Penalized by Penguin 2.0
-
I believe our site has been penalizes by Penguin 2.0. Our impressions in Google Webmaster are down and our traffic in Google Analytics also took a hit. Both of these occurences took place right when Penguin 2.0 was unleashed.
What are the steps I need to take to regain my ranking? Is disallowing all the links I think maybe spammy the first thing to do?
-
Its all about relevancy IMO. The closer you can get to the niche with that particular page the better. Remember the entire site does not necessarily need to be related to your niche (of course it does help if it is) as much as the individual pages do. The reason I say that is I have a hard time finding full site related niches who are not my competitors. Of course I am not going to be able to get a link on their sites, so I have to find those 1 pagers (usually news, blog and such) that happen to be perfect for my niche.
So if you are going to place that link on a particular page, try and make sure the relevancy is a perfect match (The higher the relevancy, the higher the impact). I have learned that when links are placed at the end of content they tend to not have as much of an impact (especially in forums, blog comments, etc...) the only reason I say this about the end of content is because I no longer will place links at the end of anything, only in the middle of text. Of course make sure that its relevant and helpful to the readers and make sense. You don't want to place links just to place them.
Also remember that Google still loves anchor text (yes even post penguin :)), but you really have to evaluate how you are placing that text in the link. Try and take yourself out of the SEO mode (I know I have too) and really think how you would link to that page and with what anchor text. Be as natural as possible when writing and make sure it makes sense. I tend to write my content first then I pick the most relevant text to highlight and place my links there.
Many times people make the mistake of thinking about the link before the content. Write your content whether its a blog comment, forum post or whatever and make sure the comments relates to the question. Then after you have answered the question ask yourself if a link is really necessary. If not, then don't place a link. Which I know is hard to do sometimes, but honestly that's what spam is all about. If anything most profiles have the ability to place a link to your homepage to them. Just make sure that's in place and leave well enough as it is.
I personally don't place percentages to my anchor text to my brand name. I just write the content and look at the best place to place my link and do that. Naturally it tends to be my brand term, but sometimes it's text like
- this article
- about this site
- check this link out
- freakin awesome tool
Yes even misspelled words, because naturally I will write them like that
and I know that Google understands that too.
If I learned anything its that because of the amount of SEO I know I tend to gravitate to keywords and subconsciously tend to use them too much OR it causes me to write content that can be somewhat un-natural. I don't mean to do, but it just seems to happen. What I started doing was asking friends of mine to write my content for me. I tell them the subject of the page, verbally tell them the keyword without letting them know that's the keyword
and let them write something for me. 99.9% of the time, it will be extremely natural flowing content
-
Our home page was affected, so I believe it's a little on the home page, more so on the targeted page level.
-
Wow great job! How long did that take you? What kind of quality links did you get and how did you get them? I'm a bit frustrated because I've been doing some quality links, even got two from 2 different pr7 .gov links, and still haven't recovered yet :s
-
I stuck with certain rules
- Rewrote Content
- Only added keywords to Title, Description, H1 and First paragraph (long tail)
- Added Sitemaps
- Contact Us Pages
- Increased Social Media
- Added Mailing List
- Added more quality backlinks
And the most important (that I felt) was leaving the disavowed tool alone.
I never received a manual penalty for any of my sites, I simply dropped in ranking after Penguin 1.0. Because of this obviously Google did not see anything sneaky with my back links so I most likely suffered simply a devalue of some of my back links from other sites which brought me down. So I figured I needed more quality back links to build myself back up. Took a while, but that seemed to fix it because I am ranking for keywords I have not seen since Penguin 1.0. I'm not as high as I was before.
Also I studied all my back links and the keywords used. I figured that since I ranked for those terms at one time, I tried to figure out which back links devalued and what keywords were used and tried to replicate it. If some were to spammy then I just branded them, otherwise I created new links (quality) with similar anchor text
-
What did you do?
-
Our home page was unaffected, so I believe 2.0 is targeting the page level. It is only getting pages for certain keywords we have targeted heavily in the past.
-
We did not receive a message in GWT.
-
Well I know is I did something right since 1.0 because I'm back baby!
-
Sadly, we can only speculate. I think it's reasonable to think that Penguin 1.0 may have acted sitewide, whereas Penguin 2.0 could be more targeted, but that's not so much an issue of where the links are pointing as it is of the impact of the penalty. The original Penguin did seem a bit all-or-none, in some cases. The update may be more nuanced. I think Google waited a long time for this roll-out because the collateral damage was just too high in testing. So, it's likely they found ways to make the action more targeted.
-
The only thing that kept me scratching my head was the comment Matt Cutts said about "Penguin 1.0 primarily focusing on the homepage only"
-
I just want to add that this is a difficult and even potentially dangerous process. There's no way to know exactly what Google didn't like, so it's easy to cut too deep. On the other hand, if you don't cut deep enough, Google may actually take that as a negative sign (don't just keep removing 5 links and then submitting a new disavow).
We don't know much about how Penguin 2.0 differs from 1.0, except some hearsay that it's targeting the page level now (and isn't just a sitewide action). So, I think the first thing you need to do is really pin down which keywords lost ranking and which pages those keywords target. It's possible that you've been too aggressive with links to a specific page or with anchor text using specific terms. If you see a pattern, then you can focus on just those links.
Also, keep in mind that, if the vast majority of your link profile is low quality, there may not be much left after you disavow. In other words, you may remove the bad links and still not recover. So, as Takeshi said, it's important to both address the problem and build for the future at the same time.
-
Side Note: You only need to submit a reconsideration request if you have been "manually penalized"
You will know this by getting some kind of message in GWT, if you DID NOT get any message then its the algorithm that got you and that means clean things up and Good Luck!
-
First of all, assess all your external links with a tool such as OSE or Majestic. Identify all the links coming from low quality/spammy sites, as well as the anchor text that is being used for the links. Greater than 30-40% exact anchor text links can get you penalized.
Then, go through the links and remove all the links you are able to. Use the disavow tool in webmaster tools on those you aren't able to remove. Then file a reconsideration request.
Note that because you are removing all these links, you will need to build new links to get your traffic back to the level it was previously at.
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
-
Paid Link/Doorway Disavow - disavowing the links between 2 sites in the same company.
Hello, Three of our client's sites are having difficulty because of past doorway/paid link activity, which we're doing the final cleanup on with a disavow. There are links between the sites. Should we disavow all the links between the sites? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Is Google not Penalizing aggressively anymore for on page manipulation?
I wanted to throw this out where we have been seeing so much emphasis on Google cracking down on bad linking, have they let up enforcement on manipulative on-page tactics that have faded in current years? I've been seeing hidden text popping up again and ranking. Here is an example. Google "landscaping Portsmouth NH" and find the #1 result. Now find "Portsmouth" on the page. So what I find interesting, the site has a clean backilnk profile, but that's a pretty blatant manipulation hiding those keywords. What I find interesting is I filled out a report on it a year ago. (I'm not a big "fill out spam report" guy, I was curious if Google would take action). A year later it is still #1 for the competitive keyword. So I'm curious if others have seemed similar trends like font-size:0px, or text color as the background popping back up and ranking. I would love other's thoughts on it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCutrer0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
Penguin 2.1: How to recover?
I know Penguin focuses on links but do you need to personally reach out and try to manually remove the links, or can you simply place the bad links in the disavow tool. I know for manual penalties you must manually reach out and try to remove and use disavow as an absolute last resort. Does the same go for algorithm penalties? Any insight would be helpful.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Does this look like a Penguin drop to you?
Hi Folks, This is my first post here. Psyched to be part of this great community. I have a site that's seen a steady drop in Google organic traffic since September of last year. Slow at first, then picking up speed in late January, then in a free-fall in May. Things are finally flattening out, but I'm left with 30% of my former traffic. See graph. I've been thinking that this was caused by Penguin. Back in 2006-2009, I used free directory submission services, and it looked like I was finally getting penalized for it. However, from the research I've done so far, it looks like websites hit by Penguin see a decrease in traffic over a couple days, not six months. Should I concern myself with disavowing those spammy directory links, or focus my energy elsewhere? There are other plausible explanations for the decline. I haven't posted much content on the site in recent years, and have let my blog go fallow. Obviously, this needs to be fixed. My question is, in addition to my content development and quality linkbuilding efforts, should I be worried about those spammy links? For the record, this is a high-quality informational site with lots of high-quality links mixed in with the spammy ones. Thanks for any insight you can offer. qozm7Rr.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | srmaximo0 -
Am I Being Penalized For Having My Whole Site In A Subfolder Named With A Keyword?
I inherited a client. For some reason, their previous webmaster set up the site so everything is in a subfolder /law/. It's an attorney website. All the urls have the primary domain name /law/ and then assigned url. I can't image this is helping but could the site be penalized for this by Google or Bing? It's set up like this: www.attorneysite.com**/law/**therestoftheurl /law/ is included in EVERY PAGE... even the homepage.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DeltonChilds0 -
Google Penguin for non-English queries?
Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update? All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RBenedict0 -
Hit hard by Panda 3.3 and Penguin. What to do?
Hi there. I work with a company that was originally all white hat, then began to dabble in some pretty serious black hat activities last year (usually paid linking in private blog networks). At the time we saw tremendous results - many of our most highly competitive keywords shot up 20, 30 positions to the top 10. And they didn't seem to budge so long as we kept those (very expensive) links intact. Alongside all of this, we have had a lot of white hat activity going on (pretty much everything recommended by Google/SEO Moz is ALSO in effect on this domain - lots of consistent/relevant blogging, social media, good content, good on-site SEO, etc), which I attribute to SOME of our success with keyword ranking, but what really made the difference was the paid linking. Let's just say we had two different mindsets behind the SEO strategy of the company, and the "Get rich quick" one worked for a while. Now, it doesn't. (Can you guess if I'm the white hat or the black hat at the company?) So here's my question. I have made the effort to contact all of the webmasters of our egregious links and, as everyone else has described, it is effectively useless. Especially given the amazing post by Ryan Kent on this question (http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links) I have sort of given up on the strategy of contacting these webmasters on a case by case basis and asking for the links to be removed, especially if Google is not going to accept anything less than a perfect backlink portfolio. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to clean up these links. Meanwhile, this company is a big name in a very competitive online market and it really needs to see lead generation from organic SEO. (Please don't give me any told-you-so's here, it was out of my hands.) MY QUESTION IS: WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Should we just keep the domain going and focus on only building quailty links from now on? Most of our keywords fall anywhere from position 40 to position 150 right now, so it's not like ALL hope is lost. But as any SEO knows that is basically as good as not being indexed at all. OTHER OPTION: We have an old domain that is the less-SEO-friendly, but it is the official name of our company . com, and this domain is currently 301'd to our live (SEO-friendly) domain. The companyname.com domain is also older than our SEO friendly domain. Should we manually move our site back over to the old domain since there is no penalty on it? It seems like a lot of sites that are ranking are brand new anyway (except their URL's are loaded with keywords.) Blah, I know that was a lot, but I'm feeling lost and ANY insight would be helpful. Thanks as always SEOMoz!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LilyRay1