Strategy for recovering from Penguin
-
I have a web site that has been hit hard by the penguin update. I believe that main cause our problem has been links from low quality blogs and article sites with overly optimized keyword anchor text. Some questions I have are:
-
I have noticed that we still have good ranking on long tail search terms on pages that did not have unnatural links. This leads me to believe that the penalty is URL specific, i.e. only URL with unnatural linking patterns have been penalized. Is that correct?
-
Are URLs that have been penalized permanently tainted to the point that it is not worth adding content to them and continuing to get quality links to them?
-
Should new contact go on new pages that have no history thus no penalty, or is the age of a previously highly ranked page still of great benefit in ranking?
-
Is it likely that the penalty will go away over time if there are no more unnatural links coming in?
-
-
Depends on what type of sites those "not so great sites" are. If they are viewed as spammy, no they won't help.
-
Would non-optimized links from not so great sites be of any help, or do these need to be quality links?
-
I would start by adding links that are not optimized with keywords to those URL's that you feel are penalized. Level up the score for natural vs unnatural links. I wouldn't drop the url's because you probably have some good links out there pointing to those pages. It'll take some work, but you can recover from what I've been reading.
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
-
Recover google INdexing issue after fixing malware attack.
Dear My Niche site attacked by malware on 1 st march 2018. Hacker inject a php file on my blogpage. Injected link like: mydomain.com/blog/dmy4xa.php? Then I scan My site by wordfence. Identifying all malware code.Then manually clean whole site with database. My site is completely free from malware. and remove all malware link from webmaster tools. Even Block my blog page by robots.txt . But new malware link index every week. So i need to remove those link every week. So this issue I decided to rebuild my site. Finally I rebuild my site another server. Then I flash my current server and migrate my site from those server on 10th january 2019 . I wait 1 month to deindex malware link. But new link are indexing every week. I discourage site for over 1 week and even delete site from google webmaster tools with all properties as well as verification file from server. Over 1 week , Link are showing. I feel boar to delete malware link every week. I need permanent solution. Please give me a perfect solution for this malware link index. Google index about 100 url .After that I clean my site with some tools. My site was free from malware. But Ne
Technical SEO | | Gfound1230 -
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
Are subdomains a good seo strategy for a multistore e-commerce?
Hi there I'm wondering what is the best strategy to work with multi-stores on magento: to use or not to use subdomains? Suppose we have the www.website.com and we configure it to use multistore. The url base will not have the store id on it so it will not be like www.website.com/store1 and www.website.com/store2. It will simply rely on the user session so if we have two categories for each store it will acces using: www.website.com/category1 (for store 1) www.website.com/category2 (for store 2) The homepage will allways be set on www.website.com so we should have a single page for several "home pages" (depending on the user session / store he is accessing). I guess this is not a good option if we want to rank for different keywords (for each store). So I was wondering if it is a good solution to set: store1.website.com store2.website.com This way we have 2 "home pages" each one able to rank. Does it make sense? Is it good or bad for seo? Another option I was considering was: www.website.com (for store 1) store2.website.com (for store 2) store3.website.com (for store 3) www.website.com/blog (for blog) Can this work? Good or bad for seo? best regards
Technical SEO | | qgairsoft0 -
Looking for sites hit by Penguin for research
I'm doing some link profile analysis and need examples of sites hit by Penguin (not Panda). If you have a site that was hit and are willing to share, please PM me: Your site homepage URL Main keyword(s) you lost rankings for (preferably keywords your homepage was ranked for but no longer is) I will keep your information strictly confidential and will not share it. (I will publish the results of my findings, but will not mention any of the sites used for research.) Thanks.
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
My organic search results are down 16% since the Penguin update 4/24
Penguin has affected my search results down 16% When I look at my SEOmoz scan the only problem I see is "too many on page links" The problem is that my blog for each month is considered one page-eg august 2007 I wrote many blogs-the total on page links was 106-but that included all the blogs that were written in a month. The other problem area is duplicate content. I thought Penguin was after "link farming" which I do not do. Any advice how I can correct this? Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Business Site Hit Hard from The Penguin Update
Over the last week or so I have been swimming through all the forum posts regarding the latest google penguin update and I am still unclear as to why my site was hit so hard. I have lost 90% of my traffic and my target keywords have disappeared. Maybe I am missing something hear but if you could have a look at my site in question here : http://www.websitetemplatedesign.com/ Is there something that just stands out that I have missed as to why this site would have been hit so hard? Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmccommas1 -
Secondary Menu - nofollow or other strategy?
We have a "secondary main menu" on a site that displays some popular pages of the site. They are in the main navigation of the site as subpages but we wanted to highlight them on every page of the site through this secondary menu. so this secondary menu is the same on every page of the site. So we have the main menu on the top of the site, subpages on the left and this secondary menu below the subpages (in a blue box so they stand out). Is this secondary menu confusing for the structure of the site or negative at all (in relation to robots, not UX)? Should we nofollow these links in the secondary menu? thanks for replies!
Technical SEO | | Motava0