HOW TO IDENTIFY & RECOVER FROM A GOOGLE PENGUIN PENALTY

Shilpi C

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Google Penguin Update• Many businesses have been feeling the unwanted effects of Google’s

recent algorithm updates. In this slideshow, I will discuss how to identify and recover from a Google Penguin update.

• What is Google Penguin Update?

• Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings. When a new Penguin Update is released, sites that have taken action to remove bad links (such as through the Google disavow links tool or to remove spam may regain rankings. New sites not previously caught might get trapped by Penguin. “False positives,” sites that were caught by mistake, may escape.

• The latest Penguin update was rolled on October 4th 2013

Diagnose the ProblemIt is likely that you have been hit by a Google Penguin update if:

• Your website isn’t showing up in Google results for some of your most potential key phrases for which you used to rank in top result pages

• If you’ have seen a drop in sales over the past two quarters and your website traffic has taken a significant hit

How to make sure that this is true?

• First log into your analytics control panel and set the dates from sometime in September 2013 to sometime in November 2013. Did you see a considerable decline in traffic and conversions? That is most likely due to the Google Penguin 2.1 update that went live in October 4th of this year. If organic search traffic dipped around October 5, you might have been hit by the update.

• The next step to verify the penalty is to dig into your Google Webmaster Tools account and verify that you did not receive a huge penalty here for something else (404 errors, 500 errors, HTML improvements etc.). Use Google's new 'Manual actions' tab to see what type of penalty you have (if any).

• You may receive warnings from Google like “Unnatural links warning” which may be something like:

Other Factors for Recognizing a Penalty

• Verify whether your site’s PageRank has dropped significantly since the expected penalty took place.

• Check if the entire website has been removed from Google’s cached search results overnight.

• Running a site search – site:yourdomain.com keyword – yields no results.

• Your listing – when you eventually find it in Google – is for a page on your site other than the home page.

• Your listing – when you eventually find it in Google – is for a page on your site other than the home page.

Tips to Recover from a Penguin Update

• Clean Up Your On-Site and Off-Site Links: When Penguin hits, its essential to review your link portfolio. Start with external links pointing to your site.

• Rebuild Website: Rebuild the link profile of your site by using best practices

Link Clean Up• If you are submitting your site URL to various directories or link farms,

remove those links immediately, and cancel this type of activity in future.

• You may also notice hundreds of other websites linking to yours by logging into Google Webmaster Tools. Download this table of links pointing to your site and analyze every single link. Look out for any spammy sites or links and repeat the process of reaching out to webmasters to request they remove links to your site.

• You may also use the new Google Disavow Tool to clean up your backlink profile by essentially telling Google “ignore these.”

On Site Links Correction• After you are done with the link clean up process with external

links, check your own site. The following points need your attention:

• Do not over optimize with internal links• Do not include a large number of keywords with links (one or two per

blog post are considered as best practice)• Diversify the anchor text• Avoid exact match keywords as anchor texts

Rebuild Link Profile & Start Earning Links

• Once you complete the cleaning of bad links for your site, you need to start utilizing best linking practices to rebuild your links profile.

• Stop link building and start link earning.