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.
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
-
Has there been an algorithm change in the last week?
Hi guys, Rankings for almost half of our targeted keywords have gone down this week vs. last week. I have checked a couple of rank trackers and all are reporting some serious movement in Google's algorithms during this period. Does anyone have any further information on this that can help me restore our rankings? I haven't read anything in regards to any 'major' pending updates. Many thanks in advance, Jack
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jack_Jahan0 -
Google Penguin 2.1 Penalty - Recoverable?
Hello, I have a client that was hit very bad by the Google Penguin 2.1 update. He mentioned he did an intensive link analysis and removed all the bad links; however there were a lot of them (around 6000). His domain has a decent sized domain authority of 30/100. I'm wondering if it's worth it to try and save his domain, or start fresh from a new one. Due to the high number of links I'm not 100% confident that all the bad links were taken care of, and I've heard that even if you remove the links Google won't lift the penalties. What would you do...get a new domain, or risk the next couple months trying to save the existing one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reidsteven751 -
How about a discussion on Penguin 2.0?
Penguin 2.0 was officially released today. I'm sure we've all seen Matt's video. http://searchengineland.com/penguin-4-with-penguin-2-0-generation-spam-fighting-is-now-live-160544 Ideas for building sharable, linkable content? New strategies? What to avoid, what not to do, etc? Let's get a discussion going!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jhinchcliffe1 -
Algorithmic penalty perhaps but what is it?
I've discovered that when google crawled my home page my ranking for all keywords dropped. I've submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I wasn't breaking the rules. The response was that no manual penalty had been applied to my site. Therefore it must be an on site algorithim penalty? I thought it could be duplicate content as I have many posts that are in multiple categories so maybe that was it. Since then I've made efforts to ensure the posts in the categories are varied. I also thought it might be too many on page links so I removed categories that weren't needed as I have categories in my navigation and sidebar. So far though no improvement. I wonder if anyone here can take a look at the site and offer any suggestions as to what might be causing this algorithmic penalty? The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content!) I'm really struggling to figure this out so any help much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Best strategy for "product blocks" linking to sister site? Penguin Penalty?
Here is the scenario -- we own several different tennis based websites and want to be able to maximize traffic between them. Ideally we would have them ALL in 1 site/domain but 2 of the 3 are a partnership which we own 50% of and why are they are off as a separate domain. Big question is how do we link the "products" from the 2 different websites without looking spammy? Here is the breakdown of sites: Site1: Tennis Retail website --> about 1200 tennis products Site2: Tennis team and league management site --> about 60k unique visitors/month Site3: Tennis coaching tip website --> about 10k unique visitors/month The interesting thing was right after we launched the retail store website (site1), google was cranking up and sending upwards of 25k search impressions/day within the first 45 days. Orders kept trickling in and doing well overall for first launching. Interesting thing was Google "impressions" peaked at about 60 days post launch and then started trickling down farther and farther and now at about 3k-5k impressions/day. Many keywords phrases were originally on page 1 (position 6-10) and now on page 3-8 instead. Next step was to start putting "product links" (3 products per page) on site2 and site3 -- about 10k pages in total with about 6 links per page off to the product page (1 per product and 1 per category). We actually divided up about 100 different products to be displayed so this would mean about 2k links per product depending on the page. FYI, those original 10k pages from site2 and site3 already rank very well in Google and have been indexed for the past 2+ years in there. Most popular word on the sites is Tennis so very related. Our rationale was "all the websites are tennis related" and figured that the links on the latest and greatest products would be good for our audience. Pre-Penguin, we also figured this strategy would also help us rank for these products as well for when users are searching on them. We are thinking through since traffic and gone down and down and down from the peak of 45 days ago, that Penguin doesn't like all these links -- so what to do now? How to fix it and make the Penguin happy? Here are a couple of my thoughts on fixing it: 1. Remove the "category link" in our "product grouping" which would cut down the link by 1/3rd. 2. Place a "nofollow" on all the links for the other "product links". This would allow us to get the "user clicks" from these while the user is on that page. 3. On our homepage (site2 & site3), place 3 core products that change frequently (weekly) and showcase the latest and greatest products/deals. Thought is to NOT use the "nofollow" on these links since it is the homepage and only about 5 links overall. Heck part of me debated on taking our top 1000 pages (from the 10k page) and put the links ONLY on those and distribute about 500 products on them so this would mean only 2 links per product -- it would mean though about 4k links going there. Still thinking #2 above could be better? Any other thoughts would be great! Thanks, Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jab10000 -
Penguin or paid link penalty, or both?
Hello, I have a site, macpokeronline.com, that has seen dramatic decrease in visitors in the last few months, it has went down from 800 per day to 200 per day. It is a pretty complex situation. The site owner purchased paid links from reputable mac sites for years (they were more of followed advertisements, but were only there for SEO Purposes), now that i'm going through the link profligate ins OSE, I can see that a majority of their links come from these sites. There is also a branding issue, there are almost 15,000 links with the anchor text of "macpokeronline.com" These are obviously branded links, I don't know the best way to deal with them (though the majority are coming from the paid link sites) We have just sent the request in to remove the paid links from the sites, and i'm guessing since he is paying over $1000 a month for the links, they will be removed quickly. The site has been receiving significantly less traffic since penguin (apr 24-25) We received a message on July 19th which was the generic unnatural link warning, saying that once we remove links make a reconsideration request. Then on July 23rd, we received another message that says they are taking a "very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole" which I have never seen before. This damage was done before I was hired by this client, I just want to get his traffic back up so I can help him even further, I want to know more about the steps I should take. 1. I will definitely remove the paid ads What else should I do, thanks Zach
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BestOdds0 -
Google Penguin Winners and Losers?
Hi All, Just wondering out of the SEOmoz community who has come out on top after Penguin and who has been hit and why. Personally my site has come out on top. I started workig on the site back in December and NOTHING had been done, no link development, no onpage, nothing, a virginal website. The site was chock-a-block with issues both technically and in content. After 4 months of hard work, we have climbed from 100+ to top ten on most of our phrases and post Penguin we have climbed even higher as some of our competitors were dragged down into the murky depths. So I think thats a win (for now). My focus has been on Guest posting, social outreach, reviews and getting my on page right (still a ways to go, but our CMS is clunky to say the least). A little humour attached 😉 (Why has no one yet stuck Matt Cutts head on a Penguin?) Are you a Penguin Winner or have you experienced the wrath of the penguin. keep-calm-and-deoptimise.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aran_Smithson0