Penalized by Penguin 2.0
-
I believe our site has been penalizes by Penguin 2.0. Our impressions in Google Webmaster are down and our traffic in Google Analytics also took a hit. Both of these occurences took place right when Penguin 2.0 was unleashed.
What are the steps I need to take to regain my ranking? Is disallowing all the links I think maybe spammy the first thing to do?
-
Its all about relevancy IMO. The closer you can get to the niche with that particular page the better. Remember the entire site does not necessarily need to be related to your niche (of course it does help if it is) as much as the individual pages do. The reason I say that is I have a hard time finding full site related niches who are not my competitors. Of course I am not going to be able to get a link on their sites, so I have to find those 1 pagers (usually news, blog and such) that happen to be perfect for my niche.
So if you are going to place that link on a particular page, try and make sure the relevancy is a perfect match (The higher the relevancy, the higher the impact). I have learned that when links are placed at the end of content they tend to not have as much of an impact (especially in forums, blog comments, etc...) the only reason I say this about the end of content is because I no longer will place links at the end of anything, only in the middle of text. Of course make sure that its relevant and helpful to the readers and make sense. You don't want to place links just to place them.
Also remember that Google still loves anchor text (yes even post penguin :)), but you really have to evaluate how you are placing that text in the link. Try and take yourself out of the SEO mode (I know I have too) and really think how you would link to that page and with what anchor text. Be as natural as possible when writing and make sure it makes sense. I tend to write my content first then I pick the most relevant text to highlight and place my links there.
Many times people make the mistake of thinking about the link before the content. Write your content whether its a blog comment, forum post or whatever and make sure the comments relates to the question. Then after you have answered the question ask yourself if a link is really necessary. If not, then don't place a link. Which I know is hard to do sometimes, but honestly that's what spam is all about. If anything most profiles have the ability to place a link to your homepage to them. Just make sure that's in place and leave well enough as it is.
I personally don't place percentages to my anchor text to my brand name. I just write the content and look at the best place to place my link and do that. Naturally it tends to be my brand term, but sometimes it's text like
- this article
- about this site
- check this link out
- freakin awesome tool
Yes even misspelled words, because naturally I will write them like that and I know that Google understands that too.
If I learned anything its that because of the amount of SEO I know I tend to gravitate to keywords and subconsciously tend to use them too much OR it causes me to write content that can be somewhat un-natural. I don't mean to do, but it just seems to happen. What I started doing was asking friends of mine to write my content for me. I tell them the subject of the page, verbally tell them the keyword without letting them know that's the keyword and let them write something for me. 99.9% of the time, it will be extremely natural flowing content
-
Our home page was affected, so I believe it's a little on the home page, more so on the targeted page level.
-
Wow great job! How long did that take you? What kind of quality links did you get and how did you get them? I'm a bit frustrated because I've been doing some quality links, even got two from 2 different pr7 .gov links, and still haven't recovered yet :s
-
I stuck with certain rules
- Rewrote Content
- Only added keywords to Title, Description, H1 and First paragraph (long tail)
- Added Sitemaps
- Contact Us Pages
- Increased Social Media
- Added Mailing List
- Added more quality backlinks
And the most important (that I felt) was leaving the disavowed tool alone.
I never received a manual penalty for any of my sites, I simply dropped in ranking after Penguin 1.0. Because of this obviously Google did not see anything sneaky with my back links so I most likely suffered simply a devalue of some of my back links from other sites which brought me down. So I figured I needed more quality back links to build myself back up. Took a while, but that seemed to fix it because I am ranking for keywords I have not seen since Penguin 1.0. I'm not as high as I was before.
Also I studied all my back links and the keywords used. I figured that since I ranked for those terms at one time, I tried to figure out which back links devalued and what keywords were used and tried to replicate it. If some were to spammy then I just branded them, otherwise I created new links (quality) with similar anchor text
-
What did you do?
-
Our home page was unaffected, so I believe 2.0 is targeting the page level. It is only getting pages for certain keywords we have targeted heavily in the past.
-
We did not receive a message in GWT.
-
Well I know is I did something right since 1.0 because I'm back baby!
-
Sadly, we can only speculate. I think it's reasonable to think that Penguin 1.0 may have acted sitewide, whereas Penguin 2.0 could be more targeted, but that's not so much an issue of where the links are pointing as it is of the impact of the penalty. The original Penguin did seem a bit all-or-none, in some cases. The update may be more nuanced. I think Google waited a long time for this roll-out because the collateral damage was just too high in testing. So, it's likely they found ways to make the action more targeted.
-
The only thing that kept me scratching my head was the comment Matt Cutts said about "Penguin 1.0 primarily focusing on the homepage only"
-
I just want to add that this is a difficult and even potentially dangerous process. There's no way to know exactly what Google didn't like, so it's easy to cut too deep. On the other hand, if you don't cut deep enough, Google may actually take that as a negative sign (don't just keep removing 5 links and then submitting a new disavow).
We don't know much about how Penguin 2.0 differs from 1.0, except some hearsay that it's targeting the page level now (and isn't just a sitewide action). So, I think the first thing you need to do is really pin down which keywords lost ranking and which pages those keywords target. It's possible that you've been too aggressive with links to a specific page or with anchor text using specific terms. If you see a pattern, then you can focus on just those links.
Also, keep in mind that, if the vast majority of your link profile is low quality, there may not be much left after you disavow. In other words, you may remove the bad links and still not recover. So, as Takeshi said, it's important to both address the problem and build for the future at the same time.
-
Side Note: You only need to submit a reconsideration request if you have been "manually penalized"
You will know this by getting some kind of message in GWT, if you DID NOT get any message then its the algorithm that got you and that means clean things up and Good Luck!
-
First of all, assess all your external links with a tool such as OSE or Majestic. Identify all the links coming from low quality/spammy sites, as well as the anchor text that is being used for the links. Greater than 30-40% exact anchor text links can get you penalized.
Then, go through the links and remove all the links you are able to. Use the disavow tool in webmaster tools on those you aren't able to remove. Then file a reconsideration request.
Note that because you are removing all these links, you will need to build new links to get your traffic back to the level it was previously at.
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
-
I was penalized by Google? What do you think i have to do?
Id like some help, My site had a rank fall and I think I was penalized by Penguin, I compared running a 'Full SERP Report "and I see no reason for me to be in 4th place in the SERP.The Facts: I have a higher: Page Authority, # of Root Domains Linking to the Page, Domain Authority, # of Root Domains Linking to the Domain, MozRank, MozTrust My mT/mR is 0.955 against: #1->0.983 #2->0 #3->1.023 (but my mozrank and moz trust is higher My website is: https://www.soprojetos.com.br/ this occours since Nov 2015. I have 99 external links against: #1->15 #2->0 #3->11 Link to OSE:https://mza.seotoolninja.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=www.soprojetos.com.br&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=What I think:I guess a have to Disallow some links that some crazy Real Estate Websites made to my website, but i'm afraid to do this, and id like an oppinion about why my website is not ranking first to "plantas de casas" and "projetos de casas" anymore, my competitors are not so well seen on google as me (according to moz) (sorry for my bad english i'm brazilian) Thanks in Advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aneebelo0 -
Killed by penguin 3
So with the update to penguin 3.0 last week we notice that some clients have been significantly hit by the update. How do we rectify the situation for the poor links that are on the site. We have used open site explorer and Google webmaster to try and identify which are the bad links to try and remove. Now we can spot that some inbound links are from directories that may be perceived as low value/spam, but could not be sure what is affecting the ranking. The vast majority of these links are historical prior to inheriting this client recently and so do not have any logins to remove the links (if there are logins). These appear to be placed by teams outsourced in India. We would suspect that no site owner would spend the time removing links from the site any way. How do we recover from the penguin hit. Is it just a case of trying to identify ones that we suspect could be perceived as spam and ask for these to be disavowed by Google? Do we contact all the sites to ask them to be removed and/or do we just push ahead with more engaging white hat methods of social SEO? Are we likely to recover in the short term or be permanently hit. The site is for a small business with no more than 800 monthly hits so this fall from grace off very good front page positions is going to hit our client very hard even if the sins are from a previous business. Any thoughts and suggestions PLEASE HELP
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smartcow0 -
Why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
why would my domain authority drop 2 points ?and how can i bring my domain authority back up?'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aronwp0 -
My Website Just Got Penalized
I had a website that recently got penalized. The pagerank dropped to zero on the homepage and moved to page 200 on google. I checked manual actions on my site in web mastertools and it says that no webspam is found. I am curious to find out why my website would drop. I had a a network of 5 blogs that I was linking to the site that also lost page rank but theres is N/A now. I am thinking thats where the trouble started because i did not use no follow. Question 1 My question is if I remove all the links to the other site or make them no follow will the penalty lift. I am thinking that the penalty is an automated on and not a manual one. Does any one have experience with automated penalties? Did they lift after you fixed the issues. Did you regain most of your original rankings? Question 2 What happens to all my blogs. I spent all lot of money on have posts written for it. Can any of the content be salvaged. I have over 1000 pages written on 5 different blogs. I can send you a list of the urls so you can see what I am talking about.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
Should I Do a Social Bookmarking Campaign and a Tier 2 Linking?
I don't see anything bad in manually creating links on different (about 50) social bookmarking services. Is this method labeled as White Hat? I was wondering if it would be fine to create Tier 2 linking (probably blog comments) for indexing of the social bookmarking links? Please share your thoughts on the topic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zorsto0 -
Preparing for Penguin: Remove, Disavow, or change to branded
For someone that has 80 root domains pointing to their domain and 10 of them are sitewide backlinks from 10 PR4+ sites. All paid for. All with the same main keyword anchor text Should I advise him to remove the links, dissavow the links, dissavow then remove or just change to branded anchor text for the 10 sitewide links. Another option is to just keep one link (preferrably editorial) from each site. The only reason not to pull them off right away is that the client could not sustain his business with a drop in sales. These are by far the strongest 10 root domains. Eventually, when he has enough good backlinks these are all coming off. There was a huge drop in sales for this site last fall, but it recovered almost completely by changing keyword stuffing and adding ecommerce content. Looking to keep his sales and also prepare for this years updates.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Google Penguin w/ Meta Keywords
It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed: I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization. If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so? The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot. Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings. I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account. Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Link Farms and The Relationship between 2 domain with a 301 Redirect
I have an interesting scenario: Domain A was worked on by a disreputable SEO company off shore. The owner of Domain A came to me for my assistance and evaluation on how the off shore company was doing. I concluded that he should terminate the relationship immediately. One of the bad things they did was register Domain A with a LOT of link farms. I started working on a new site that eventually we decided to go with Domain B (a better, but totally related domain name to Domain A). I added a nice new site and had my client write clean, relevant information for it. We've done all legitimate, above ground by-google's-recommendation SEO for Domain B. I have a series of 301 redirects from Domain A to Domain B. Since April 24th, organic search results have plummeted. I see many incoming links via Webmaster Tools as the massive link farms, but those link farms have Domain A in their databases, not Domain B. My question: is Domain B inheriting the link juice from Domain A insofar as the incoming links are showing up in Webmaster Tools as directly related to Domain A? Should I sever the ties with Domain A altogether? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KateZDCA1