we can now see that backlink anchor text abuse is a huge factor. But, we haven't seen any case studies because there has not been another refresh yet.
-
PArticularly if its the homepage, you really need to check the backlinks and the anchor thresholds. Although there may be no case studies, we have successfully recovered from both Penguin related drops and unnatural link penalties. The homepage is usually the target because the home page usually has the most (spammy) links.
-
Hey And thanks for the quick replays..
well Im sure its a penguin hit since the date of the drop, and to be honest i deserve it
Well i will wait patiently to the 1.2 update.. i hope thats the case.
Dont you think its weird that there are no case studies ?
-
Marie is exactly correct - the unnatural links penalty and Penguin are two separate entities.
The best way to combat a penguin related traffic drop is to use your SEOMoz tools to mine your backlinks and then sort by anchor. Traditionally link builders would buy a majority of their links with the same anchor text (or close variations). Website that have a majority of their links as an anchor can get hit by Penguin (there are some instances where this isnt the case when brand and exact anchor domains are concerned, but generally this is the case).
If your links were natural, Google would see links of all types in your profile including "click here" and "www.url.com" etc. You should try and decrease your keyword link anchor threshold to below 30% by either getting rid of spammy keyword anchor links, or building more generic anchor ones.
-
The problem here is that you are confusing Penguin and Unnatural Links Warnings. The Unnatural Links warnings are manual. (Many believe that they originate from someone filing a spam report on your site.) When you have a manual warning you can clean things up and then file a reconsideration request.
However, Penguin is algorithmic, not manual, so a reconsideration request will not help at all. The general belief is that once we get another Penguin refresh, if you have cleaned up your site enough then you can recover.
One problem, however, is that in removing 90% of a site's links, you could also be removing a lot of link equity. So, you may not end up ranking well even after a refresh. Of course, if you have good, natural links on top of the poor ones then you should be able to recover.
Hopefully a refresh will happen soon...we've been waiting long enough!
-
When you say you got hit would you mind confirming if you received an actual error message in your Google Webmaster Tools account informing you that they had detected unnatural links and you had to request a reconsideration?
The only reason I ask is I was just wondering if it's possible that Google aren't penalising you in the strictest sense of the word but rather have just devalued a number of links pointing to you. This isn’t a penalty as such but could result in a drop in your rankings due to Google no longer paying attention to the trashy links that it used to like. In this situation requesting a reconsideration wouldn't achieve anything.
I’m only an ‘aspirant’ so take anything I say with a pinch of salt – This is just my two cents.
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
-
Suggested Screaming Frog configuration to mirror default Googlebot crawl?
Hi All, Does anyone have a suggested Screaming Frog (SF) configuration to mirror default Googlebot crawl? I want to test my site and see if it will return 429 "Too Many Requests" to Google. I have set the User Agent as Googlebot (Smartphone). Is the default SF Menu > Configuration > Speed > Max Threads 5 and Max URLs 2.0 comparable to Googlebot? Context:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gravymatt-se
I had tried NetPeak SEO Spider which did a nice job and had a cool feature that would pause a crawl if it got to many 429. Long Story short, B2B site threw 429 Errors when there should have been no load on a holiday weekend at 1:00 AM.0 -
Penguin hit Website - Moving to new domain
Hey! I am working on a Penguin hit Website. Still ranking for all brand keywords and blog articles are still being returned in Google SERPs, but the website is showing up for only 3 or 4 money keywords. It is clearly a penguin hit as it was ranked 1st page for all money keywords before latest update (3.0). We already did a link cleanup and disavowed all bad backlinks. Still, the recovery process could take over 2 years from previous experience, and in 2 years, the site will suffer a slow death. Solution: We own the .com version of the domain, currently being served on the .net. We bought the .com version about 6 years ago, it is clean and NOT redirected to the .net (actual site). We were thinking about moving the whole Website to the .com version to start over. However, we need to make sure Google doesn't connect the 2 sites (no pagerank flow). Of course Google will notice is the same content, but there won't be any pagerank flowing from the old site to the new one. For this, we thought about the following steps: Block Googlebot (and only googlebot) for the .net version via robots.txt. Wait until Google removes all URLs from the index. Move content to the .com version. Set a 301 redirect from .net to .com (without EVER removing the block on googlebot). Thoughts? Has anyone went over this before? Other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
How would you suggest finding content topics for this site?
Hello, How would you suggest finding content topics for this site: nlpca.com The end goal is signups for training seminars in San Francisco, California and Salt Lake City, Utah. In the future the seminars will move more towards life coaching trainings but right now they are mostly about NLP. NLP is a personal development field. Just looking for ideas for the process of finding topics for the most link-bait-heavy fabulous content. The owners of the site are authorities in the field. This is for both blog and article content. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Hit By Penguin...Wait for recovery or do i change domains?
Hey Guys Would very much appreciate all opinions on our following situation, we have an .uk based ecommerce sports nutrition site www.cardiffsportsnutrition.co.uk Previously we worked with an SEO, that to put it simply did not follow webmaster guidelines(money anchor heavy, bad links etc), we reached some very good ranks too quickly and subsequently after the first penguin we where hit. We didn't receive any link warning or manual penalties just what i am assuming algorithmic...Rankings and traffic drop significantly, but not business ending. Since the first penguin we have done very little to no SEO, some unique content, re-writing of product pages, lots of social activity and didnt really lose much traffic after that, some small ups and down after refresh s and a slight slow decline on some keywords. Come Penguin 2.0...things that where still ranking for have now dropped even further, impressions in webmasters is now down over 50% and we have a had a wkly but not drastic drop in traffic since then. Over the last couple of months we have obtained some good quality links, have added lots of great unique content that has been shared significantly and generated some great traffic to our blog, added more unique product pages and category pages. But organically things are starting to look pretty grim apart from our brand keywords and everything is still in a slow decline and no increase in impressions in webmasters either jsut small drops We have been working to remove the poor quality and toxic links that the previous SEO built,getting anchor text corrected and collating information on the whole process ready to submit a file of links to disavow tool. which we are planning to do within the next couple of wks. Now i have read some successful stories and some not so successful one, so im starting to think of how to deal with this worse case scenario, If our domain is too damaged by the previous SEO guys We have the same domain name but on the .com that will help us carry over our brand name directly, but my concern is even though we have not had any manual penalty and not 301'd the .com back to the .co.uk or any other form of link will the penalties be carried over to the new domain just on the basis of brand association. We wouldn't plan to redirect any of the .co.uk traffic back to the .com but rather focus on our already strong ablate less converting traffic from the likes of twitter and facebook and run a small PPC campaign for some brand keyword to help buffer the traffic loss. While we focus on building good quality links and putting up plenty of new quality content on the site on the new domain that does not have any poor quality links back to it. What im trying to avoid is carry on spending time money and effort on the .co.uk domain for the next 3/4 months and continue to lose traffic slowly and then have to switch the domain anyway. I plan to wait and see for the next 4-6wks after we run the dissavow to but October time would be time i would have to make a decision and go for it. Any advice or opinions would be appreciated marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CSN0 -
Website is not indexed in Google, please help with suggestions
Our client website was removed from Google index. Anybody could recommend how to speed up process of re index: Webmaster tools done SM done (Twitter, FB) sitemap.xml done backlinks in process PPC done Robots.txt is fine Guys any recommendations are welcome, client is very unhappy. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThinkBDW0 -
Google penguin penalty(s), please help
Hi MozFans, I have got a question out of the field about www.coloringpagesabc.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
Question is why the rankings and traffic are going down down down the last 4 months. Costumer thinks he got hit by google penguin update(s). The site has about 600 page’s/posts al ‘optimized’ for old seo:
- Almost all posts are superb optimized for one keyword combination (like … coloring pages) there is a high keyword density on the keyword titles and descriptions are all the same like: <keyword>and this is the rest of my title, This is my description <keyword>and i like it internal linking is all with a ‘perfect’ keyword anchor text there is a ok backlink profile, not much links to inner pages
- there are social signals the content quality is low The site to me looks like a seo over optimized content farm Competition:
When I look at the competition. The most coloring pages websites don’t offer a lot of content (text) on there page. The offer a small text and the coloring pages (What it is about :-)) How to get the rankings back:
What I was thinking to do. rewrite the content to a smaller text. Low keyword density on the keyword and put the coloring pages up front. rewrite all titles and descriptions to unique titles and descriptions Make some internal links to related posts with a other anchor text. get linkbuilding going on inner pages get more social signals Am I on the right track? I can use some advise what to do, and where to start. Thanks!!</keyword></keyword> Maarten0 -
Wrong Page Indexing in SERPS - Suggestions?
Hey Moz'ers! I have a quick question. Our company (Savvy Panda) is working on ranking for the keyword: "Milwaukee SEO". On our website, we have a page for "Milwaukee SEO" in our services section that's optimized for the keyword and we've been doing link building to this. However, when you search for "Milwaukee SEO" a different page is being displayed in the SERP's. The page that's showing up in the SERP's is a category view of our blog of articles with the tag "Milwaukee SEO". **Is there a way to alert google that the page showing up in the SERP's is not the most relevant and request a new URL to be indexed for that spot? ** I saw a webinar awhile back that showed something like that using google webmaster sitelinks denote tool. I would hate to denote that URL and then loose any kind of indexing for the keyword.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SavvyPanda
Ideas, suggestions?0 -
Suggest some best seo extensions for prestashop
Hello all if any one of you using prestashop for their ecommerce portal or for their clients... pelase suggest some good addons of prestashop for the SEO. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | idreams0