Penguin recovery - Any suggestions?
-
Hey Guys.
To be honest i havent heard about any case of penguin recovery yet except from the famous WMPU revocery (if u ask me it dosent count really)
Any way I own a few sites.. that got hit by Penguin. I did remove 90% of the "suspected as bad links" and apply to google reconsideration. in return i got an answer after a few days from google saying :"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.... and so on"
So what they saying is that the engine still think that your links are spammy..
what should i do?? i truy removed most of the links but homepage isnt really showing any progress.. he is just no where..
Idaes? Case Studies?
-
I had a site hit by penguin and since recovered it. Once the links that were causing the problem were removed it took about a week to come back. I will have to look at the dates... I think my site was fine on the 1st up date then got hit on the refresh. Not sure why it came back without another refresh.... Maybe that is not how it works. I will see if I still have the data in GA. I have since sold the site.
**I found the GA. An image is attached. I did not receive any type of message in webmaster tools.
-
Let's wait then.
Thanks All!
-
So far there has only been one refresh of Penguin and that was on May 25, just one month after the initial Penguin rollout. At that point most people had no clue what Penguin was about. Since then, from looking at sites that have been hit we can now see that backlink anchor text abuse is a huge factor. But, we haven't seen any case studies because there has not been another refresh yet.
-
PArticularly if its the homepage, you really need to check the backlinks and the anchor thresholds. Although there may be no case studies, we have successfully recovered from both Penguin related drops and unnatural link penalties. The homepage is usually the target because the home page usually has the most (spammy) links.
-
Hey And thanks for the quick replays..
well Im sure its a penguin hit since the date of the drop, and to be honest i deserve it
Well i will wait patiently to the 1.2 update.. i hope thats the case.
Dont you think its weird that there are no case studies ?
-
Marie is exactly correct - the unnatural links penalty and Penguin are two separate entities.
The best way to combat a penguin related traffic drop is to use your SEOMoz tools to mine your backlinks and then sort by anchor. Traditionally link builders would buy a majority of their links with the same anchor text (or close variations). Website that have a majority of their links as an anchor can get hit by Penguin (there are some instances where this isnt the case when brand and exact anchor domains are concerned, but generally this is the case).
If your links were natural, Google would see links of all types in your profile including "click here" and "www.url.com" etc. You should try and decrease your keyword link anchor threshold to below 30% by either getting rid of spammy keyword anchor links, or building more generic anchor ones.
-
The problem here is that you are confusing Penguin and Unnatural Links Warnings. The Unnatural Links warnings are manual. (Many believe that they originate from someone filing a spam report on your site.) When you have a manual warning you can clean things up and then file a reconsideration request.
However, Penguin is algorithmic, not manual, so a reconsideration request will not help at all. The general belief is that once we get another Penguin refresh, if you have cleaned up your site enough then you can recover.
One problem, however, is that in removing 90% of a site's links, you could also be removing a lot of link equity. So, you may not end up ranking well even after a refresh. Of course, if you have good, natural links on top of the poor ones then you should be able to recover.
Hopefully a refresh will happen soon...we've been waiting long enough!
-
When you say you got hit would you mind confirming if you received an actual error message in your Google Webmaster Tools account informing you that they had detected unnatural links and you had to request a reconsideration?
The only reason I ask is I was just wondering if it's possible that Google aren't penalising you in the strictest sense of the word but rather have just devalued a number of links pointing to you. This isn’t a penalty as such but could result in a drop in your rankings due to Google no longer paying attention to the trashy links that it used to like. In this situation requesting a reconsideration wouldn't achieve anything.
I’m only an ‘aspirant’ so take anything I say with a pinch of salt – This is just my two cents.
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
-
Website hit by something, but not sure if penguin or panda?
Hi my site was doing ok, last week, humming along and increase in traffic. We felt that all the work removing bad links had worked. then all of a sudden, bang traffic dropped and is still dropping day by day. The strange thing as well is all the social media, bing and yahoo traffic has also dried up! Has anyone else had something smiler?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Penguin Apply To Internal Linking?
Is Penguin focused primarily on backlinks or does it also assess internal linking/anchor text? We've lost about 3,000 visitors a month since the rolling updates were implemented. I'm always careful not to over-react to algo updates but enough time has passed that I think the dust has settled. I try to stay white in all I do but I think if I've over-done anything its the internal linking related products/categories with exact match. My backlink profile also has an over-abundance of affiliate links but that's kind of out of my hands isn't it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Dealing with Penguin: Changing URL instead of removing links
I have some links pointing to categories from article directories, web directories, and a few blogs. We are talking about 20-30 links in total. They are less than 5% of the links to my site (counting unique domains). I either haven't been able to make contact with webmasters, or they are asking money to remove the links. If I simply rename the URL (for example changing mysite.com/t-shirt.html to mysite.com/tshirts.html), will that resolve any penguin issues? The link will forward to the homepage since that page no longer exists. I really want to avoid using the disavow tool if possible. I appreciate the feedback. If you have actually done this, please share your experience.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Penguin Penalty On A Duplicate url
Hi I have noticed a distinct drop in traffic to a page on my web site which occurred around April of last year. Doing some analysis of links pointing to this page, I found that most were sitewide and exact match commercial anchor text. I think the obvious conclusion from this is I got slapped by Penguin although I didn't receive a warning in Webmaster Tools. The page in question was ranking highly for our targeted terms and the url was structured like this: companyname.com/category/index.php The same page is still ranking for some of those terms, but it is the duplicate url: companyname.com/category/ The sitewide problem is associated with links going to the index.php page. There aren't too many links pointing to the non index.php page. My question is this - if we were to 301 redirect index.php to the non php page, would this be detrimental to the rankings we are getting today? ie would we simply redirect the penguin effect to the non php page? If anybody has come across a similar problem or has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sicseo0 -
Home page url 301 redirect suggestion
Hello, In our site we have already done 301 redirect from http:// to http://www. However, the home page links are still coming in 2 ways http://www.mycarhelpline.com/ http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=search&Itemid=2 Need suggestion We have already use rel canonical is another 301 redirect to be used for maintaining the home page pr from seo point of view. Does google still takes both urls as separate url and finds duplicate content
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Directories - Bad or Good for Link Building (Discussion on Penguin)
Hello, I would like to hear everybodies opinion on directories for link building now that penguin is out. Here's a good background post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger Do you think their out? How do you still use them? Which ones do you stick to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Anybody else seeing Penguin corrections?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
Over the past few days, I have noticed that a few of my pages that were hit by the Google Penguin update come back from the dead and return to the #1 spot for the main keywords. I still don't see any change for secondary keywords I used to rank for, but hey at least there is something. Has anybody else noticed this? NOTE: I did not make any changes to my pages. I had never done any black-hat (just greyish) so I took the advice of many and just waited.1 -
Does 301 redirect to a new domain removes penguin penality
Hi, One of my client has shady link profile and has hit by penguin update. I have confirmed the penalty using Google hack. Now, seeing his link profile, most of his links comes from blog comments which are from unmoderated blogs, and there is no way, we cant remove those comments. But without removing them, we cant get rid of the Google's penguin penality. So, i am planning on 301 redirecting to a new domain. But my question is, will the penality transfers, if i 301 to a new domain? What iff, if someone buys an old domain hit by a penguin update? Please clarify me, or if there are any alternatives to get rid of penguin update, please help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess0