My steps to recovering from Penguin
- SEO |
Plan A: Fixing the penalized site.
1- First I've gone through the site and removed what links I could. Lots of links on my sites were from various WF and the other WF vendors. I pulled an updated opensiteexplorer report to find links that looked the worst or were heavy on anchor text and looked through my reports to find the vendors who built these. Then I contacted them and asked them if they could bring the links down in exchange for a small $. I was able to remove quite a few this way.
2- All of my sites were ecommerce so yes lots of content beneath the fold, all of it A+ when it comes to the SEOmoz on page scores. I brought part of the content up above the fold, made the title tags look more natural, and removed keyword bolding and exact match alt tag keywords. This is all just guesswork, not sure yet what Google considers too optimized.
3- Some of the landing pages on my sites had hundreds of links, with way to much anchor text. I fixed what I could, but I also created a new page for these URL's with a slightly different URL and 301'd the old URL. This is totally untested but its possible the 301 will help, I know some people that successfully did this post Panda.
4- New links. I'm focusing on links that can be moved should this site not recover; things like the BBB online, my local chamber of commerce, business.com, a few very authority sites that sell me very natural looking link placement within their sites. The point is here to only invest in links that could be moved, should I need a new domain. I've also done some press releases using prlog and prweb to try to bring the anchor text distribution back to normal levels using things like click here, mywebsite.com, etc.
5- Removed webmastertools. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but hey its worth a shot. In a few weeks to a month I will reinstall, resubmit xml sitemap, etc. In the interim I'm going to try removing it all in hopes of some kind of reset.
Plan B: New domain
1- Using a .net version of the above affected domain as a back up. At least as far as past visitors are concerned my branding and domain ownership will seem unchanged if i need to move the site design over to this URL.
2- I'm putting up a temporary wordpress blog will I try to fix the .com. I'll throw up some fresh content on the URL and a few very basic keywords on the home page and call it a day.
3- I will build a few links just to get it indexed and some PR. Tumblr, pinterist, few local directories, a press release, rss submission, all on a limited scale.
Then the plan is just to wait. Google stated in their recent update that Penguin is not part of their main algorithm. I won't expect my penalized sites to recover until they update penguin again, might be a few weeks or a month or two. If rankings dont recover I will move the main site over to the new site, after I make sure no other sites scraped my content, and after i've given google enough time to deindex everything. Then I'll get as many of the good links from the old site to point to the new one. I won't redirect the old site to the new though.
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