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Need advices and tips on my work to recover from Penguin

by simonsay
15 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi mates,

I have a website that has been hit by Penguin few months ago (I would say 18 months) and despite my efforts, site is not recovering. I would like you to see what I have done till now and potentially give me some tips according to your experience. Please notice I never get any message in Webmaster Tools message informing about a manual penalty.

Let me explain what I have done since the site has been hit :
- After being hit, I created a brand new website, with new webdesign and improved content. Some pages are still really poor in terms of content but I have no choice as I get data from feeds (competitors do exactly the same and do not have more content).
- A year ago, I do my best to get some better links (I did get some) and stop any automated work to get links.
- Progressively, I got some more natural links and decided to wait, thinking these links will be enough to recover. No way !
- 5 months ago, I hired someone who was doing high quality content (3 articles per day, average 250 words per article)
- 3 months ago, I started a deeper analyse of my netlinking and discovered that I had around 200 poor quality backlinks from directories, and similar kind of websites. I contacted all of these website owners, and finally reached to remove more of half of these links in 2 months. Still no big change.

Now my plan is the following :
- Disavow rest of poor quality links
- Submit a reconsideration form in GWT
- Change domain, as I have an EMD which is exact-matchdomain.com

What do you think of my next actions and do you believe it can be successful ?
Thanks for your opinion, I am desperate to see so much efforts are not giving the expected results.
#advices #penguin #recover #tips #work
  • Profile picture of the author nik0
    Banned
    No one forces you to use data feeds.

    Somehow I have the idea that Google heavily dislikes sites that work with data feeds, UNLESS your site already has a lot of authority from it self.

    So if you switch domains, in other words start over from zero again you might want to rethink your concept.

    Lately I'm playing around with the idea to start a hotel site, as the commissions are pretty good, what all the large sites are doing is pull everything from feeds and they get away with it cause they've been around for so long. I don't expect a new site to do well with that so what I intend to do is:

    - write stories about the holiday destination, what to do etc, nightlife...
    - create reviews based on what people previously wrote about the hotel
    - grab images from the hotel site itself and from other sources
    - outline facilities in detail with photo's where possible.

    In other words providing the user all the information he would find if he visited the hotel site.

    I think that's the way you have to go these days if you really want to succeed. Sure it would be better to review the actual product or hotel yourself but well, kind of hard to grow large that way.

    You should also revive your whole SEO / link building strategy around it, posting 3 articles of 250 words a day makes no sense as they probably end up on spammed to death article sites, not much benefit from that.

    In case of the hotel example I would set it up in two ways

    1) Authority site
    2) Feeder site

    Link building for the authority site would include:

    - Blog commenting at popular travel blogs
    - Forum participating at travel forums
    - Link all the feeder sites to the authority site obvious
    - Try to create some buzz at social media sites, not so easy but giveaways might help
    - Link from some expired domains that are niche relevant

    Link building for the feeder site would be a lot less whitehat:

    - Link mostly from my private network
    - Social bookmarking
    - Links from travel web directories
    - Pinterest / image sharing sites

    I just used the hotel niche as I got that on my mind now but you can apply it to each niche of course.
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    • Profile picture of the author simonsay
      Thanks for advices, but I am obliged to use feeds, else I will need to hire 10 persons to provide information I provide now on my website.

      Thanks anyway for sharing, I might be also hit by Panda as many pages do not contain useful, but poor information.

      I still have a lot of doubts, but I will follow my instinct and hope Google see that.
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    • Profile picture of the author NitalJoshi
      Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

      No one forces you to use data feeds.

      Somehow I have the idea that Google heavily dislikes sites that work with data feeds, UNLESS your site already has a lot of authority from it self.

      So if you switch domains, in other words start over from zero again you might want to rethink your concept.

      Lately I'm playing around with the idea to start a hotel site, as the commissions are pretty good, what all the large sites are doing is pull everything from feeds and they get away with it cause they've been around for so long. I don't expect a new site to do well with that so what I intend to do is:

      - write stories about the holiday destination, what to do etc, nightlife...
      - create reviews based on what people previously wrote about the hotel
      - grab images from the hotel site itself and from other sources
      - outline facilities in detail with photo's where possible.

      In other words providing the user all the information he would find if he visited the hotel site.

      I think that's the way you have to go these days if you really want to succeed. Sure it would be better to review the actual product or hotel yourself but well, kind of hard to grow large that way.

      You should also revive your whole SEO / link building strategy around it, posting 3 articles of 250 words a day makes no sense as they probably end up on spammed to death article sites, not much benefit from that.

      In case of the hotel example I would set it up in two ways

      1) Authority site
      2) Feeder site

      Link building for the authority site would include:

      - Blog commenting at popular travel blogs
      - Forum participating at travel forums
      - Link all the feeder sites to the authority site obvious
      - Try to create some buzz at social media sites, not so easy but giveaways might help
      - Link from some expired domains that are niche relevant

      Link building for the feeder site would be a lot less whitehat:

      - Link mostly from my private network
      - Social bookmarking
      - Links from travel web directories
      - Pinterest / image sharing sites

      I just used the hotel niche as I got that on my mind now but you can apply it to each niche of course.
      You are right and may if you remove all spam links its also help to recover
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  • Profile picture of the author murad12s
    Disavow the bad links created against your site is the best solution I think, then go with manual link building
    Signature


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  • Profile picture of the author simonsay
    @nik0

    Let's say I have a hotel website (this is not the case but it's a good example), and imagine I have a feed containing basic information about each hotel in a city (like number of rooms, type of room, number of stars, address and some more useful but not exclusive information).

    I don't have the resources to write a detailed and useful page about the thousands hotels in each city, so what I should do ? This is also one of my concern, all pages I have on my website are useful, but some are really poor.

    Should I create a main page about the city, then pages about activities, monuments, and also a hotels page ? What about a page for each hotel ? This is Panda risky if information is poor, isn't it ?

    My website has more than 1 million pages indexed, and 95% have poor data, even if they remain useful for users, who cannot really find better information elsewhere.
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      Originally Posted by simonsay View Post

      @nik0

      Let's say I have a hotel website (this is not the case but it's a good example), and imagine I have a feed containing basic information about each hotel in a city (like number of rooms, type of room, number of stars, address and some more useful but not exclusive information).

      I don't have the resources to write a detailed and useful page about the thousands hotels in each city, so what I should do ? This is also one of my concern, all pages I have on my website are useful, but some are really poor.

      Should I create a main page about the city, then pages about activities, monuments, and also a hotels page ? What about a page for each hotel ? This is Panda risky if information is poor, isn't it ?

      My website has more than 1 million pages indexed, and 95% have poor data, even if they remain useful for users, who cannot really find better information elsewhere.
      What I would probably do is noindex all the pages created by the data feed so that Google can't make a problem of that.

      Then write interesting stuff about the hotels and city yourself on the side and only give Google access to the pages that you wrote / created yourself and target those with links obvious.

      You could make your own comparison pages of hotels and optimize it for "hotel + city".

      For example a list of 20 hotels with 20 unique descriptions and 20 unique photo's with a button below each description saying something like "read reviews" or "book hotel" and the image clickable as well so that by clicking they end up on the data feed part of your website.

      In case it's a larger city you could write let's say 20 more detailed pages about certain hotels that link back to your comparison page, that way you create more authority, works kind of like a silo concept that way. Or instead of hotels make separate pages with neighbourhoods where the hotels are compared. Eg: Pattaya East, Pattaya West, Pattaya North, Pattaya South, Jomtien, Bansaree etc etc and link those back to the main comparison or whatever page that's optimized for your main keyword.

      Kind of the same thing that I'm doing with a product review sites, 7 products outlined in detail and all linking back to a comparison page with those 7 products same like toptenreviews does.
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      • Profile picture of the author simonsay
        Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

        What I would probably do is noindex all the pages created by the data feed so that Google can't make a problem of that.

        Then write interesting stuff about the hotels and city yourself on the side and only give Google access to the pages that you wrote / created yourself and target those with links obvious.

        You could make your own comparison pages of hotels and optimize it for "hotel + city".

        For example a list of 20 hotels with 20 unique descriptions and 20 unique photo's with a button below each description saying something like "read reviews" or "book hotel" and the image clickable as well so that by clicking they end up on the data feed part of your website.

        In case it's a larger city you could write let's say 20 more detailed pages about certain hotels that link back to your comparison page, that way you create more authority, works kind of like a silo concept that way. Or instead of hotels make separate pages with neighbourhoods where the hotels are compared. Eg: Pattaya East, Pattaya West, Pattaya North, Pattaya South, Jomtien, Bansaree etc etc and link those back to the main comparison or whatever page that's optimized for your main keyword.

        Kind of the same thing that I'm doing with a product review sites, 7 products outlined in detail and all linking back to a comparison page with those 7 products same like toptenreviews does.
        Thanks for advices, very useful.
        Yeah, I think I must do that and noindex the poor pages created with feeds data.
        GG must estimate I have too much pages with light content, and shouldn't appreciate that. I will refine my strategy and work on that during the next weeks.

        As I feel my domain as an algorithmic penalty, and that moreover I have a EMD (exact-matchdomain.com is my domain), what do you think is the best to do ?
        Should I create a brand new website or still work on the same website (which has still some poor directories linking) ? In the first case, should I use an old EMD (10 years old) which is like hotel-review.com or create something more brandable like hotelssomething.com ?
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        • Profile picture of the author nik0
          Banned
          Originally Posted by simonsay View Post

          Thanks for advices, very useful.
          Yeah, I think I must do that and noindex the poor pages created with feeds data.
          GG must estimate I have too much pages with light content, and shouldn't appreciate that. I will refine my strategy and work on that during the next weeks.

          As I feel my domain as an algorithmic penalty, and that moreover I have a EMD (exact-matchdomain.com is my domain), what do you think is the best to do ?
          Should I create a brand new website or still work on the same website (which has still some poor directories linking) ? In the first case, should I use an old EMD (10 years old) which is like hotel-review.com or create something more brandable like hotelssomething.com ?
          I would start completely fresh if I were you with a branded domain name.
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          • Profile picture of the author simonsay
            Originally Posted by nik0 View Post

            I would start completely fresh if I were you with a branded domain name.
            @nik0
            No 301 from old domain to new domain ? I have more than 300 refering domains and 60% of them are natural links made by webmasters or forums users (rest is old and bad netlinking strategy). Should I give up and start again linking from zero ? I already spend a lot of time working on netlinking, so I should start from zero again ? According to you, I cannot use a old (and so trusted) EMD domain to restart ?

            Thanks for your help.
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            • Profile picture of the author nik0
              Banned
              Originally Posted by simonsay View Post

              @nik0
              No 301 from old domain to new domain ? I have more than 300 refering domains and 60% of them are natural links made by webmasters or forums users (rest is old and bad netlinking strategy). Should I give up and start again linking from zero ? I already spend a lot of time working on netlinking, so I should start from zero again ? According to you, I cannot use a old (and so trusted) EMD domain to restart ?

              Thanks for your help.
              If you have a penalty the 301 passes on the penalty to a new domain.

              You stated in your OP that you were going to change domains.

              You have to make the choice yourself, start all fresh or recover the current site, in case of recovery it starts with disavowing and reporting all that you did, no guarantee for success though.

              Perhaps you can start a second site while you're busy recovering the old one.
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  • Profile picture of the author laceyyoung666
    One truly-work way is to build more good links to make your link profile looks natural.
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  • Profile picture of the author Marketing Ignite
    Simon
    You need to stop the 250 word content. That is thin and those pages will usually not be strong enough to be passed on in the social media platforms. What you need is expert written content and 1000 words or more. Thats the type of content that I see Google seems to love. I wrote a blog post about this with some tips on how to recover. I hope that will help you.

    hxxp://www.marketingignite.com/blog/has-penguin-5-0-affected-your-website-and-what-are-the-remedies-for-it/
    Signature

    Digital Marketing Consultant since 1998. Contact me for a free consultation.
    https://www.marketingignite.com

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  • Profile picture of the author affilorama-portal
    Hi Simon,

    The suggestions above are really helpful and in addition, I would also suggest you analyze more your on page SEO efforts. Have you looked into your Webmaster tools and check which pages have errors, most especially code errors and on-page and html errors? You may want to look at duplicate content issue as well. Based from what you just said, you have lots of pages and you may have overlooked duplicate meta tags. This also poses a problem to your site. You need to change duplicate title tags to avoid duplicate content issue. That is just one factor to look for when fixing your site.

    Then about producing content, you do not need to post as much content per week if you are just going for 250 words. Like one commenter here said, this is too thin. It's okay to post at least 2-3 times a week but with a really good content and at least about 500-800 words. Remember that quality content (above all) is very important these days.

    I hope that helps
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  • Profile picture of the author simonsay
    I have also another question. for my current website, I created a tailor made webdesign, spend a lot of time on it, can I use it for brand new domain or will it be suspicious for Google ?

    Thanks
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    • Profile picture of the author affilorama-portal
      Originally Posted by simonsay View Post

      I have also another question. for my current website, I created a tailor made webdesign, spend a lot of time on it, can I use it for brand new domain or will it be suspicious for Google ?

      Thanks
      If the site has already been indexed, you just need to do a redirect of all the pages. But if you are transferring your site just to start fresh with ranking, I suggest you just make a new one instead. This is much easier and less complicated.
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