Penguin Remove Links or Change Them?

[moehits]

On Penguin 2.0 a few sites had a drop in rankings, a few places or pages. Inner pages saw the biggest drop, 3-5 pages. Link text looks over-optimized but it doesn't look real bad.

It's tough to tell if certain types of links were downgraded, so a loss in pagerank would explain a drop, or if it's a bloop penalty. Has anyone seen any certain types of links that might stick out?
The sites have some high quality links and a mixture of directories, some are years old, web 2.0, articles and a few press releases a year. Roughly 1-5000 links per site, these weren't real aggressive campaigns with pretty consistent velocity.

I still have access to many of the links. Has anyone tried changing link text or is it better to just delete some.

The sites had no measurable impact from penguin 1.

I'm not hearing any real recovery stories, I'm hesitant to do anything drastic yet.

[Whitey]

Have you checked :

Did the Disavow Tool work for you? [webmasterworld.com...]

Matt Cutts on stages of Penguin recovery [webmasterworld.com...]

There's a few claims of success in the mix, amongst some who have not. Overuse od exact match and commercial terms in the anchor text is another risk - but usually those point towards the same remedy. Remove or disavow them. Changing them assumes they are not given editorially freely.

[jakebohall]

I have been involved in several recovery stories, though most of them have involved significant efforts in link removals with up to 3 reconsideration requests.

Some of the biggest things that stand out are sitewide links, directory links, and links with commercial anchor text.

You definitely want to try and remove as many "bad links" as possible before doing any type of disavow (as per MC). Generally I recommend a combination of link removals and requesting no-follows, and then submitting a disavow on the "bad links" where you can't get in touch with the webmasters. I'm not sure about changing anchor text, it isn't something we've spent much time on... as we agree with Whitey that if you can change the link, it probably isn't given freely... we suggest that links you can control should be no-followed.

[moehits]

Good point on the editorial links, I won't change any links, I may just delete some going to the subpages, it's only a few terms that dropped more than a few places, major drops were on subpages.

I'm changing the url's of one site soon, but not the domain name. I may try not doing redirects from the old url's to the new one's, I'm curious if they point to 404's, will they still count against you.

This was just a 2.0 issue, the site's were fine till then.

[Planet13]

"I'm curious if they point to 404's, will they still count against you."

I can't say with absolute certainty, but I suspect that they WOULD.

and I suspect that it would cause your site not to rank for that keyword for ANY page on that domain (if it is a keyword-specific Penguin affliction).

[seoskunk]

"I'm curious if they point to 404's, will they still count against you."

I can't say with absolute certainty, but I suspect that they WOULD.

and I suspect that it would cause your site not to rank for that keyword for ANY page on that domain (if it is a keyword-specific Penguin affliction).

John Mu of google said this, hope it helps............

"In general, if you remove the page that is being linked to (such as a spammy forum thread) and make sure that it returns a 404/410 HTTP response code, we'll ignore the links to those pages. If these links are primarily pointing at threads that you've removed, then there's no need to move the whole forum to a new URL. If you find that there's a significant number of problematic links that you can't remove which are linking to general parts of your forum (eg the forum homepage), moving the forum to a different URL might be a possibility (but I'd only recommend doing that if you're absolutely sure that these links are causing problems -- we're pretty good at ignoring spammy links). If you choose to move the forum, then StevieD has some good suggestions on how that could be done (make sure that your 404 page is useful to users too)."

[Whitey]

Here's the link : [productforums.google.com...] - I'm not sure how much of this has been superseded by the Penguin recovery guidelines mentioned above. For example, Google being good at identifying SPAM links and leaving them is not consistent with current directives. Google seems to want webmasters to confess to a behaviour change before trusting their sites again.

[moehits]

Those two statements are clear as mud, lol. The 404 suggestion was _after penguin 1, I wonder if anyone tried. Or has tried since 2. It could be a catch 22, the penalty gets lifted, but you lose all pagerank from the few good links and nothing improves.

I might try it for at least a short time, maybe just the page I think got hit worst.

[Whitey]

That would be a strong removal signal to Google. But is it enough per the "machete" directive? Only you can tell and watch for a response. Good luck.

[Oimachi2]

So if I have a list of bad obvious links in webmater tools, that's like 33 000 links in a week and all anchor text is "cialis" and stuff like that...

Should I use the dissavow tool immediately? ALL links are spam, I've been hit by someone commenting on my blog.

Even if I never accepted the comments they still linked to my pages...

[Planet13]

"Should I use the dissavow tool immediately? ALL links are spam, I've been hit by someone commenting on my blog. "

Just to understand your situation, what you are saying was that someone was trying to post on YOUR site with some links to their money site, and then they created 33,000 backlinks to the pages on your site which they had tried to get to their money site?

In that case, I would imagine that the disavow tool should be used as soon as possible. I don't think there would be any way for you to remove those links.

[aristotle]

Well there's tens of millions, maybe billions, of spammy backlinks on the web, most of them created because of Google. Not to mention all of the associated spammy content, such as blog comments and article sites. It's a huge rancid morass that even if it suddenly stopped expanding, would take a hundred years to decay away. The good parts of the web will have to overcome Google in order to pull themselves out of the muck.

[seoskunk]

@aristotle Time for a new way of searching? [webmasterworld.com...]

[netmeg]

Seriously, are you posting this in every item?

[seoskunk]

I am called seoskunk netmeg.............what did you expect :)

[netmeg]

Not much. The entire forum has been pretty much trashed for weeks. Carry on.