How to fight the Penguin!

by Banned 17 replies
21
As I provide seo services I talk with a lot of people who do the same and we cooperate on many fronts and yeah same like everyone here, a lot of our sites and clients sites have been hit by the latest update.

As Yukon previously mentioned it might be worth it to change the url of a page when only the specific page has been hit/penalized. We tried and it worked, got the page back for that keyword at #2 above Google Places in less then a week.

For the rootdomain there is not really a solution but for the innerpages you can rename the url and redirect the old url to the new one in the .htaccess file that you find on your hosting in the rootmap of that particular domain. We've tested this on a large site that got penalized hard and the rankings are all back, not as high as before but certainly not beyond page 5 anymore.

The thing is, you have probably been penalized for bad links or poor anchor diversity so by redirecting 301'ing the old url you get rid of that. First I thought all this anchor diversity was a bit over hyped up but as the redirects proof to be working it seems to be more true then ever as you don't have any links/anchors pointing directly at your url anymore but only at the old one.

This way you still remain your old links that always worked.


Another thing that you might've been penalized for is losing a lot of links after the blog network deindexing, when you lose a lot of links you not only lose the juice but also the popularity of that page (in Google's eyes) and that leads to a penalty. When you have a brand new page you don't have that problem and thanks to the redirecting you still get the juice from your remaining links.

Think about it and try it yourself. So far we had great success with this renaming of the urls and 301'ing the old urls. No guarantees but hey, you got nothing to lose anyway!
#search engine optimization #fight #penguin
  • Excellent insight and a good idea ty.

    I currently have an 11 mos old pr 0 EMD for a very nice 2 word keyword phrase.

    I also have an aged pr 4 site that is just sitting there for my next project.

    Should I move my site and fix this internal linking problem all in one stroke?
    • [1] reply
    • Banned
      I dont understand this moving part really.

      I would just rename my url's that rank, and redirect them. And if it concerns your root domain then you can change index.php to home.php or index.html to home.html. That should fix it.
      • [1] reply
  • nik0,

    had a followup

    If i change the old urls to new ones they will be fresh and not penalized which is great.

    HOWEVER, if i redirect the old urls to my home page would that not then ppollute the link structure of the home page and possible clear its percentages enough to make it rank again?

    Also where do you go to do a url redirect? is this a WP thing or a cpanel?

    Also is there something i need to do in WMT to notify google?
    • [1] reply
    • Banned
      The idea was to redirect your homepage:

      homepage.com/index.php ----> homepage.com/home.php

      However after some second thought this doesn't really work on the homepage but only for innerpages cause all your links will be pointed at:

      homepage.com/ without the home.php or index.php attached to it, so in case of the homepage it unfortunatly doesn't make sense.

      You do the redirection for other pages in the .htaccess file in your root map of your hosting.
  • Hi nik0,
    I have inner page was hit by penguin, it at page 12 (page 3 before).

    Can I redirect 301 for it , ex:
    Code:
    www.mywebsite.com/aaa/bbb/1/mypage.html ---> www.mywebsite.com/aaa/bbb/7/mypage.html
    Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Banned
      Yes you can!
  • How do you do this in Wordpress? Especially changing the homepage from index.php to home.php you would need to fix the entire template, right?
  • I don't know 301 re-direction is the correct solution for the sites that has been hit by penguin. the reason is that links to the old pages has some effect on the re-directed pages and Google also said don't do too much of 301 re-directions in their guidelines. in this case site is not following the Google guidelines in one way or other
    • [1] reply
    • Then redirect it to a dummy site and recreate the landing page?
  • Can someone give my the steps how to achieve this with WP install with Clickbump theme? I have like a microniche site that got hit with 10 pages of content and pretty much all my links were to the homepage url. I also had BMR posts that got deindexed so that might been an issue as well why my sites got hit, but then again BMR posts that got deindexed did not affect my client's site one bit. In fact the client's site moved up a few spots after the Penguin update.

    But anyways if someone can let me know what steps to take achieve this since I'd like to test this out on one domain at first and see what results I get before testing on other domains that got hit.
  • Now here's a question.. what will you do with the old URL/page that got hit? Do you remove it from the site (delete).

    Google will not remove a page from its index if you do not request a removal through WMT.
    • [1] reply
    • I think the point is to change the url but leave the content. Even though it is the same content the changed url will then make its link profile 100% fresh and you can rebuild.

      Bu pointing the old urls to the home page you are hopefully merging so many keywords that it will clutter the percentages and hopefully google will unpenalize the home page
      • [1] reply
  • Banned
    no 301 redirection is going to work here, if you change your url then you are wasting lots of effort you have made previously, as it would completely be out of SEO track.

    Penguin is a little change and it is helpful to the internet community also, the importance is given on developing content and building natural links.

    You need to avoid keyword stuffing in anchor text, try to have different-different anchor text and keep building links as you were doing before.

    Try to make anchor text with main point of your page, bold section, which is closely related to your main keyword, your main keyword would be considered from meta title and heading, if you are building links on other anchor text it would automatically give benefit to your main keyword.

    Apart from all these, there is some changes, which are:

    Marketing Signal
    Social Signal
    Authority Signal

    If you managed to put your site link on authority sites, high quality classifieds sites, very active forums, social sites, would help a lot.
    • [1] reply
    • Well we will see. i think the true legacy of penguin will be its effect in concert with negative seo.

      The combination of bad links and anchor text overoptimization could easily mean exponential negative seo capabilities particularly to a non-homepage url
  • I'm going to give this a shot, but was wondering how I would go about this using my Wordpress site structure.

    Right now I have permalinks as category/postname. I was thinking why not just remove the category for the url. But what I find is that I am automatically re-directed to my new URL without the 301. The same thing occurs if I rename my category and leave the permalink structure as is. Doesn't this transfer my penalties to the new URL?

    Just wondering if I am going about this the right way.

    Thanks!
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    How to fight the Penguin!

    As I provide seo services I talk with a lot of people who do the same and we cooperate on many fronts and yeah same like everyone here, a lot of our sites and clients sites have been hit by the latest update. As Yukon previously mentioned it might be worth it to change the url of a page when only the specific page has been hit/penalized. We tried and it worked, got the page back for that keyword at #2 above Google Places in less then a week.