Penguin recovery - Any suggestions?

[Idoz]

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?

[BigStereo]

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.

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[Idoz]

Let's wait then.

Thanks All!

[MarieHaynes]

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.

[JaredMumford]

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.

[Idoz]

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 ?

[JaredMumford]

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.

[MarieHaynes]

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!

[ChrisHolgate]

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.