Tips to Recover From Penguin

 If you are dealing with a Penguin penalty here are a few things we’ve done that might help you get well a little quicker.

1. Remove Author Profiles on Article Submission Sites

It’s better just deleting the profiles and removing any articles that linked back to your website. The same advice holds true for free or junky online PR capitulation sites. If they won’t add no follow tags to your past releases just delete the profiles.

2. Reject Entire Domains, not Just Individual Links

If you have a link from a site that exists on more than 2-3 pages it’s maybe worth disavowing the entire domain (provided you don’t want your site associated with it in any way) with the Disavow Tool from Google. For example, one of my client’s has a keyword rich link in the side level navigation on another site. 

That’s doubly unnatural according to Google. We’ve emailed the owner of the site several times to get the link removed or at least make it nofollowed, but never heard back. You can stake that domain is the first one in the disavow file we submitted. As far as we can tell that link never sent any traffic and the client isn’t even sure who formed it in the first place. Their former SEO provider isn’t talking so we’ve taken the matter into our own hands.

Keep in mind we don’t know for sure how rapidly Google takes this in turn into account so there is no telling when those disavowed links are no longer being held next to you.

3. Take away Profiles from Spammy Bookmarking Sites

 
Bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon really send a lot of traffic to websites, but as for sites like FolkD? maybe not so much. While those social bookmarking sites used to be a truthful way to build up a few additional links, like any good link building tactic the spammers took it to a whole new level and ruined it for the rest of us. If old social bookmarking profiles aren’t delivering traffic to your site, don’t bother keeping it around. Delete the profile and any links tied to it.

Depending upon how bad your link profile was when Penguin hit, these tactics could destroy your link profile in a matter of weeks. As terrifying as that is, sometimes you have to start from scratch if you want to undo a penalty. While you working on removing the bad links, take time to focus on earning a few good ones to level out your link profile. 

Keep investing in your content marketing and social media efforts and look for new business partnerships and promotional opportunities that will introduce your brand to new audiences so you don’t have to rely so heavily on Google. Above all else just know that you are not the only one going through this hurting process and you can learn from others as you go. 

 you might also like: The shock of Penguin 2.1

How to Check if You’ve Been Hit by Penguin 4

In the wake of a fourth Penguin chapter, utilizing new “Penguin 2.0” technology, around 2.3% of all English search queries will have been affected. The Penguin update is planned to combat manipulative (spammy) link building practices, and punish those who’ve indulged in the darker side of link building by throwing them losing the rankings. This includes by automated link building services and submission software.

Hopefully, this article will give you an overview of how to tell if you’re affected by Penguin and what to do about it!

 Have you been hit by Penguin?

If you know you’ve been using dodgy link building tactics, or believe that you might be a aim for Penguin, then your first port of call is to check your analytics for a rapid drop in traffic. If you can clearly see a drop, then you’ve probably been hit.

If you check rankings, check these carefully, and be sure to turn off any location settings and personalization by adding “&pws=0” to the end of the query string in the address bar, to get as true a result as possible.

Look to see if you’ve dropped off for any exact keywords. Penguin operates at page level, so checking your home page might not be enough. You can verify your analytics and webmaster tools accounts to see if you’ve lost any traffic or imitation for certain keywords.

If you think you’ve been beat, then run a full Majestic SEO report and take a look through your backlinks.

What types of links caused the punishment?

If you’ve been beat for a specific keyword, then check all the links that used that fix text. You’re specifically looking for:

    Paid directories & “search engines”
    Social Bookmarking
    Thin Content / Article Syndication
    Paid links
    Site-wide links
    Hidden links
    Anything that violates Google Search Quality Guidelines

I’ll go into detail on the three most common of these link types, so you can recognize them yourself and take suitable action.

Paid Directories – what’s the problem?

A lot of directories will have several options for addition. These are usually a “featured” and “regular” listing or “express” and “3 month” review time. The problem is that if you buy a link, then that link must be marked with the “nofollow” attribute, to prevent that link from passing any SEO profit. Most of these types of directories do not use this quality when they sell links. In fact, they rarely differentiate between a paid listing and a free listing at all.

If you’re linked to from these kinds of directories, then make a note of them and be ready to undertake a link removal movement. It’s easier said than done. Many webmasters of these directories will attempt to blackmail you into paying through the nose to take your link down

Social Bookmarking – asking for danger!

Social Bookmarking was all the rage once. You could buy 1,000 social bookmarks with one or two different secure texts and you could achieve a slight boost in SERP’s for those terms. The whole principle was riddled with danger from the word get go. Since the links carried so little weight, you would had to obtain in thousands to get any real movement. Even then, you risked over optimising

Identifying these types of links is easy. They all follow a typical format like the one below. The linking URL and domain name are a giveaway.

Guidelines to Save Your Site from Getting Penalized By Google Penguin Update

Yesterday, I read a post about future Google penguin update by Berry Schwartz. In that article he talked about the release of new penguin update soon. I thought Google had slowed down its back to back updates chain from 24 January 2013, but this update made me to rethink about ways to stay safe from the impacts of the approaching Google updates.

As Google is trying to get better the quality of search results, many previous techniques do not work now. After research I found some techniques which can be successful to avoid penalty from Google penguin updates:

Content Marketing

Creating and sharing an informative content to get the attention of people to market business online is all about Content Marketing. Sometimes people think that blogging is the only way of content marketing, but they are wrong. Here I am explaining all possible ways of online content promotion:

Promote your content socially amongst your friends and colleagues on different sites like Facebook, twitter, Google plus etc.

Promoting the content in the form of videos on different quality sites like YouTube, Vimeo,Viddler etc.

Documents, slides and PDF are also good ways to share content on dissimilar websites like, Docstoc, SlideShare and AuthorStream.

“By creating almost 50 infographics, we were able to make over 2 million visitors and 41,000 backlinks for under $30,000”- as quoted by Neil Patel (Co-founder of Kissmetrics). So it is excellent idea to use blog content in the form of an infographic and post it on different sites.

Guest posting is also one of the best promotion techniques to increase awareness about your products and services. It helps to construct more links for your blog or site. Interviews posting is also a possible way to engage users on your blog or site.

Podcast is another good way to use your content in audio form and then share it on other sites.

Content on a blog alone is like “a tree falling in a forest and no one is around to hear it”-Wikipedia. So you should know the mediums that people are using to share their contents.

Social Media

Social media sharing is the finest practice to connect or attract users through social media sites. Social media sites allow people to like, share, update and join activities & gain traffic from people that are using the social sites.

Why people are connected with different brands and businesses publicly? What people find in those brands”? The answer is simple. People are connected with a brand in social media due to three basic factors:

For enjoyment like “Barack Obama”, people are encouraged of his personality and people enjoy updated information on their Social Media pages.

35M Facebook likes

2792315 Google plus ones

139K Twitter Followers

For interest like “Ford Motor Company”, people love cars and are interested to know more about the advanced features and quality design of new cars.

1.8M Facebook likes

2,068,190 Google plus ones

199K Twitter Followers

For information, a good example is “SEOmoz.org”. It is an organization which provides information linked to internet marketing.

109K Facebook likes

33,133 Google plus ones

208K Twitter Followers

I read one article on Mashable about “Social Media Lessons from a Successful Food Truck” and I learned some very good things about social media promotion:

Linking of social media sites makes it easy to endorse content from one site to another automatically.

Social media is not only about engaging people but is also about encouraging them to vote, like and share your information among their friends too.

One thing I like the most is sharing “the story’s behind your brands”. It inspires users to follow you and grow your business in a cost efficient manner.

Site Structure and Navigation:

Site structure and navigation is a very significant factor as it influences SEO authority of a website. An organized navigation structure not only help visitor to locate about what he is searching for, but also encourage the people to search other sections of the site also. An optimized web page structure is a good practice to make your website SEO friendly. It is also significant to direct the course of link equity throughout the site.

I will not talk much about the patterns of site structure as you can easily find several examples on internet. I just want to share the significant factors to design the site structure and navigation properly.

It is always necessary to connect each page of website to the home page so that when visitors go deep in the site, they can get back to home page with just one click.

A breadcrumb trail is helpful to navigate visitor within the site. It enables user to know at what page they are and also helps them to get back on parent page easily.

Internal linking of web pages is very significant to control and decrease the depth of website.

Internal linking also allows the usage of anchor text around the site and improves the visitor’s experience as well. Site structure and navigation are the crucial elements for an outstanding SEO practice. It makes the content easily findable within the website for both users and search engines. Effective changes in site structure can present solid SEO benefits to your site and moreover, the spiders will also think your site as a high quality one.