Google Penguin Recovery Strategies

The World of Google and SEO

Google has created a business economy all of its own. Through developing arguably the best  search engine they have been able to attract a phenomenal amount of interest form computer users an businesses who relay on internet presence of more significantly eCommerce for their business survival. This has in turn created a secondary industry, the SEO companies, who provide services to help business owners get their websites to the search rankings. Google want everything to look natural as if the links to peoples site came from other webmasters thinking that is a great site so I will link to it. The reality of the situation is that only around 2% of links are natural and the rest are created to fool the Google search engines. This means that the SEO companies are constantly fighting for business to see who can create the most natural looking links so businesses can improve their website search positions.

Google Panda and Penguin

Now from 2011 Google have started to introduce new algorithms to target Webspam  which will look at a sites content and the backlinks and make an algorithmic analysis of whether they think the Google guidelines have been violated and whether in fact the website is actually high quality or just made to look good in the eyes of search engines. Panda was primarily focuses om factors like duplicated content and excessive adverts on site and Penguin more on off site issues like the link profile. Here we will just look at Penguin which hit on the 24th April 2012 with a refresh on 25th May 2012 and what strategies can be employed to recover.

Penguin Recover Checklist

1. Check out your backlink profile and remove and non PR ranked links and ones linking back from sites which are obviously set up for SEO purposes.
2. Check your back link anchor text profile at the page level and check to see that you have no more than 50% of the links with exact match keyword anchor text to the keywords that that page optimised for.If you are over 50% then delete the links or better changed the links to branded terms which involves variants of your business name or generic terms link , click here, more info and it is fine to just use page URL's.
3. Accrue some good quality hand written links for decent quality sites which either have manual article checking like Ezine or have a mechanism for user validation like Hubpages.
4. Complement these with some straight text links from sites with good PR and relevant content.
5. Remove site wide links like blog rolls or multiple links from the same domain.




These are the big hitters so now sit back and wait for the next refresh and  monitor your recovery. If nothing happens then you can move the domain to a similar domain, hopefully of a similar age, and then 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones. Then take any good links you have control over and link those to the new site.  This  process has recovered many sites but some then get the penality back after a few weeks when it is passed from the old penalised domain.

.... and if you want some help contact Paul at  Towers IT Professional Services http://www.towersitservices.co.uk