Recovering from the Penguin update finally w00t!

[cbielich]

Since there is so little information out there for people who have recovered from the Google Penguin Update I thought I would share my recent recovery and what I did, and what worked for me.

First let me say that I don't necessarily believe that you have to wait for a Penguin update to recover from it, unless there has been an update in the last few weeks that I am not aware of.

When I got hit

I got hit with penguin on April 24th 2012. The reason I know is because 90% percent of all my major keywords I completely fell of the map with rankings, luckily I did not lose my main cash cow keyword which kept me alive (thank goodness) but I did lose rankings on many other keywords. Here is an example http://goo.gl/nZYAu

What I did

When the hit first came like many others I went into panic mode. For many months I tried all sorts of things.

• Redesign of my site
• Changed to friendly URL's
• Rewrote Content
• Got rid of low quality content
• Added more images to pages
• Less ads to the page
• Redesigned internal link structure
• Removed links from other sites I owned
• and more

None of which seemed to work for me, even with all these changes my rankings remained the same. I was scratching my head as to why Google thought my site was considered spammy. I finally decided to dig as deep as I could and literally start over from scratch in my research.

The first thing I did was go to my godaddy account and first see every domain I had owned. I was surprised to see that I had owned 73 domains. After a while you forget what you buy I guess :). Some of these domains I bought but never did anything with, some I bought and copied one of my other sites just to get something up with the hopes to redesigned it and others I had completed sites with unique content. Obvious there are issues with copying an entire site over dealing with duplicate content. Honestly most of these sites I had forgotten I even owned and that even had content on them. Back when I did all these things (about 2 years ago) I really did not know what I was doing from a SEO standpoint. I have learned since then which is why I needed to go through all these and clean them up.

One of the main things I used to do with my sites (Pre SEO) was I would take my big traffic sites and link to my other sites from either a footer or somewhere on a page that would have a ton of indexing (dynamic pages) Usually somewhere in the 90,000k+ in pages generated. I honestly did this not with the intent to manipulate rankings, but with the idea of sending traffic to those pages. I thought that was a great idea

As I started going through my domains one by one with a fine tooth and comb there were many sites which I had totally forgotten about that contained links to my other sites. Especially my main cash cow site. It took me about 2 weeks to get through all my domains and clean everything up. The things I did was

• Removed all duplicate sites
• Removed URL's I was not doing anything with (I know this had no effect, just wanted to clean my domains up)
• Removed all links that pointed to any of my other sites

Now What

About 1 week later (and as those links started to go away in Google webmaster tools) keywords I have not ranked for since April 24th started to gain rank. While many are still not raking and the ones that are have low rankings. They are ranking again. I know for sure now this made a difference for me. These are keywords that tanked from Penguin that all of a sudden I have ranks in them again.

While I know the practices I did where obviously bad SEO much of what I did was done before I actually knew what I was doing. What worked for me was checking every domain I owned and looking at every page I had on those sites. Most of my problems came from sites I totally forgot I even had, which is what was hurting me. Finally going back to those sites and either removing the links/domains is what I believe is making the difference.

Just thought I would share

[Klarke]

So you removed a bunch of sitewide (anchor-text rich ? ) links and you recovered.  That's pretty much how everybody understands it.

And yes, there was a Penguin refresh on October 5th.   More credibility to the notion that you can only recover from Penguin during a refresh or update.  And If you recovered at any other time, then you probably weren't hit by Penguin in the first place.

[danatanseo]

Wow, thanks for sharing. I hope this is a serious object lesson for people who are trying the same things. What kind of baffles me is that you'd forgotten that you'd purchased and set up a bunch of different Web sites. I don't know, call me crazy , but that's kinda like publishing a book and saying "Really? That's mine> I had no idea!"