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Penguin Recovery

by MichaelAnthony
11 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Yep, my Amazon niche site got slaughtered. I didn't even do a LOT of link building -- about 25 PBN links, 7-10 high-PR sidebar links (very recently), and some forum signatures about 6 months ago when I was just starting out. Maybe it was over-aggressive anchor text?

Anyway. I'm wondering if anyone has ever tried this recovery method --

How to Recover from Penguin in 3 days -

And if you could add anything to what he's talking about there. What does it mean to "migrate" one site to another? Would you do a 302 or 301 redirect? How does one even do a redirect?
#penguin #recovery
  • Profile picture of the author Xelaetaks
    It's an interesting idea but it seems like it is suggesting to migrate to a new domain every time Penguin is updated. Maybe not a bad idea though. If Penguin gets more frequent it could mean buying a couple domains a year tho if it works not the biggest deal.
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  • Profile picture of the author sweezeter
    The only way to recover from Penguin properly is to remove the bad links created. That's it.

    Then you just wait for the next update, which will be sooner than a year like the last refresh according to Matt Cutts.

    I've had quite a few recovered websites that have suffered the last penguin update. People told me to forget about it and they'd never recover. I'm glad I didn't follow that advice though. I worked hard on getting my link profile back to normal by removing everything from forum profile spam to social bookmarking.

    It was a long uphill and expensive battle but now my sites are back to the top rankings again after last night. I knew something was up when I started seeing commission notifications on a site that hadn't had any traffic in some time.

    Back in the $$!
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      In an attempt to recover I'm going to do the following:

      - Remove sidebar links
      - Use excerpts on homepage/category pages of PBN to increase relevancy of the link
      - Build relevant blog comments
      - Setup hyper relevant web2.0 subdomains with unique content
      - Assign number of domains exclusively to be used for 1 site only
      - Do some competitor backlink analysis to find link opportunities
      - Build new links to inner pages, eg 50 percent to homepage and the rest spread out
      - Remove exact anchor text links if there are too many

      Google said they might refresh Penguin once a month same like they do with Panda so that's our best shot. If not it might take another year so let's hope they stick to that plan.

      Perhaps that's what Google meant when they said they're going to make this update more "pleasent" for site owners.

      301 and 302 redirects are both able to pass on penalties so even if it works it's a very short term solution, with migrating a site they just mean to copy the site to a new domain. A redirect can be setup at your registrar or you can use the .htaccess file to do so.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO Power
    Originally Posted by MichaelAnthony View Post

    Yep, my Amazon niche site got slaughtered. I didn't even do a LOT of link building -- about 25 PBN links, 7-10 high-PR sidebar links (very recently), and some forum signatures about 6 months ago when I was just starting out. Maybe it was over-aggressive anchor text?

    Anyway. I'm wondering if anyone has ever tried this recovery method --

    How to Recover from Penguin in 3 days -

    And if you could add anything to what he's talking about there. What does it mean to "migrate" one site to another? Would you do a 302 or 301 redirect? How does one even do a redirect?
    I've heard of and used that method before. Migrating a site means moving it to another domain name or web host. In this case, it means moving it to another domain name. To do a 301 redirect from one domain to another, install the WordPress plugin "redirection". I don't use 302 redirects.
    Signature
    ONE HOUR INDEXING - STOP WASTING MONEY ON LINKS GOOGLE NEVER FINDS
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    • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
      Originally Posted by SEO Power View Post

      I've heard of and used that method before. Migrating a site means moving it to another domain name or web host. In this case, it means moving it to another domain name. To do a 301 redirect from one domain to another, install the WordPress plugin "redirection". I don't use 302 redirects.
      When you tried it, how did it work?

      It seems like the strategy is two-fold -- 1) set up the re-direct, restore rankings; 2) when the penalty passes over, unplug the re-direct.

      This is an incredibly dumb question -- when what do you do with the content on the original, penalized site? Since you're moving it over to the new site, do you simply delete all content on the original site?

      Also, when you register the new site, should it be with a different hosting company?
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  • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
    So I'm going to go ahead and test this 301 method. It's for an Amazon review site with 4 "money" pages.

    I bought a new domain on Saturday, and I installed the plugin "Redirection" on my old site.

    I started 301'ing with just two pages at first -- my home page, and one money page. I barely built any links to these at all, so they should be clean. (The homepage is just a landing page, and one of the money pages ranked on its own due to weak competition and strength of domain). I copied the old content over to the new site, and set the 301s up with the plugin for those two pages only.

    I'm going to do the same thing with my 3 other money pages this week -- these are the pages that I build links to, and which I'm assuming caused the penalty to begin with.

    Then, the theory goes, I should restore my rankings fairly quickly, if all goes well.

    Then, after some time, the penalty from the old domain is expected to follow over to the new domain -- at which point I will disconnect the 301 redirect.

    That's the plan for now -- will report back on how it goes.

    Any tips are greatly appreciated!
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  • Profile picture of the author jrod11
    I think Nik0 gave you some really solid advice. Have you tried taking a look at your competitors and investigating what is ranking currently? Look at their backlink profile and see what is different from yours in terms of anchor text and types of links.

    I'd be interested to see how the 301 idea plays out. I've seen people do this before that had some quick success, but then the penalty followed them and they were in the same boat again.
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    • Profile picture of the author MichaelAnthony
      Originally Posted by jrod11 View Post

      I think Nik0 gave you some really solid advice. Have you tried taking a look at your competitors and investigating what is ranking currently? Look at their backlink profile and see what is different from yours in terms of anchor text and types of links.

      I'd be interested to see how the 301 idea plays out. I've seen people do this before that had some quick success, but then the penalty followed them and they were in the same boat again.
      Most of my competition got wiped out with Penguin as well

      I'm curious to see if the penalty follow. If it were that easily passed, what's to stop anyone from 301'ing a penalized site to one of their competitors for negative SEO? Have to figure Google is aware of that potential negative consequence.
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  • Profile picture of the author bizgrower
    What happens to the advantages of an older domain name and registration?

    <><>

    Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz
    Signature

    "If you think you're the smartest person in the room, then you're probably in the wrong room."

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  • Profile picture of the author sonpink1
    I think anchor text is the main fact this time. i have reviewed few sites that slapped last 17th most of them got very bad anchor text ratio.
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  • Profile picture of the author sweezeter
    301 will work temporarily. When those links eventually get passed along your site will tank.

    Your best bet is to fix the links on the original site or just start over entirely. What's the point of a temporary rank increase?
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