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 -
Is it a Panda/Penguin hit? Or it's just a natural ranking drop?
My traffic comes from google. This is the traffic profile. Does it look like a Panda or Penguin hit? I have a hard time determining it myself. Thanks. ne0r7kg.png
Technical SEO | | ChelseaP0 -
Website affected by Penguine / Panda
Dear All,
Technical SEO | | omverma
We have some websites. How we can check if site got affected by penguine / panda. We have observed few things since last few days like impressions are going down and keyword ranking is going down too. Any tools or any steps, to detect it will help us.
Thanks,
Om1 -
Combine two websites or keep them separate after Penguin 3 ranking drop and gain
Since 1995 we had one website which combined our wedding and portrait photography business.(website A) Three years ago we created a new website and new domain name for the portrait photography side. (website B) We did not delete the portrait information from website A. Both sites were ranking well on page one. After Penguin 3 website B is no longer ranking at all. Website A is still ranking well and one of the original portrait pages on the website A is now ranking on page one also. I am wondering what to do and considering the below options: 1. Should I go back to a combined wedding and portrait site? (and delete website B) 2. Should I create a "301" from the original portrait page on website A that is now ranking, to website B that is no longer ranking, and delete all portrait content from website A? 3. Will having a combined wedding and portrait site be harder to rank as they are competing against each other, or will they help each other rank? Any comments or advice greatly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | annaberg0 -
Do Com Junct links affect your site with Google and Penguin
We received the dreaded letter from google in reference to "unnatural or artificial links" Our site has affiliate programs through Commission Junction and Link Share and between the two programs we have over 8000 affiliates or advertisers. Our site has been very successful, but our organic search traffic is down as our rankings in the search engines have dropped. My question is do the affiliate links have an effect on our site with Panda or Penguin?
Technical SEO | | Statrak0 -
Best strategy for category filtering links eg by colour
Hi All, I hope you can help with some basic on page seo questions! I have an ecommerce site which allows users to filter/restrict the view of a category by one or more colours. This is done by appending a querystring value to the url ie to view blue, green and purple widgets the link might be: www.example.com/my-widgets-category/?colors=123,92,64 On each category page is a group of coloured boxes with links to filter by that colour, (only if there are available coloured widgets in that category). Each category has rel=canonical set to be the appropriate unfiltered category url ie: www.example.com/my-widgets-category/ I used to have these colour filter links all nofollowed- but am not sure that this is a good idea. So my questions are: 1/ what are the implications of these colour links that can generate a lot of different urls (as you can keep on adding colours to the filter) and how can i enure that i am not shooting myself in the foot- my customers love it! 2/ I also have page=1 etc appended for paging through results- the canonical url is set in all instnaces to be the plain category page as above- do i need to add the rel=prev and re=next? 3/ all of these links can really bump up my total page link count- at the moment i have colour filtering boxes in my main menu drop downs so that users can filter all the products that exists in all of the nested child categories of top level categories by colour. Should i remove these to reduce my total link count, nofollow them or leave as is? Its a great site feature for users- i just don't want to be shooting myself in the foot unecessarily. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | blessig0 -
Very Weird Type of Penguin Penalization
One of my client's sites has a bunch of bad links from blog networks with exact-match anchor text. Since Penguin, they have been completely removed from Google for that keyword. But here's the weird part: It's only the homepage that has been removed, and only for that keyword. If I put other keywords into Google, our homepage comes up. So the site hasn't been banned, and that page hasn't even been banned because it still comes up with all of our other keywords. It's only when you put in the keyword that has all the anchor text that the homepage doesn't come up anywhere. (I went all the way to the end). Has this happened to anyone else, and does it warrant a re-inclusion request since the site and even that page haven't technically been banned?
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0