Has Anyone Recovered From Penguin?

[stgeorge]

Hi All

With all these changes happening, the BIG question is still the same. Has anyone actually recovered from Penguin.

We removed thousands upon thousands of links from some sites that were hit, to a point that they have less than 100 links left in total.

Yet no recovery and any of our sites.

And after reading tons of comments on so many websites, I am still to hear of someone recovering from Penguin.

I will refrain from swearing :)

Please if anyone has recovered I'm sure everyone would love to hear, else it means the last 5 months have been a waste and we all should have just started new websites.

[vrdci]

Hello;

Just a little feedback on a fast penguin removal with one of our french customer :

The timeline :
july 23 : Google warning about artificial/unnatural inbound links
september 1 : We begun to fight for bad backlinks removal
september 28 : reinclusion request
october 8 : Google response without noticing that there are mores link to remove.
october 12 : Our clients regain 20 position on its biggest keyword

Thank you.
Antoine Mussard.

[edited by: tedster at 2:47 pm (utc) on Oct 16, 2012]
[edit reason] removed keywords and personal links [/edit]

[Jez123]

@ Antoine Mussard. Thnaks for that info. I wonder how and why the manual penalty is different from the non manual penalty. Perhaps the manual penalty (where you get The Message) is for less severe (in google's eyes) cases.

[Jez123]

The more I think about this - and given the amount of reprieves I think that it's a flat out penalty. For how long I don't know. Maybe 6 months, maybe 1 year. Perhaps it' varies according to the "crime". Maybe it's never lifted but given the amount of recoveries I think that must be the case.

I think the sites are penalised and the links that google dislikes are devalued, the penalty is run and the site is released and will rank on what links it has left after that (if it's ever let out that is). Whether it matters if the links are removed or not I don't know.

[vrdci]

In fact, it was not a manual penalty

It was a manual noticing in GWT of a previous "supposed" penalty.

Thank you.
AntoineMussard

[edited by: vrdci at 12:57 pm (utc) on Oct 16, 2012]

[Jez123]

If it was not a manual penalty the reinclusion would have stated that there was no penalty AFAIK

[crobb305]

maybe Penguin just makes your site more susceptible to Panda?

I've been thinking this same thing lately. After the initial Penguin on April 24, the hit my site took was moderate. My rankings really tanked after Panda hit 3 days later. I didn't realize exactly how much of my traffic loss coincided more with Panda than with Penguin, until I really started looking at the traffic logs (in fact, I didn't know there was a Panda that week -April 27-, until I read it on a timeline somewhere).

We had a Penguin refresh last week, but some may have to wait until the next Panda to see if rankings can be restored.

I have a feeling that Penguin computes something along the lines of a "SpamRank", that could really increase your site's susceptibility to Panda et al.

[edited by: crobb305 at 12:41 pm (utc) on Oct 16, 2012]

[Jez123]

Hmm - that's an interesting though crobb. When someone looked at my site he thought it was more susceptible to Panda than to Penguin as some pages are image heavy and text light (well, they were). So perhaps you are right. Penguin triggered Panda or maybe, (take it a step further) triggered another algo such as over optimistaion or all 3 or more? Once Penguin removes trust maybe lots of other parts of the site trigger where the trust may have stopped them triggering before?

[crobb305]

Jez123,

Do you still rank for any terms, longtail, etc? Also, do you rank for snippets of your own content?

[aristotle]

crobb305 -- I don't think rankings will ever be fully-restored unless the site acquires some new "natural" backlinks to compensate for old backlinks that were removed or devalued.

[Jez123]

I don't think rankings will ever be fully-restored unless the site acquires some new "natural" backlinks to compensate for old backlinks that were removed or devalued.

Yes. If links are devalued then replacements will need to be made. I have carried on link building thoughout and have picked up a couple of very nice links that have made no difference at all so far.

Do you still rank for any terms, longtail, etc? Also, do you rank for snippets of your own content?

Very little. Longtail and main keywords have been badly affected. Though most longtail do contain the main keywords too which is possibly why.

[crobb305]

I don't think rankings will ever be fully-restored unless the site acquires some new "natural" backlinks to compensate for old backlinks that were removed or devalued.

aristotle, I agree. That was my underlying assumption that I should have included with my speculation: *IF* a site eliminates the spam (whatever that may be), acquires new backlinks, etc., then *maybe* there can be some recovery, especially with future Panda iterations (assuming that Penguin increases a site's susceptibility to Panda).

I've had 200,000 bad backlinks removed, and have acquired some very nice, natural backlinks, even some media mentions. Not a single iota of recovery. In fact, rankings keep dropping.

[Jez123]

Can we have a recap here? How many of you that were affected got any sort of recovery after the last refresh? Am I right in thinking that still hardly anyone has recovered? I certainly haven't. What are you trying now, or have you simply moved on?

[gehrlekrona]

@Jez123, I hate to be right but I have said many times that there is no recovery. Whatever we had is what we are going to get no matter what we do. GOOG puts out smoke screens witht he help of their disinformar, Matt Cutts. I haven't seen anything about anyone recovering and whatever I have tried have not helped at all. On the contrary. I have lost Bing and Yahoo while trying to regain GOOG's love again. There is no doubt that they have changed something that gives you a total amount of traffic and the only thing you can do is to screw up that part, but you will never get back to where you were. I hate to sound pessimistic but that's what have found so far.
MC goes out and says "Unnatural links.. " and people start removinh blindly. Did it help? No! It's stupid since Internet was built on links. I guss GOOG is the only on that can have links now? No wonder they get sued. They had a thing on CNN yesterday...... so it's not just us "whiners" that are hurt.

[Jez123]

@ gehrlekrona. I hope you are wrong. I would feel totally mislead if that were the case. Cutts did say that recovery was possible if cleanups were undertaken.

Same as you I have lost Yahoo and Bing in the cleanup process.