Google Panda and Penguin "Recovery"
-
We're working with a client who had been hit by Google Panda (duplicate content, copyright infringement) and Google Penguin (poor backlinks).
While this has taken a lot of time, effort and patience to eradicate these issues, it's still been more than 6 months without any improvement.
Have you experienced longer recovery periods?
I've seen sites perform every black hat technique under the sun and still nearly 2 years later..no recovery! In addition many companies I've spoken to advised their clients to begin right from the very beginning with a new domain, site etc.
-
Thank you to you all for your valued feedback. Marie, please do let me know when this article becomes available. I'd be vary interested to read.
We use Moz to analyse and correct the general health of a website to eradicate errors accordingly.
Panda - I'm aware Panda updates have happened more frequently. All duplicates and the quality of content has been implemented for our client.
Penguin - I have disavowed "all" poor quality backlinks, ensuring good quality links remain. We did this manually checking each link and the referring websites for quality assurance.
**But how do we know when the Panda penalty has been lifted, when it's obvious we have a Penguin penalty in place? **
**Does a business who are desperate to advertise online simply begin creating new "valuable" **content, reach out to industry influencers etc, to achieve backlinks with authority - meaning waiting maybe months before the penalty is removed, if removed?
Or, create a new site, "completely" separate from the old, and implement our marketing strategy knowing that the spammy practices conducted in the past will not affect my clients new site?
-
If you disavowed six months ago then you still haven't seen a Penguin refresh as the last one was October 4, 2013. So, if you have done the work required to escape Penguin, you may see an improvement once Google finally refreshes Penguin. No one knows when the refresh will happen but hopefully it will be soon!
I actually have an article coming out on Search Engine Watch this week that lists 5 reasons why people don't see recovery on Penguin hit sites. To summarize:
1. Not a thorough enough disavow
2. Errors in your disavow file
3. Still waiting for a refresh (probably the case for you).
4. Not enough good links there to support the site naturally.
5. Other issues such as Panda or technical issues.
-
"My client is reluctant to spend money on developing links with relevance and authority until we see some evidence that the penalty has been removed."
Part of bringing a site any traffic after being penalized is developing a white hat strategy to get visitors via authoritative relative links pointing at your site.
It is like a fighter who has been knocked out. They are down and all the sudden everything changed they no longer are able to stay in contention.
Would you tell some guy who just got knocked out by Mike Tyson get back in there and fight them once he was pushed to his feet?
No you got to train and get yourself feeling better in order to get back to the same level you are at before if you can do that.
If the knockout was too hard you may have to swap out your current expectations with new ones.
How valuable is this domain to the client?
If it is not brought up to snuff there is no need to worry about whether or not will work because no one's will even try it.
Even with a new domain your client is starting at a disadvantage just because of who they are whois and numerous other methods will tell Google to a very small or very large extent exactly who they are.
Maybe they 301 redirect and it is the same deal for new domain
Maybe they start fresh realizing that without putting amazing content out there for end-users that they are just in it sit and complain it is not even worth thinking about unless they are going to do it.
You need to explain to your client that your site is equivalent to worse then a new domain right now most likely or depending on your circumstances possibly better I do not know.
But put yourself in either place you start a site with a new domain would you do?
You get penalized by Google for what occurred you have to really step it up top quality all the way.
You have to show Google that not only are you very trustworthy now and you are essentially sorry that you did what you did but that you are actually a site that is worth something to them and to end users. With the fact that you have had this penalty on your domain means your going to have to work even harder to make up for everything you lost.
If you did a link disavowal I think you took the right measures obviously you had no choice right?
The client has to start looking at search from a different perspective not one that states you can do a couple cool things that might get you a higher ranking but one that looks at their end users and how they can actually serve the visitors to that site the best they possibly can.
That is a pretty tall order and the web is huge so there is outstanding content, including video, text photograph, infotographs I could go on your client not only needs to have a top tier website.
They need very fast load times
An easy to navigate beautiful site.
Links that are being generated by users that like what they see.
Just those three things are not inexpensive in any way.
You want to start get into technical seo it only gets more time-consuming and a lot more expensive.
I do not know the circumstances of their penalty however a new domain might be something that will get your client to actually work on the things that they need to do to make the site a quality website.
I hope that helps,
Thomas
-
The disavow tool has of course been used. Some links still appear in webmaster tools. We've also asked the webmaster of each site to kindly remove the links, which some have been kind enough and removed.
I know once a link has been "disavowed" Google adds an invisible nofollow tag to the link. Similar to your no-followed links in WMT.
My client is reluctant to spend money on developing links with relevance and authority until we see some evidence that the penalty has been removed.
It seems we've exhausted all avenues by cleaning up the website. Plus disavowing links should also be used with caution!
Having seen no recovery for such a long time - my question is, will the site every recover if it has seriously abused Google's guidelines in the past?
-
If your trying to promote a brand it's hard to start from the beginning. Im wmt I'm sure you know about "links to your site" tab, go in there and see who is linking to you, if it looks spammy, disavow or email them to take the link off.
-
you can create quality links not quantity and create new fresh content , use Google disavow tool.
-
Have you just gotten rid of all the duplicate content, poor backlinks, etc? Or have you done that and also added quality content and obtained quality links?
- Ruben
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
-
My indexed site URL removed from google search without get any message or Manual Actions???
On Agust 2 or 3.. I'm not sure about the exact date...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | newwaves
The main URL of my website https://new-waves.net/ had been completely removed from Google search results! without getting any messages or Manual Actions on search console ?? but I'm still can find some of my site subpages in search results and on Google local maps results when I tried to check it on google
info:new-waves.net >> no results
site:new-waves.net >> only now I can see the main URL in results because I had submitted it again and again to google but it might be deleted again today or tomorrow as that happen before last few days
100% of all ranked keywords >> my site URL new-waves.net had been completely removed from all results! but I'm still can see it on maps on some results I never get any penalties to my site on Google search console. I noticed some drops on some keywords before that happens (in June and July) but it all of it was related to web design keywords for local Qatar, but all other keywords that related to SEO and digital marketing were not have any changes and been on top My site was ranked number 1 on google search results for "digital marketing qatar" and some other keywords, but the main URL had been removed from 100% of all search results. but you can still see it on the map only. I just tried to submit it again to Google and to index it through google search console tool but still not get any results, Recently, based on google console, I found some new links but I have no idea how it been added to links of my website:
essay-writing-hub.com - 9,710
tiverton-market.co.uk - 252
facianohaircare.com - 48
prothemes.biz - 44
worldone.pw - 2
slashdot.org - 1
onwebmarketing.com - 1 the problem is that all my high PR real links deleted from google console as well although it still have my site link and it could be recognized by MOZ and other sites! Can any one help to know what is the reason?? and how can I solve this issue without losing my previous ranked keywords? Can I submit a direct message to google support or customer service to know the reason or get help on this issue? Thanks & Regards0 -
How to remove this type of external link from Google
Hello, My website has been hacked few days Before, But after resolved it It is generating bad links, So i am Dis-vowing it , But as it is generating links like this,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | innovativekrishna1
http://domain.com/a></p><h1>DIXCEL HS-typeスリットディ
i am Not able to disavow it As it generating Spacing between. So my question is : Is there any Way to remove this Type of link from google???
If any body know Please Let me know, I need Do remove this As soon as possible,
please Help, Thank you0 -
Should we remove our "index" pages (alphabetical link list to all of the products on the site)?
We run an e-commerce site with a large number of product families, with each family having a number of products within it. We have a set of pages (26 - one for each letter A-Z) that are lists of links to the product family pages. We originally created these pages thinking it would aid in discoverability of these pages to search engines, of course as time has gone on, techniques like this have fallen out of favor with Google as it provides negligible value to the user. Should we consider removing these pages from the site overall? Is it possible that it could be viewed by Panda as resembling a link farm? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChrisRoberts-MTI1 -
Do industry partner links violate Google's policies?
We're in the process of The Great _Inquisition_piecing together a reconsideration request. In doing so, we reached out to an agency to filter and flag our backlinks as safe, should be no-followed, or should be removed. The problem is, they flagged several of our earned, industry partner links (like those pointing to us, HireAHelper, from 1-800-Pack-Rat and PODS for example) as either should be no-followed or should be removed. I have a hard time believing Google would penalize such a natural source of earned links, but then again, this is our second attempt at a Reconsideration Request, and I want to cover all my bases. What say you Moz community? No-follow? Remove? Leave alone?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanielH0 -
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 -
Should you include keywords in your domain name to rank well on Google Places?
Is it okay to include keywords in your domain name (as well as business name) to rank well on Google Places? In my opinion, this is very spammy and the sites using this technique will be slapped by Google sooner or later.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | thegoatman1 -
Competitor using "unatural inbound links" not penalized??!
Since Google's latest updates, I think it would be safe to say that building links is harder. But i also read that Google applies their latest guidelines retro-actively. In other words, if you have built your ilnking profile on a lot of unnatural links, with spammy anchor text, you will get noticed and penalized. In the past, I used to use SEO friendly directories and "suggest URL's" to build back links, with keyword/phrase anchor text. But I thought that this technique was frowned upon by Google these days. So, what is safe to do? Why is Google not penalizing the competitor? And bottom line what is considered to be "unnatural link building" ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20101 -
Help required as difficulty removing Google algorithmic penalty
I am not an SEO expert but I am trying to recover my company's ranking on Google. We are a UK based baby shower company. Been established since 2003. We have used SEO companies a few years ago. On September 28th 2012 our rankings in Google dropped significantly on certain landing pages, others like our baby shower gifts page has remained position 1 for UK Google searches . Bing and Yahoo were unaffected. Searches for baby shower and baby shower decorations has gone from position 1 or 2 (behind wikipedia ) to these 2 landing pages being unranked in Google. I have for the first time ever gone through our back links, tried to locate bad or low quality links, emailed where possible, and set up in webmaster tools a dissavow file ( currently not acted upon by Google). I have also amended the text in the baby shower department so it does not read as keyword stuffed. It has been two and a half months now and sales has dropped significantly and me and the staff are getting very concerned. Our site is www.showermybaby.co.uk . We have not received a manual penalty. Any suggestions or help in removing this Google penalty would be greatly appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | postagestamp0