This is how i got myself recovered from Penguin!

Okay this penguin stuff has been a pain in head for so many including me. One of my established website that used to get around 3000 UV a day all from organic search went down to a few hundreds. Rankings for almost all of my keywords were tanked. My main keyword has an exact match of 301,000 searches a month and i ranked #3. I had page 1 rankings for around a dozen of other keywords too. So around 25 days ago my world went upside down. I was hit by penguin.

On my way to recovery.

The time when i was hit by penguin was when everyone knew little about what has happened and what needs to be done. As about me i knew lesser than little. I read people making experiments to reach conclusions on what this penguin thing was about so i decided the same and followed my own approach. All i knew that penguin was about over optimization. Let me discuss every step one by one:

1) Content: I admit my content was quality but i had way too much on page seo done. I had almost all of my two word keywords bolded , italicized , underlined , h1 tagged etc. Each of my article had around 10 exact matched or partial match keywords bolded, italicized ......... etc. I reduced the number to two.

2) Internal links: Similar to the point above, i had too many internal links with exact match keywords pointing to other pages of my site. I reduced them to a maximum of two again and transformed the anchors from exact match to relevant phrases. For example "nikkon cameras" became "the new nikkon cameras outperform its competitors" . This is just an idea.

3) Backlinks: I analyzed my backlink profile via Open Site Explorer .
I recorded my anchor text data and all of my backlinks i put into an excel sheet. Around 70% of my anchor texts exactly matched my keyword.After analylizing my backlinks i found that i had around 20% of backlinks coming from very low quality sources like forum profiles , spammed to death blogs etc. What i did first was to dilute my anchors. I didn't resort to building links with anchors like click here , visit the website etc but to use long term phrases that describe my keywords. I hope you understand what i mean.

Basically i ignored correcting low quality existing links and built new high quality links with phrases relating to my anchors.

I used scrapebox to find niche related blogs and posted comments on low obl blogs (generally less than 40 obl). Around 80% of the blogs were moderated ones and i got my comments approved on around 80% of those 80%. may be rest 20 didnot bother to check if new comments were posted lately. For blog comments it very unlikely to get them approved with long phrases , so i used "SOME NAME @ company ltd or SOME NAME- website.com or SOME NAME- keyword". Did you get the idea?

Then i used UAW. I hope most of you are familiar with it. I made 1 submission each 3 days and i used some 200 resource boxes for each. As mentioned before i used long phrases as anchors to my website. I pointed around 40% of the links to homepage and rest all to innerpages. I set the submission rate to 15 articles a day.

I wonder if it had been useful but i created 2 accounts on high pr web 2.0 properties each day and posted 300 word articles on each of them with two links pointing to my website. One to homepage and one to inner pages.

Okay i followed the process above for 20 days and i promised to myself not to check my ranking before 20 days. And guess what , today is the 20th day. I rank #5 for my main keyword , #4 for secondary keyword and rank on page 1 for around 10 other keywords. Thats pretty much close to what i was before i was eaten up by penguin. The traffic yesterday was 2496 UVs.

Conclusion:
So the idea behind all i did was that google has started deciding relevance not by exact keywords but something that describes your content in more words and more sense. I mean , obviously i am not gonna link to a "rabbit cage's site" by the exact term rabbit cage if i liked something about it. I will link it with terms like "some rabbit cage is wonderful" or " how to properly use some rabbit cage". I hope i conveyed my message.


Thanks for reading and very sorry for my extremely bad enlgsih