How to recover from Google Penguin update
So your site was killing it in rankings, and then the new Penguin 3.0 algorithm came and now your seo rankings are in the gutter! Why? How? If you found this post you more than likely already know why or how penguin works. It’s about over optimized anchor text. Not having a diverse link profile, seems that Penguin 3.0 is even tighter on it’s link profile than the last version. If you look at the sites that now dominate the first page, and check out their link profile. Majestic being the best tool I have came across for analyzing back links and website link profiles, then you will see these websites have very little keyword anchor text for the keywords they are ranking for. They probably have a huge amount of branded links or “other” links known as miscellaneous links. And their on page optimization seems to be driving their rankings.
Back in the day you used to be able to just crank out the keywords in anchor text and that’s how you ranked a site. But that’s all in the past, Google finally got smart, or they finally started favoring “big brands”. So now you little guys, well you have to trick Google into thinking you are a big brand website. This means blasting your brand name or naked url everywhere.
Methods of Penguin Recovery
1. Fastest way to Recovery
Change domain names. A little trick I tested out after penguin 2.0, basically you create a wild card redirect from your old site to your new site. If you are on WordPress this is super simple as you can keep the exact same site and content, but just switch over your domain and the redirect your old url with a wild card and all your pages will match up and you will retain 100% links. Why or how this works, is that all the link juice and anchor text is now being forwarded t the new domain that doesn’t have a penalty. You can get back on top as soon as the new site is index within a week or so! If you already have a easy brand name this might not be an option unless you shorten it even more! Or just rebrand! But you still need to do the other steps below in combination, but a little slack on cleaning up. That part you want to go slow and check rankings as you remove links.
2. Diversify your link profile
Start building branded, naked url and random text links. You have to over saturated those keyword anchor text so google doesn’t think you are trying to spam their search engine. Start using branded links, just the name of your company or brand. Then throw in the naked url. What’s a naked url you ask? www.naked.com or http://www.naked.com. Use both even just naked.com, this is considered a brand url. Then we have the random text. Click here, view website, see now, you get the picture. Once you diversify your links then penguin will even out your rankings because you will have more “natural” links in Google’s eyes. Another option is to change your current links out there to more branded instead of building them from scratch.
3. Clean up links & Disavow Tool
Start cleaning up your current backlinks. Remove those sites that really have no juice, a good rule of thumb is if it doesn’t have a PR of 2 you should probably just have that darn thing removed! Either log into your account and delete the link or contact the web owner and request they remove the link. If all that fails start a running list to submit to Google’s Disavow Tool.
4. Sit and wait
Outside of method 1 which should get you results within weeks if not days! The last thing you have to do is wait! Yup it’s stated that you might even have to wait until Google rolls out it’s next Penguin Algo, which seems to be a yearly thing!