Penguin: Recovery from Algorithm
-
Hi Mozzers,
A quick question regarding Google Penguin recovery. A domain I have was hit by Penguin and we got a message in Webmaster Tools. We went to work fixing links we thought were most harmful, documented the evidence and did a reconsideration request.
Google's reply was "No manual spam actions found".
If reconsideration requests aren't the way to go then of course I will continue to build good natural links. But if I remove more links which I consider to be harmful will I ever know if the penalty is removed? Is there a point at which the algorithm would remove the penalty and inform me?
Thanks!
-
I had same that message during my midway battle clearing a penatly. Google said that they were being "extremely granular", however, they said that we should send another reconsideration request if we had made any further process in cleaning up the links.
We all got very excited at this point, however, despite some improvement we didn't get back to where we should be (taking into account that we lost 1000s of bad links).
Rankings started to drop again so....
From this point we sent a further 3 reconsideration requests. 2 were rejected and the final one (after all spammy links were finally removed (thank you disavow tool!)) was accepted. "we have revoked the penalty on your site".
So from experience I would not stop cleaning up the site just because you received that message.
-
Hi Richard and Marie,
Thanks for the replies so far. We did the first generic warning asking for a reconsideration request then the second message saying "..for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole".
In this instance did our drop in rankings result purely from some of inbound links being excluded from then? Are these links of no worry or consequence to us as Google have essentially disavowed them from being of any value? That's certainly the conclusion I'm getting.
We did stop link building in light of these messages and that has no doubt let other sites take over and improve their rankings while ours stagnated a bit.
-
I actually have 3 fully documented cases of penguin recovery to my own sites!! I have started writing one up but it's currently 22 pages long!! (Messages from google included in that!) I plan to post a refined version of it in a couple of weeks. Hopefully it helps people out!
-
What was the message that you got in WMT? It seems odd that you would have a message and then get told that there is no penalty. However, if you got a message of unnatural links in (I think) July, there were a bunch of those that went out by mistake and then a few days later a different message came in basically saying not to worry about it.
Penalties because of a message of unnatural links in WMT are manual warnings. However, Penguin is an algorithmic change. It is believed that you can only recover from Penguin once the algorithm refreshes (although no one knows that for sure.)
The problem with Penguin recovery is that there are very few well documented cases of recovery. The last time the Penguin algorithm refreshed was October 5. At that time the disavow tool didn't exist. We are eager to see what happens once the algo refreshes again and see if sites that have disavowed their manipulative links will recover.
One thing that we do know is that you will need good, natural links in order to recover and that is hard to do!
-
Seems like you might have an algorithmic penalty instead (Google don't tell you when you have these). Have you done anything dodgy on your website?
How badly have you been hit? Could it just be other sites overtaking you?
Post the domain and I'll have a look.
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
-
Penguin hit Website - Moving to new domain
Hey! I am working on a Penguin hit Website. Still ranking for all brand keywords and blog articles are still being returned in Google SERPs, but the website is showing up for only 3 or 4 money keywords. It is clearly a penguin hit as it was ranked 1st page for all money keywords before latest update (3.0). We already did a link cleanup and disavowed all bad backlinks. Still, the recovery process could take over 2 years from previous experience, and in 2 years, the site will suffer a slow death. Solution: We own the .com version of the domain, currently being served on the .net. We bought the .com version about 6 years ago, it is clean and NOT redirected to the .net (actual site). We were thinking about moving the whole Website to the .com version to start over. However, we need to make sure Google doesn't connect the 2 sites (no pagerank flow). Of course Google will notice is the same content, but there won't be any pagerank flowing from the old site to the new one. For this, we thought about the following steps: Block Googlebot (and only googlebot) for the .net version via robots.txt. Wait until Google removes all URLs from the index. Move content to the .com version. Set a 301 redirect from .net to .com (without EVER removing the block on googlebot). Thoughts? Has anyone went over this before? Other ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
Is Tumblr being used as a social algorithm for Bing and Google?
Hi Y'all, Bing uses Pinterest as part of its image search by using pins of users...But what about Tumblr? Is Tubmlr still a good source for a ranking factor when pointing an image link to your blog? Our industry is pretty boring, so we would get a few clicks here and there a month, but nothing compared to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest...but overall is Tumblr a good backlink every time a blog is posted for search algorithms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Penguin 2.0 Recovery - Penguin Update Rerun yet or not
I have been hit by the penguin 2.0 update some five months back. I believe that I have an algorythmic penalty applied to my sites. While the work to cleanup etc has been done, there is certainly no recovery. I also notice a lack of recovery stories. In fact I think anyone affected cannot recover because a recalculation has not happened? Does anyone think that a recalculation of the penguin 2.0 penalties has happened? If so why do they think that.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jurnii0 -
Was anyone hit by BOTH the 'Phantom' update as well as Penguin 2.0?
I'm interested to know if Phantom was just a "pre-Penguin" 2.0 or if it was a completely different update. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Penguin 2.0 update, ranking dropped. Advice needed!
Hello After another penguin 2.0 update the website i've been working on dropped in rankings,some of keywords that i ranked in #1 are now on second and third page, you can see this screenshot here http://screencast.com/t/MramoXgTr 95% of my competitors were not even effected with this update at all, most of them don't even optimize their website for SEO, rather they use paid directories. First thing i did is analyzed my backing profile using OSE, to my surprise i found a lot of low quality domains pointing to my pages with a keyword in anchor text. A lot of them blog commenting and low quality article directories. Since i don't have control over these links and i cant remove them i used Disavow tool to do the job. For the past 3 months, i've been doing a lot of hight quality link building; such as
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentR
press releases once in 2 months, squidoo lens and hubpages 3 posts a week for each keyword, youtube video, in fact my youtube video still ranks in #3 for high competitive search, i was involved in social media, posting tweets every week and Facebook posts. I really hope that someone can help me here with a good advice on getting my rankings back here's my website, let me know what do you think about it. Thank You0 -
Duplicate site (disaster recovery) being crawled and creating two indexed search results
I have a primary domain, toptable.co.uk, and a disaster recovery site for this primary domain named uk-www.gtm.opentable.com. In the event of a disaster, toptable.co.uk would get CNAMEd (DNS alias) to the .gtm site. Naturally the .gtm disaster recover domian is an exact match to the toptable.co.uk domain. Unfortunately, Google has crawled the uk-www.gtm.opentable site, and it's showing up in search results. In most cases the gtm urls don't get redirected to toptable they actually appear as an entirely separate domain to the user. The strong feeling is that this duplicate content is hurting toptable.co.uk, especially as .gtm.ot is part of the .opentable.com domain which has significant authority. So we need a way of stopping Google from crawling gtm. There seem to be two potential fixes. Which is best for this case? use the robots.txt to block Google from crawling the .gtm site 2) canonicalize the the gtm urls to toptable.co.uk In general Google seems to recommend a canonical change but in this special case it seems robot.txt change could be best. Thanks in advance to the SEOmoz community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OpenTable0 -
Google Penguin Penalty
Howdy Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW
We have been battling our way the Google penguin penalty and have just received our 3 knocked back reconsideration request. I posted a find on here the other day about a simple change of page title made our site jump back up... In the meantime I've built 1 hight quality link back to our site and we have moved again from #50 to #46.Have Google ever removed a penalty without telling you?Should we ask for another reconsideration request?Thanks,
Scott0 -
Panda/Penguin & Ecommerce Sites in similar niches
Hello, We have a few online stores that are in similar niches. How do we make sure that we don't get penalized for this (Panda/Penguin) We have the sites interlinked, but our newest one is not going to be linked to the others. Also, will rewriting descriptions help if the product is on more than one site? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0