When Penguins Attack...

[WorldText]

I'm hoping for a couple of second opinions of my conclusions here before I shoot 60% of our link profile in the head...
a) I've not needed to deal with an angry Penguin before,
b) it's not as black and white as most of the blog posts seem to find.

Domain is www.world-text.com

The Penguin Google Says...

●  We have no unnatural links warning in WMT
●  We have dropped out of the top 50 for all keywords except three.  Those three are a couple of pages down.
●  We still own page 1 for a brand search (World Text), though we lost the bottom result.
●  Overall traffic down 25%, organic down 50%, SERPs impressions down 50-70%

I'd love to know where the remaining organic Google traffic is coming from as we currently rank for nothing (useful anyway);  the analytics doesn't show the usual off a cliff to nothing, more a few quiet weeks.

Several other players in the sector appear to have been obliterated too - searches on several keywords are a total mess with total unknowns and spam showing up on page 1 SERPs.

Adwords traffic is up markedly which I put down to the mess that is SERPs

Our adwords are nicely optimised and our top keywords are hitting quality scores of >=8, mostly 9 or 10.

Why did the Penguin Peck?...

Simple.  Opensiteexplorer should make it blindingly obvious what the issue is.

We have a horrible link profile that I have been muttering about for 18 months or more.

●  Long before I joined seems they got a 5,000 search friendly directory submissions package or equivalent
●  Sadly not a single one of them was from the long obsolete SEOMoz directories list, or worth keeping.
●  Every single last one of them has identical anchor text and description.  Still, makes for easy analysis.
●  The anchor text used isn't likely to be searched often
     "World-Text.com Text Messaging Services"
●  3 of 4 originally submitted sites/directories have since expired, removed links etc

Findings

740 judged bad domains:
    All the identical anchor text SEO directories
    a couple of others picked out as unwanted
    the domains serving malware

Only 235 class Cs in these
    144 have 0-2 indexed pages - not useful for a directory!

500 judged maybe:
    No links found even though in WMT (a lot of these)
    down, suspended etc (a lot of these too)
    parked
    links that are less than ideal but not identically anchored spam.
    (for instance someone who had linked to us has had their site scraped and dropped on dozen or more forums including our link)

another pass of these in a week or so, just in case some come back to life...

400 judged good (well harmless):
     Natural links
     real directories
     all the assorted alexa like scrapers, domain valuation junk etc.

Executing Penguins and other vermin...

Apparently pretending to know nothing doesn't help, so...

●  Disavow the three discovered sites serving malware
●  Remove where possible every last one of the SEO directory entries avoiding any extorted payment.     Track contacts and responses.
●  Disavow the rest

{Reconsideration request}

I KNOW this is for manual penalties, and we don't have one, BUT I've seen countless sources suggesting reconsideration for Penguin.  Really?

Anyway that was far longer than intended, so thanks for making it this far!  I look forward to comments!

[GregB123]

Hi Matt,

It sounds like you ran Link Detox? If not, then it is possible to get a $50 for two evaluations deal with them that will give you pretty reliable list of bad links to compare to the one you created.

I also suggest you read this Moz Blog article called It's Penguin-Hunting Season: How to Be the Predator and Not the Prey

...and then test a few of your sub-pages that used to rank well at the program used in this article which is called the Penguin Analysis Tool.  I say sub-page because it needs a single keyword phrase you want rank that particular page for so it do the anchor text analysis. And that works better on focused sub-pages than on general homepages. $10 will let you fully evaluate two pages and see if the data helps you.

I did a Disavow months ago and got a little recovery, but not 100%. Fortunately I only got nailed for a few keywords that did not convert very well anyways.  After testing a few of my own pages in the tool above, I wonder if maybe I Disavowed too many of one type of link and not enough of another type.

About doing a Reconsideration Request. I tried it just for the heck of it after submitting my Disavow. An hour or two later I got an automated email response saying that their was no manual penalty and therefore no action was needed. So it probably doesn't hurt, but evidently doesn't help either. Basically they are for those who get a notice.

[onlinechester]

Quick question (I'm in the same situation) can you actually file a reconsideration request if you don't have a manual penalty against you? If so- please tell me how as I can't find how-to anywhere and I'm thinking of doing the exact same thing as you.

I disavowed a lot of my links a few weeks before the last penguin update and therefore I'm not sure whether I've simply deleted links that were actually giving us good value.

Sorry for the hijack- I'd just be interested to know!