Recovering from an algorithmic bodyslam

[Boogily]

Hi there. We inherited a client who didn't receive a manual penalty, but holy cow they have a good sized algorithmic penalty on their site. Here is what we have done since receiving the client:

• Client arrived with a bad backlink profile and an algorithmic penalty. We knew this, but underestimated the effort in removing it.
• We researched great forum posts like http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover http://moz.com/community/q/penguin-2-1-how-to-recover
• The researched great blog posts like http://moz.com/ugc/what-a-penguin-recovery-looks-like http://moz.com/ugc/recovery-from-google-penguin-tips-from-the-trenches http://moz.com/ugc/a-theory-for-preventing-recovering-from-a-google-penguin-penalty

Outside of Moz, we researched a lot as well. We felt armed that we needed to do 3 major things.

1. Remove all of the bad backlinks
2. Create good content within the site
3. Fix any unnatural on page SEO tactics (keyword stuffing, etc)

Here is how we tackled it step by step

Step 1: For step 1, we contacted over 100 of the bad backlinks. Many of them wanted a fee for removing the backlinks. They were from sites that were literally like "freeseobacklinks.org". Crazy bad ones. But we only got a few removed. The rest either ignored us or wanted some money.

Hence our round(s) of disavow. Our SEO manager at the time of the first disavow only did 50 domains on the disavow. She was extremely thorough, followed the guidelines to a T, and performed it. We actually fell back in ranking afterward, even though I didn't think it was possible.

With nothing to lose, besides lots of time and budget, we went through thousands of links and manually compiled an extravagant spreadsheet for our next round of disavow. Again, limited to no response from site owners. So we went ahead and pushed forth with nearly 300 domains for the disavow. By this time, the site was in the abyss, so it couldn't hurt anymore. We kept all of the great links, which surprisingly there were a fair amount.

Step 2:
Our SEO manager and our content writer began to write for the website. Our graphic design created an awesome infographic, and a good slideshare too. We've been putting 3-4 articles / posts on the site monthly. Typical word range is 750+

Step 3:
We did a full site analysis and removed all unnatural location based keywords. There wasn't a ton of unnatural on page SEO going on. The bulk of the damage must have came from the bad backlinks.

Summary:
On top of this we have been doing this for at least 6 months. All of the pages that are hit by the penalty are just gone. Nowhere to be found on Google, unless you search with the site operator or search for that exact page.

We seem to make zero headway with all of this. I'm not sure what else we can be doing. We even optimized for conversions and longer time on site, as well as page speed. We've confirmed that there is no manual penalty. I'm starting to feel as if the site is permanently deemed bad or something. I also don't want to keep wasting our writers and manager's time on this one.

Any ideas on next steps? Can anyone restore my confidence in this site? Thanks for the long read and any response,

Have a great day,

[MickEdwards]

Good news!

[Boogily]

Just an update, the penalty was FINALLY lifted. Our client soared the rankings. WOOT

[Boogily]

We have gobs of spreadsheets. We wanted to keep the good backlinks, so we disavowed all of the "dodgy" ones. It was a disavow on the domain level and it totaled to over 50% of all incoming domains.

As for manually checking the remaining links, the ones that we chose to keep on the spreadsheet are from relative, authoritative niches with minimal exact match keywords, so we chose to keep them. We did manually check every single one too.

We will continue to press on, and I will update here in a month to note progress if any.

Do you know of any way to see if the disavow even took? Is there a way in WMT to see what you have selected for Google not to use when looking at backlinks? http://moz.com/community/q/why-does-gwt-still-show-some-links-from-a-disavowed-domain That link doesn't give me much confidence in finding out if my disavows are even taking effect. It's almost like I have to do it, and throw my hands up in the air and who knows.

[MickEdwards]

From a cleansing point of view we have to take your word that all relevant links have been removed or disavowed, just having a couple of "dodgy" ones can hold the site back.  When removing links have you manually checked the remaining links - a tool is not really adequate in many cases?

This is an interesting issue that happened to someone - http://moz.com/community/q/disavow-links-leading-to-404

Also,are you sure your disavow file is accumulative and contains ALL URLs?

[Boogily]

Here is the latest update.

The rankings have still not recovered. The pages that do rank in the 60-170 SERP for the bad terms are not the pages that are built for that keyword.

So, I dug even further and used ahrefs (great tool). An "ah-hah!" moment came when I noticed the % of incoming anchor text seemed to directly correlate with the SERPs that have been negatively effected. Long of the short, further proof that Penguin has stomped on this site. Those nasty anchor texts have been disavowed a long time ago obviously.

Funny, we have an old Penguin recovery post on this from our site. But we followed that to a "T", and appeared to do the right steps. We can't really disavow anymore, and the link profile that we did not touch is a good one. This site just seems so far down the rabbit hole that at times it feels like we are wasting a lot of valuable time and money. I wonder how much more time we can invest in it (Creating content, getting higher quality links to it).

Has anyone encountered a Penguin attack that they couldn't recover from? Or one that took over 10 months or something like that?

[Boogily]

Also, to reassure you I've used the Moz on-page grader for all pages and they all rank at about an A or a B. WIthout stuffing of course.

Thanks for the tip though,

[Boogily]

Hey Michael,

The big slam occurred in late march. It coincides with Panda Update 25. The only other thing that occurred around that time is that the site had a graphic overhaul, getting a new template on the CMS and new graphics. The content stayed the same. The site on the Moz pro dashboard continued to show no errors and a few warnings, nothing major.

For scrubbing on page content, accessibility, etc I use WMT and Moz Pro tools like campaigns, crawling, on page keywords, etc.

Are you having an inkling that there is something else at play? Please let me know, I'll take any help I can get.

Thank you,

[Boogily]

Thank you so much for the thoughful response Wiqas. The thing is, we've done a good amount of good link building as well. There are quality links from relative industries that are just branded (no keyword insertion). There are a lot of government sites, edu, even Harvard (a small no-follow but still).

I apologize for leaving that nugget out of there. With Matt Cutts and his stance on Guest Blogging, we are treading very very carefully. She's in tons of local directories now too. This effort was done right away, and the client surprisingly had some decent backlinks as well, in which we kept.

We continue to press forward for link building, but not sure if that will lift the algorithmic choke hold that is on this site.

Thanks again,

[Boogily]

Thank you for the response Eric. I may have mistyped, there were lots of links through hundreds of domains. It's still a smaller local client in a field with a bad stigma (attorney), but other than OSE and WMT I'm not sure what else I can do to grab all of the incoming links.

If you're suggesting that I should force Google to recrawl the nasty links after 6 months, I'll try anything at this point. How would you recommend doing that?

Thanks again,

[MickEdwards]

Are you sure about the direct algorithmic penalty/penalties, do they tie in with the update release dates and was there significant drops in traffic to identify which update version/s caused the problems?

I've worked on sites where I would describe as suffering the residue of penalties from linking domains, along with masses of on-site technical issues.  Typically organic traffic has declined over a 1-2 year period.

I'm not suggesting you don't clean up your link profile, it is the right thing to do, but you want to be real sure what is causing the immediate problems.

[Asjad]

Hey Ryan,

You team did most of good things

• Fixing On Page Issues
• Removing Low Quality, Anchor Based Links (Manually or Disavow)
• 3 to 4 Blogs Posts per week

You have done all things recommended by experts but you miss a big thing

• Generating More Quality links

By deleting or disavowing hundreds of links, lots of link juice had been dropped. you need to build more quality links like

• Few Quality Guest Posts (Non Anchor Based For Sure)
• Few Top Business Directories (Yellow Page, Yelp, Merchant Circle etc)
• If its is a local business, few quality local directories (State-wise or City-wise)
• Lots of Social Sharing (Google Plus especially)
• Goolge Plus Local Page if not yet
• May be Google Authorship if feasible

and others. This will neutralize power lost due to removed links.

Good Luck!

Regards

[GlobeRunner]

Ryan,

I'm sorry you're having trouble. You're not the only one who is having issues like this. My first thought is that you're probably not seeing all of the links to the site. You haven't mentioned which tools you've used to gather the links to the site, but nowadays you need to use several tools and combine the data. Then, it's really a fine art, in a way, to figure out which links to remove and which ones to keep. You mentioned that there are a few hundred that you contacted. We typically try to remove thousands or hundreds of links, not just 100 or so.

The other issue here is that you may have targeted the correct links to remove. But it takes time for Google to recrawl those links and then give you credit for disavowing them. You can speed up that process by forcing Google to recrawl those links.