Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website?

[S.Adrian]

Does anybody know about a Penguin recovery for a small business website and the methodology they used? I have a PR 5 website that lost more than 50% of the traffic in Google. I removed some of the wide site links at the best of my ability but I see little or no results so far.

[ShaMenz]

hmmm...I went looking on your profile to see if you had listed a URL and having run your domain through Open Site Explorer, I can see that it is very likely that the bulk of your problems are coming from your site's external link profile.

Here are a few more blog posts that might help you to get a clear picture of things:

Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo by Dr Pete Meyers.

Anchor Text Distribution: Avoiding Over Optimization by Geoff Kenyon.

Bad Backlink Checking by Richard Baxter

and for something a little less intense, but that can help immensely if you are trying to get a picture of your own situation, Link Removal Flowchart by Bob Meinke.

Hope that helps,

Sha

P.S. The Google Algorithm Change History can also be very useful in checking whether changes in site traffic, rankings etc coincide with changes at Google.

[avassa]

Hi Sorin,

If your site tanked on 25th-26th April, then it is safe to presume that your site was indeed hit by the Penguin update. There was a smaller Panda update that happened on 18th April as well. If you have access to Google Analytics or rank trackers, you should be able to tell by looking at the dates whether it was Panda or Penguin.

Coming to the issue of your small website, I would agree with Sha. It would be most appropriate if you can disclose the affected URL on the forum for real helpful suggestions.

Penguin penalized everything that was on the 'over' side. It punished sites with over-optimization at each level. Be it links (internal and external both) or the covert keyword stuffing across web pages. Penguin's impact could be felt more extensively because it affected almost everything that an SEO would have done to boost site's rankings.

I guess, if you are really looking for non-generalized approach towards helping your cause, then website's url is much needed.

Best Regards,

Rajesh Dhawan

[ShaMenz]

Hi Sorin,

There are a couple of very comprehensive blog posts that will give you some very good information on identifying and removing problem links. Both talk about issues and successes.

The first of these is Identifying Link Penalties in 2012 by Ryan Kent.

Ryan also provided some very detailed information in this Q&A thread.

The second post that provides real detail on a recovery is How W.P.M.U. Recovered from the Penguin Update by Ross Hudgens. As you will see from reading all of these, recovery will be heavily influenced by the actual elements that have contributed to the problem.

The most critical part of a recovery is in accurately identifying the issues that are contributing to the problem...one big thing to remember is that Penguin came accompanied by another Panda. I have seen instances of people making the assumption that they were hit by Penguin, when in fact Panda finally caught up with them. This is not to say that your problem is not from Penguin, but to emphasize that you need to make an informed analysis and be sure of the real issues before going down a path.

If you are unsure where to start, then you could post the site URL and those here can take a look and give you their thoughts.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[shiftins]

If it was panda its algorithmic, wait till Google re-crawls your site. Also keep in mind if you are removing links that you will need to not only remove them but replace them to regain rankings.