My Penguin Recovery Attempt
-
So I have decided today to attempt to beat the odds and try and do a full recovery from the Penguin Update. I am going to create a Google Doc in which I will make public and link at the end of this post for all of you to see.
I am going to meticulously go through a massive back link audit of my site and try to see if I can recover from my loss of some of my main keywords back from April 24th.
I want to clarify that I DID NOT get effected from Penguin 2.0, but I did from 1.0 and have not recovered since. I have to be honest I feel like I have done everything up to now, but I realized I needed to make this a very long journey into a massive audit into my back link profile which contains thousands of back links which I have been honestly avoiding.
I just want to see if I put the work, I will see the results and maybe it can help others
I will document everything I do in detail as well as dates when I do them. I'm sure there will be plenty of coffee fueled nights of Jibber-Jabber...and I apologize for that ahead of time. I hope at the end there is light and can shed some on others.
I am starting with a blank canvas, so keep checking back on my progress. I generally work at night so you will see most changes in the morning.
Here is the link to my Doc - http://bit.ly/11dUkzc
Wish Me Luck
-
I see what you are saying, I was referring to total links. Not domains
-
I think what Marie is saying is that there is a disparity here somewhere. You say you have thousands of natural links, yet you only are showing 125 referring domains... Same thing on OSE *only 79 referring listed there but that's normal for ahrefs to have a more complete vision. Still not a ton of links.. I'm wondering if you would see improvement just by building some great content and gaining new relevant links..
-
I am not competing against those sites, and prior to Penguin I was ranking almost 1st page on some keywords that I lost.
My goal here is to recover the ranking on particular keywords I had that I lost from Penguin 1.0
-
I might be missing something, but according to ahrefs you have followed links from 125 domains. If the majority of those are spam links then there are likely not a lot of good quality links. I would think that to compete against big brand names like Hasbro and Merriam-Webster it is going to take a lot more than that to rank.
-
I do. I have screenshots and stuff already. I will post them soon.
-
Do you know where you were ranking before you started building the spammy links?
-
I have many natural earned links, thousands of them actually.
But I do have spammy rich anchor text links as well that I created years ago.
My goal is to analyze every link I have manually by visiting each one of them. I am going to create a checklist tonight of what process I will determine to detect spam. I do code so I might make a tool for myself that can help me find things quicker.
Like the purpose of this endeavor is to see through all attempts I can come up with to get myself out of the Penguin Hold. I am so determined to do this its crazy
I am willing to spend whatever time it takes even if what I do, does nothing. Then at least I know what doesn't work and move on to the next.
-
YES I am wondering this too. I'd kind of like to see him do it without natural links (or somebody) to test this theory. I hope it's true. It would just mean that we can focus entirely on proper content and link building and forget about poison links altogether!
Since Penguin 2.0 is an overhaul though (right?) it should technically overwrite whatever damage was done from 1.0... by theory? So my next question would be, OP - Did you see any changes at all last night? even bumped up or down a couple spots for targeted keywords?
-
I am trying to decide whether Penguin is really penalizing links or whether it just devalues all of the self made links it can detect. I have a question. For your site, do you have many naturally earned links? If not, removing backlinks may not do anything.
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
-
Do you see sites with unfixable Penguin penalties?
Hello, We have a site with 2 Penguin update penalties (drops in traffic) and one quality penalty (another drop in traffic) all years ago, both just drops in rankings and not messages in Google Console. Now that Penguin is hard coded, do you find that some sites never recover even with a beautiful disavow and cleanup? We've added content and still have some quality errors, though I thought they were minor. This client used to have doorway sites and paid links, but now is squeaky clean with a disavow done a month ago though most of the cleanup was done by deletion of the doorways and paid links 9 months ago. Is this a quality problem or is our site permanently gone? Let me know what information you need. Looking for people with a lot of experience with other sites and Penguin. Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW2 -
Anyone seem anything from penguin yet?
I know its early days and even the wonderful Dr Pete said it will take a few days to notice anything, but has anyone seen anything. I've not seen any rise in traffic yet, but none of my ranking tracking tools have ran yet. Anyone seen anything, are you expecting to see any?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
Penguin: Is there a "safe threshold" for commercial links?
Hello everyone, Here I am with a question about Penguin. I am asking to all Penguin experts on these forums to help me understand if there is a "safe" threshold of unnatural links under which we can have peace of mind. I really have no idea about that, I am not an expert on Penguin nor an expert of unnatural back link profiles. I have a website with about 84% natural links and 16% affiliate/commercial links. Should I be concerned about possibly being penalized by an upcoming Penguin update? So far, I have never been hit by any previous Penguin released, but... just in case, you experts, do you know what's the "threshold" of unnatural links that shouldn't be exceeded? Or, in your experience, what's the classic threshold over which Google can penalize a website for unnatural back link profile? Thank you in advance to anyone helping me on this research!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fablau0 -
Link profile heavy with press release syndication links caused drop at Penguin 2.0
I'm wrestling with something that I'm hoping members of the community can provide input on.... I've working with an enterprise level client that is in the business of data capture and distribution. I've diagnosed a clear drop of traffic on May 22nd, i.e a loss of search visibility post Penguin 2.0. Their link profile is big! Discussions with internal stakeholders who have been with the company 10's of years confirm that no "link building" service providers have ever been hired and no over-zealous employee is ever likely to have tried to "do" link building internally. They are just one of those lucky companies that by their nature publish information that people want to link to and share. As a first port of call I've grouped links by anchor text and can see groups of hundreds of matching anchors based on their brand URL and specific page titles. The matching anchors have resulted from big take up of interesting data that they have marketed via press releases. NOT for link purposes. My question is this.... Does the community think or have evidence (or can point me toward any case studies) that show that Press release syndication alone could result in: a) a penguin penalty or...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | QubaSEO
b) a devaluing of press release type links during Penguin 2.0 that could have resulted in a loss of search visibility and give the impression of a penalty Your thoughts are much appreciated!0 -
Preparing for Penguin: Delete or Change to Branding 25 small blogs, anchor text
Hello, This site has 80 root domains pointing to the domain, call it site X. 25 of them are tiny blogs the owner put up himself. The blogs consist only of 4 posts or so, where each post has a 2 keyword anchor text links to each one of his 4 sites. One link in each post goes to the home page and one goes to an internal page. Let's concern ourselves with cleaning up the anchor text profile of site X. All blogs are on private registration. Half of the blog domain names are furniture related and furniture is not relevant to this niche. But 3/4 to 3/5 of the content of each blog (2 paragraphs per post and 4 posts) is relevant. My concern is that even though the anchor text is varied and there's only 2 links going out to site X per blog, none of it is branded and so I'm concerned about Penguin type updates. Should we change these to branded or delete them? We're working on content promotion for backlinks in case we have to delete these blogs, but it's a small budget. What should we do? '
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
What to do about "Penguin" penalties?
What are your suggestions about moving forward with sites hit by the "Penguin" penalties? Wait it out and see if the penalty goes away Try to remove spammy backlinks and resubmit (is this worth the time and effort) Build quality backlinks to offset (will this even work if they have thousands of spammy links) Blog more (I think this is probably a no brainer) Scrap the site and start from scratch (This is last resort and don't want to do this if at all possible) Or any other ideas are greatly appreciated
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin0 -
Partner Site Hit with Penguin - Links hurt me
I work for a network of international websites, the site I work on is for Canada. Our partners in Australia were hit by penguin hard because they hired a black hat SEO guy and didn't know. He was creating profiles on highly authoritative sites and keyword stuffing them. Now, they've completely dropped off the SERP. This is where the issue occurs, because we are all international partners we are all linked together on the header of every page so visitors can choose their country. Now, because they were hit hard and we have reciprocal links (not for rankings but for usability) will we be affected? It seems like we have, but I just want some opinions out there. Also, should we go ahead and stop linking our sites between countries to avoid this mess?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Penguin Update Seems To Benefit Wikipedia Etc
I was updating product info on my site which was apparently hammered by Penguin. As I was updating I was "Googling" the products. I noticed that every single product I carry, Wikipedia held the #1 position in search results. Anyone else noticing this? I previously held the number 1 position on 2 of my products but I was knocked down to 60+...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chronicle0