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
-
New Domain Name or Keep going - Help not Recovering after Penguin
Hi Moz Friends I wonder if you can help me , a while ago we had a Penguin Penalty and lost our Rankings. After Months of work Disavow and Reconsiderations , Google sent me a message in Webmaster Tools to confirm the Penalty had been uplifted. Since then we havent recovered. I have been working with Bloggers to build relevant safe links, each having a DA of between 10-30. We have developed a Mobile Friendly Website and ios and Android Apps. We have improved Site Speed and moved to a Server within the same Country. We add lots of content and believe we have ticked all the boxes for onpage optimisation. However our DA and PA seems to have dropped slightly after Moz update today. We seem to be jumping in the serps, one day page 4 for "fancy dress" the next day nowhere to be found. I'm not sure what to do next. I'm not expecting to jump back to page 1 for the main keywords but some positive movement would be nice, especially as there are Lower DA Website, not mobile friendly or as fast above us in the serps. What I am looking for I guess is any ideas from you and also what you think about this idea A few people have mentioned that we might stand more of a chance using our domain name example.com instead of example.co.uk. example.com has never been used and is totaly clean (no penaltys ect..) Do we use example.com and move the website and content away from example.co.uk ? if so do we use redirects or would that just pass any hold thats on example.co.uk to the .com version Ideas Welcome Thanks Adam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AMG1000 -
Does this graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit?
Hello,Does the attached graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit? Keep in mind that on our eCommerce site most purchases are from return customers. I forgot to add here that we cut a bunch of paid links in May 2013 as well. We quit cutting paid links when our rankings dropped - we thought it was the paid links. We currently have 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was on May 22. ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
My site www.sriindustries.com dropped to back page penguin 2.1
My website penguin 2.1 dropped back to page 5 and beyond, can you help me to come out from this ? My head is breaking, also I would like to know how to be on top for local business search (maps)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | synchronyinfo0 -
How do I prepare my store for Penguin 2.0?
Looking for advice from someone who has been keeping up on the updates from Matt Cutts, other sources on what to work on for my web store to prevent getting hit hard by the upcoming penguin update.Practical advice on what to clean up on the site would be extremely useful. Watched a Matt Cutts video yesterday getting a preview...I'm very curious about the part saying that Google will show preference to those who are "Experts in their Fields." What makes you qualified for this? We are in the wicker furniture industry and have been a local brick and mortar store since 1982. We started our website about 1998, so I would consider that experience possibly part of the equation. On the other hand, I know everyone would love to say they are the experts in their niche, so it would be nice to know what needs to be done to achieve this. Thank you in advance for any help, Mark Grabowski Wicker Paradise xQmQeKU25zg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
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 -
Penguin link removal what would you do?
Hi Over the last 4 months I have been trying to remove as many poor quality links as possible in the hope this will help us recover. I have come across some site's that the page our back-link is on has been de-indexed, goggle shows this when I look at the cached page... 404. <ins>That’s an error.</ins> The requested URL /search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGNI_enGB482GB482&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fforom.eovirtual.com%2Fviewtopic.php%3Ff%3D4%26t%3D84 was not found on this server. <ins>That’s all we know.</ins> If goggle is showing this message do I have to still try to remove the link, or is it a case goggle has already dismissed the link?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wcuk0 -
Is this Penguin or Manual Penalty?
I have a client that's traffic dropped off on April 10th. They did get a message in GWT on March 21st. The April 10th date leads me to believe that it is a manual penalty and couldn't be penguin since penguin was released on April 24th. I guess either way backlinks need to be cleaned up though.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
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