My Penguin Recovery Attempt
-
So I have decided today to attempt to beat the odds and try and do a full recovery from the Penguin Update. I am going to create a Google Doc in which I will make public and link at the end of this post for all of you to see.
I am going to meticulously go through a massive back link audit of my site and try to see if I can recover from my loss of some of my main keywords back from April 24th.
I want to clarify that I DID NOT get effected from Penguin 2.0, but I did from 1.0 and have not recovered since. I have to be honest I feel like I have done everything up to now, but I realized I needed to make this a very long journey into a massive audit into my back link profile which contains thousands of back links which I have been honestly avoiding.
I just want to see if I put the work, I will see the results and maybe it can help others
I will document everything I do in detail as well as dates when I do them. I'm sure there will be plenty of coffee fueled nights of Jibber-Jabber...and I apologize for that ahead of time. I hope at the end there is light and can shed some on others.
I am starting with a blank canvas, so keep checking back on my progress. I generally work at night so you will see most changes in the morning.
Here is the link to my Doc - http://bit.ly/11dUkzc
Wish Me Luck
-
I see what you are saying, I was referring to total links. Not domains
-
I think what Marie is saying is that there is a disparity here somewhere. You say you have thousands of natural links, yet you only are showing 125 referring domains... Same thing on OSE *only 79 referring listed there but that's normal for ahrefs to have a more complete vision. Still not a ton of links.. I'm wondering if you would see improvement just by building some great content and gaining new relevant links..
-
I am not competing against those sites, and prior to Penguin I was ranking almost 1st page on some keywords that I lost.
My goal here is to recover the ranking on particular keywords I had that I lost from Penguin 1.0
-
I might be missing something, but according to ahrefs you have followed links from 125 domains. If the majority of those are spam links then there are likely not a lot of good quality links. I would think that to compete against big brand names like Hasbro and Merriam-Webster it is going to take a lot more than that to rank.
-
I do. I have screenshots and stuff already. I will post them soon.
-
Do you know where you were ranking before you started building the spammy links?
-
I have many natural earned links, thousands of them actually.
But I do have spammy rich anchor text links as well that I created years ago.
My goal is to analyze every link I have manually by visiting each one of them. I am going to create a checklist tonight of what process I will determine to detect spam. I do code so I might make a tool for myself that can help me find things quicker.
Like the purpose of this endeavor is to see through all attempts I can come up with to get myself out of the Penguin Hold. I am so determined to do this its crazy
I am willing to spend whatever time it takes even if what I do, does nothing. Then at least I know what doesn't work and move on to the next.
-
YES I am wondering this too. I'd kind of like to see him do it without natural links (or somebody) to test this theory. I hope it's true. It would just mean that we can focus entirely on proper content and link building and forget about poison links altogether!
Since Penguin 2.0 is an overhaul though (right?) it should technically overwrite whatever damage was done from 1.0... by theory? So my next question would be, OP - Did you see any changes at all last night? even bumped up or down a couple spots for targeted keywords?
-
I am trying to decide whether Penguin is really penalizing links or whether it just devalues all of the self made links it can detect. I have a question. For your site, do you have many naturally earned links? If not, removing backlinks may not do anything.
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
-
What would you say is hurting this site, Penguin or Panda?
Would you say this is both Penguin and Panda and no penalty has ever been lifted? What would be your general recommendations for this site? seWnoQm
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
How can I tell if my site was penalized from the most recent penguin update?
Hey all, I want to be able to see if my website was penalized from the most recent penguin update because we have several hundred websites built and at the bottom of each on it says something along the lines Website by, Web Design by, Hosting by and links back to our homepage. Could this possibly be penalizing us since these links have similar anchor text and on sites that have nothing to do with our services? Thanks, Ryan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Are directory listings still appropriate in 2013? Aren't they old-style SEO and Penguin-worthy?
We have been reviewing our off-page SEO strategy for clients and as part of that process, we are looking at a number of superb info-graphics on the subject. I see that some of current ones still list "Directories" as being part of their off-page strategy. Aren't these directories mainly there for link-building purposes and provide Users no real benefit? I don't think I've ever seen a directory that I would use, apart for SEO research. Surely Google's Penguin algorithm would see directories in the same way and give them less value, or even penalise websites that use them to try to boost page rank? If I were to list my websites on directories it wouldn't be to share my lovely content with people that use directories to find great sites, it would be to sneakily build page rank. Am I missing the point? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Crumpled_Dog
Scott0 -
Google Penguin for non-English queries?
Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update? All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RBenedict0 -
Not Sure Exactly How Penguin is Effecting My Site (looking for tuff love)
Hello Everyone, I own a small web design firm website. My site was for sure hit by Penguin, but not sure why they devalued my pages. I dont really do SEO or link building except for my own site. I normally turn clients down when they want SEO services. Mainly because we do web design really well, so I've chosen to invest my time doing that versus doing both. For most of my keywords I took a 5-10 spot drop. Nothing super major, but enough that its tanking my business. I've survived all of the panda stuff, so I assumed my content writing, and link building tactics were good, but I'm wrong. Here is my website: http://www.clikzy.com/ I will explain what I have been doing below, and I am looking for a little help/direction. I don't mind if you look at my site, links, and are brutally honest. I do have original content ( I just ran everything through copyscape a month prior), and I occasionally get duplicate pages as my CMS tends to create them automatically, but we do a fairly good job of redirecting those pages when they occur. My link building tactics have been a mixture of the following. I have used anchor text alot which could be my demise. Forum postings
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Juratovic
Blog Comments
Website Footers (roughly 20 over the course of a year)
Web Design Directories (explain below) I did start using directories in January. I would use OpenSite Explorer, and review some of my bigger competitors, and would occasionally get listed on a web design directory they were on. I think total I probably purchase 8-10 since Jan including botw, business.com, etc. I have some local pages which I create case studies for which ranked fairly well. For instance for the term Baltimore Web Design I used to rank #1, but not I'm 5-6. Here's the keyword: http://www.clikzy.com/reston-web-design.html One more note: I did redirect an older website I have (12 years) to my current site (3 years) in Jan. Mainly because it ranked well for terms in NYC. I've dropped for those terms around 5 spots. I have a few questions: 1. What would you suggest to fix something like this? Power Content? Better Links? (of course, we all want better links) 2. Remove links? I am not sure which ones are bad. One thought was to just kill my local pages (roughly 15 pages) which would also kill any bad links I may have point to them. 3. If I have a bad link pointing to a internal page, could that bring down my home page rankings? Any help would be appreciated. I am in the process of interviewing for a full time PR person to come on staff to help us with our content, and PR. I knew I should have invested in this person a year ago! ha! Thank you! Pete0 -
Penguine Recovery
Our site, www.autodealerchat.com got hit hard by Google's recent Penguin update (also known as the over-optimization update). For our main set of keywords including: auto dealer chat dealer chat car dealer chat automotive chat We lost placement across the board most notably on automotive chat where we were third and are today non-existent. If you look at our site, we were following former best practices and SEOMoz recommendations. If you look at our backlinks, we were playing the white hat game like everyone else. SEOMoz tools indicated that we were tops in terms of Domain Authority, etc. according to the old rules. Everything changed on April 25th. Going forward, what are some of the things that we can do to regain some of that lost ground? Thanks in advance for the insights.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | contactatonce0 -
Penguin Update and Infographic Link Bait
Is it still ok to use infographics for link bait now that the penguin update has rolled out? Are there any techniques that should be avoided when promoting an infographic? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eddiejsd1 -
Penguin Update or URL Error - Rankings Tank
I just redid my site from Godaddy Quick Shopping Cart to Drupal. The site is much cleaner now. I transferred all the content. Now my site dropped from being in the top ten on almost every key word we were targeting to 35+. I "aliased" the urls so that they were the same as the Godaddy site. However when I look at our search results I notice that our URLs have extra wording at the end like this: ?categoryid=1 or some other number. Could this be the reason that our rankings tanked? Previously on the godaddy site the results didnt show this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chronicle0