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
-
Recovering from Sitemap Issues with Bing
Hi all, I recently took over SEO efforts for a large e-commerce site (I would prefer not to disclose). About a month ago, I began to notice a significant drop in traffic from Bing and uncovered in Bing Webmaster Tools that three different versions of the sitemap were submitted and Bing was crawling all three. I removed the two out of date sitemaps and re-submitted the up to date version. Since then, I have yet to see Bing traffic rebound and the amount of pages indexed by Bing is still dropping daily. During this time there has been no issue with traffic from Google. Currently I have 1.3 million pages indexed by Google while Bing has dropped to 715K (it was at 755K last week and was on par with Google several months ago). I know that no major changes have been made to the site in the past year so I can't point to anything other than the sitemap issue to explain this. If this is indeed the only issue, how long should I expect to wait for Bing to re-index the pages? In the interim I have been manually submitting important pages that aren't currently in the index. Any insights or suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | tdawson090 -
Do you think this site has been hit by penguin?
Hi Guys, I need some opinion on a website i am working on www.colourbnners.co.uk They updated their website in August but the company they used did not take into account the URL structure and hence there's a massive loss in links in August time. They also dropped off Google for all their key terms except their brand name 'colour banners'
Technical SEO | | gezzagregz
Since then, they have implemented a 301 redirect. Some key points They have not received any manual warnings in WMT I have disavowed some poor quality links that they have built over the years I am building high quality links quite selectively/slowly There were a lot of duplicate content issues - these have been resolved now.
So my question to you SEO pros is do you think its penguin? or something that i am missing?
If it is penguin, what is the best form of attack to get it removed? regards gezzagrez0 -
Is this a Penguin hit; how to recover?
Our site is: www.kibin.com Our organic search traffic has dropped significantly in the last few days (about 50%). Although we don't have a ton of traffic coming in via organic search, this is a huge blow. We we previously the top spot for keywords like 'edit my essay', 'fix my paper', and 'paper revision'. These kw phrases linked to smaller services pages on our site such as: kibin.com/s/edit-my-essay kibin.com/s/fix-my-paper kibin.com/s/paper-revision We no longer rank for these keywords... at all. My first question/concern is... is this a Penguin penalty? I'm not sure. Honestly, I know we have some directory links, but we've never been aggressive on the backlink front. In fact, in the last few months we've been investing quite a bit into content: kibin.com/blog If this is a Penguin penalty, how should I best go about cleaning this up? I'm not even sure what links Google would be considering spammy, and again... we really don't have that extensive of a backlink profile. Please help, this is a real blow to our business and it's got me a big freaked out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
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 -
Very Weird Type of Penguin Penalization
One of my client's sites has a bunch of bad links from blog networks with exact-match anchor text. Since Penguin, they have been completely removed from Google for that keyword. But here's the weird part: It's only the homepage that has been removed, and only for that keyword. If I put other keywords into Google, our homepage comes up. So the site hasn't been banned, and that page hasn't even been banned because it still comes up with all of our other keywords. It's only when you put in the keyword that has all the anchor text that the homepage doesn't come up anywhere. (I went all the way to the end). Has this happened to anyone else, and does it warrant a re-inclusion request since the site and even that page haven't technically been banned?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
Panda or Penquin -Website Fell - Shouldn't this Recover?
On March 23rd our site fell 47% in one day. www.TranslationSoftware4u.com but we still held quite a few #1 to #7 rankings on Google and thought it would just recover. Our top keyword "translation software" was #4 , now we are #19 Over the next week I waited to see if it recovered. We have been online 10+ years and always stayed with white hat. I admit to learning as I go over the years but always felt content was king so I focused on information. I really do not see my site as using spam techniques but maybe I am missing something on the way I have it. March 23rd, major drop -47% On April 2nd I started with SEO MOZ and the Research tools showed we had duplicate content warning. This was from a blog we were trying to start that only had 7 posts but it had about 20 tags per post. I did not realize that tags actually created that post under that tag. I went in and deleted the tags again being stupid and not realizing it was then making that come up 404. The blog was so small we do not get hits on it anyway so hoping it just clears itself up. ( still get duplicate warning on our directory due to using "php Link Directory", but it's due to how it reuses the title tag and description, 2 instances per category page"). Still trying to fix the php directory issue. Seems many others are running it and did not have a drop. April 24th, we dropped another -10% It keeps falling -70% now. I have gone through the site and tried to clean up any warnings like duplicate title tags, meta descriptions. With regards to links I put up a small web directory with some reciprocal linking. Our product translates languages but software is not the same as a human so we often set clients up with human translators, the directory is a nice place to help our customers find a translator or see online tools that can help. The links were not excessive, there were maybe 100 links. After the fall I went in and found some translators had gone out of business so I deleted those, I am down to 65 links now, about 45 are exchanges. I have submitted to some online directories manually, but looking back through the links there is not really anything that makes me concerned. The link back to my site was really the most neglected SEO thing I did. Again concentrating on content. I did find a few links that I was not happy about but I did not put those links so had no control. I have been working on cleaning up my title tags, and making sure the content just reads better. I have been hoping that my site would just start recovering but it keeps sliding. Has anyone seen recovery from the updates. Should I see anything yet? I cannot seem to get Google to return to the site and reindex. Am I doing somethign spammy on my site and I do not realize it? Thanks for any advice in advance!
Technical SEO | | Force70 -
Slapped by the Penguin
We had a client's website hit hard by the Penguin update, particularly on the 24th. Sitewide each keyword lost 10-20 positions. It was in #1 or #2 for the past couple years. We optimize all of our websites onpage features well and within the whitehat realm. Since this was the only website affected out of 50+ other sites, I am guessing the penalty came directly from the backlink profile which was quite bad. The client had bought two other directory link package deals about 4 years ago which all of the incoming directory links have the exact same anchor text. I warned him this was completely unnatural and we only went after "natural-looking" links since then. Keep in mind these links were from 4+ years ago and did very little for rankings as we came into the picture. Out of 143 root domain links, around 45 use the same anchor text in link. We started with about 50 links total 2 years ago and have since built a very good quality profile, or so I thought. I was almost certain is was enough various anchor text to dilute it down. I'm wondering if any of your websites that have been hit have a high amount of exact match anchor text. I can't believe Google would penalize just for linkbuilding because it seems to be an easy way to attack competitors but all my data is looking that way. Let me know your thoughts if any of your sites have been hit. Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoninja201
