Partial recovery from Penguin

[mobilegame]

Hi guys, after more than half a year's work, I finally see some positive changes to one of my sites.

I have three websites hit hard when penguin was first rolled out, all of them have some heavy anchor texts. Before the update, I ranked well on many main and long-tail keywords. After the new algorithm, however almost all rankings dropped by a few hundred positions.

So I immediately removed all the low quality links I can find. For high quality links under my control, I changed the anchor text from main keywords to domain name.

When Google launched the Disallow Tool, I used it to disallow many links beyond my control, these links contributed at least 80% of my main keyword anchor texts.

A few days back I surprisingly found that some main keyword rankings of one website improved a lot, namely from position 300 to 5, and other rankings also increased, just not as good as before (I used to rank number 1 on many keywords).

However about two months ago another website fell victim of penguin because of the drastic increase of one anchor text. So I think the partial recovery has something to do with anchor text since I did not change anything on-site.

What's your opinion?

[goodroi]

It might be helpful if you provide percentages of your anchor text distribution.

[klark0]

And also the exact dates of traffic loss and ranking recovery.

[Thaparian]

Did you build new links? If so, what kind of links?

I read somewhere that to have a natural link profile, a site should have no more than 30% exact match anchor texts, around 10% partial match anchor text....and 60% of generic anchor text/naked URLs.

My site was hit, and I have like 60% of backlinks with exact+partial match. (Considering sitewide links as one)

I wonder what role does PR plays in all this.

[neildt]

We also appear to have a partial recovery, mainly on pages that we changed the internal anchor text. But strangly some other pages we didnt change the internal anchor text for are also ranking - some on page one.

However the majority of pages that recovered are still on page 3.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Does this mean that automated "similar content" sections which typically employ a page title as the anchor text are causing problems?

[klark0]

Does this mean that automated "similar content" sections which typically employ a page title as the anchor text are causing problems?

Instead of the similar content section, I would blame the titles themselves if they are too keyword stuffed and not natural enough.

[smithaa02]

I've had a partial recovery for a little under two months as well. This did correlate with no link building, bad link culling and using the disavow tool.

It's so frustrating that while we are close to recovering...we're just about 10 spots below where we were before. I don't know what the extra oomph we need is to get us over the hump.

Thaparian...I don't think link building is the key or even link profiles. Rather I think it is link velocity that is tripping up so many SEO's and their too blind to admit it because it's tough for them to throttle down their link building over a long period of time and most of their clients want immediate action. Links that happen during suspect veleocity days I doubt are counted and probably contribute to penalties. Links that are acquired on days in which the link acquisition is within standard deviation for your site are probably considered legit.

[aristotle]

It's so frustrating that while we are close to recovering...we're just about 10 spots below where we were before. I don't know what the extra oomph we need is to get us over the hump.

If you removed and/or disavowed a lot of backlinks, then your site has probably lost a good part of its incoming "pagerank juice". So in order to return to your pre-Penguin Google rankings and traffic levels, most likely you need to get enough new backlinks to regain the pagerank juice that you've lost.

[martinacastro]

For one site, I also see some good results... for others Im still waiting.

By the way seems that we don't need to wait for Panda Update to see results? or are partial recoveries and we need to wait the next update?

[martinacastro]

I leave here what John Mu told about the Penguin update in a Hangout made in October 19, 2012, where he says that we must wait next update...:


Question:…Is the disavow tool good to remove [a] Penguin penalty from a domain?

John Mueller: So, generally speaking, the Penguin algorithm is a webspam algorithm that can also take into account links like that, so if you use the disavow tool that would be similar to adding a nofollow to those links which would take those out of the way that we process those links from an algorithmic point of view. So, with that in mind if the Penguin algorithm has been picking up those links for your site and kind of using those appropriately, then using the disavow tool will take those out of the use by the Penguin algorithm.

So, that should work.

But again, this is something that is a little bit, I guess, advanced, where you really have to watch what you are doing there. Most websites shouldn’t need to use this tool and you should also keep in mind that it takes quite a bit of time for this to update. So on the one hand we have to recrawl those links and on the other hand we have to update the Penguin algorithm data as well…so, it’s something where you wouldn’t see a change from one day to the next.

[Whitey]

@martinacastro - thanks for tabling those facts to center our thoughts better, c/o John Mu

Just a word of caution - I have seen one prominent business badly impacted in rankings caused by going too aggressively at removing links.

My personal recommendation is to cut slowly in a way that you can hopefully gauge / control your recovery as well as build compenasatory actions. That would take in a fairly lenghtly recovery for some folks who have done extensive link building.

[Dan01]

Speaking of links...

I see tons of links in my Webmaster Tools. They truncate the pages to 1000, so I don't see every page on my site that has a link to it. That is a problem now that I am purging low-quality content.

Soooo, I noticed the link: operator is nearly useless. I tried the operators (linkdomain etc) in Bing and Yahoo. None of them return the results I see in WMT.

Any suggestions for finding links to specific pages on my site?

[martinacastro]

Now at this time, the site that was performing a bit better is switching positions between position 80 and 600.

Also other sites that I don't own, make the same...

Any idea to share?

[Thaparian]

Thaparian...I don't think link building is the key or even link profiles. Rather I think it is link velocity that is tripping up so many SEO's and their too blind to admit it

How about news sites? If there is a breaking news...it would gather links very quickly and after some time when the news is old, it won't get much links...not a consistent link velocity but still natural...

Anchor text variation is important...an average user is much more likely to link to a site with generic anchor text...and simple URLs...

I haven't been building links for last few years...only natural links...I got the directory submissions done way back in 2008...those links were created a bit quick I guess...could that be hurting the site now? I wonder how much data Google stores about each website...they index billions of web pages, there must be limit to how much data they can store/process...

For my site i think the anchor text is causing problems...way too many links with exact match/partial match anchor text...Google probably considers those links as unnatural and ignores them...