Penguin 2.0 update, ranking dropped. Advice needed!

[KentR]

Hello

After another penguin 2.0 update the website i've been working on dropped in rankings,some of keywords that i ranked in #1 are now on second and third page, you can see this screenshot here http://screencast.com/t/MramoXgTr

95% of my competitors were not even effected with this update at all, most of them don't even optimize their  website for SEO, rather they use paid directories.

First thing i did is analyzed my backing profile using OSE, to my surprise i found a lot of low quality domains pointing to my pages with a keyword in anchor text. A lot of them blog commenting and low  quality article directories. Since i don't have control over these  links and i cant remove them i used Disavow tool to do the job.

For  the past 3 months, i've been doing a lot of hight quality link building; such as
press releases once in 2 months, squidoo lens and hubpages 3 posts a week for each keyword, youtube video, in fact my youtube video still ranks in #3 for high competitive search, i was involved in social media, posting tweets every week and Facebook posts.

I really hope that someone can help me here with a good advice on getting my rankings back here's my website, let me know what do you think about it.

Thank You

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, that's certainly painting the picture that this probably was Penguin and not just a coincidence. Best we know so far (and that's very speculative), Penguin 2.0 didn't introduce much in the way of new ranking factors. That is to say - it's not look at different things, it's just looking deeper in sites and probably being a bit less forgiving. So, the same rules for recovery probably apply to Penguin 2.0 that did to the original Penguin.

Unfortunately, that often means deep cuts to any questionable links and really focusing on quality. If you can't remove the links, that's going to mean disavowing, and even once you've disavowed, you may need to wait for a Penguin data update. Recovery stories have been hard to interpret, even for some very high-end SEOs I know who have been through the process.

The one consistent story we've heard is that, if it is Penguin, you can't just remove a few links disavow, and keep hoping for the best. It may take pretty drastic measures, and you have to weigh those measures against the loss you took. In other words, you have to figure out if the cure is worse than the disease. Sorry to paint a bleak picture, but Penguin is pretty harsh.

[echo1]

Dr Pete, based on your questions, it looks like our website has been hit by Penguin 2.0.

"(1) Did the drop happen right on May 22 (Penguin 2.0) or earlier/later? Right on May 22

(2) I see a solid loss in the top 3 - which specific keywords were these, and do they have any commonalities (branded vs. non-brand, for example)? Loss in traffic (40%) exactly after May 22nd and rankings dropped for both branded and non branded keywords anywhere from 1 to 17 positions.

(3) Were these keywords all ranking for the same page? Was it your home-page or a deeper page (it's possible this impacted a specific page or set of pages)? Pretty much, 90% of them were ranking for the Homepage but all the inner pages have been affected.

No manual penalty or warnings in GWT, pages are indexed/cached and loading normal.

[Dr-Pete]

I think step 1, as hard as it can be, is not to overreact before you have all the facts in. It's been a couple of days now, and the US holiday weekend has passed, so the first thing I'd do is check to see if this drop was temporary.

Next, dig into your analytics, and look for a few things:

(1) Did the drop happen right on May 22 (Penguin 2.0) or earlier/later?

(2) I see a solid loss in the top 3 - which specific keywords were these, and do they have any commonalities (branded vs. non-brand, for example)?

(3) Were these keywords all ranking for the same page? Was it your home-page or a deeper page (it's possible this impacted a specific page or set of pages)?

It looks like Penguin 2.0 is more granular and may target individual pages now, although that's only hearsay at this point. So, you may want to start with bad links to the affected pages. Check Google Webmaster Tools for any manual penalty warnings, and make sure the pages are loading normal, are indexed/cached, etc. You really want to have the situation pinned down before you start disavowing links at large scale.

[KentR]

Thanks Cesar for your quick reply, I'm about to disavow those links since i don't have control over them. What do you mean by having 404's on some of the domains?

Thanks for help!

[RepLoc_Tim]

Agree with Cesar, your backlinking profile looks a bit suspicious.

Here is a detailed article that still might be applicable to your situation: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience

This article has some great tips that everyone can benefit from in prevention too.

While these aren't likely tied to your ranking drops since Penguin 2.0, here are some things that you should look at improving to help your site too:

1. Site design needs to be fixed - content fits screen, but still allows horizontal scrolling
2. Not mobile responsive or mobile ready
3. Add Google Authorship and Publisher

Hope this helps.

[cbielich]

Just looking quickly at your back link profile on Open Site Explore and from a outsiders point of view the first thing that stood out to me was all your .edu domains linking to you.

• Most were irrelevant to your business or at least not related (Penguin could have just devalued those links more, than actually penalized you)
• You only have 74 root domains pointing to you, unless you have a list of your competitors its hard to judge.
• Some of the .edu domains are just a bunch of spam comments
• Came up with several 404's on some of the domains so those links are gone

Maybe you just need some more quality back links, its a very tedious process