Website Hit by Penguin Update Rising Back From The Dead?

[William.Lau]

Good job in recovering.

If you were effected by penguin, there are a few things you have to consider.

You can have been effected and notified by Google in GWT that your site has a unnatural link profile thus they are penalizing you till they are removed.

Another is that the penguin update caused your's link profile to be less valuable thus pushing down your rankings.

If you did remove those links, it should be a reason why rankings have increased to near or close to where they were before.

Another thing is that even though someone hacked the site, Google won't go penalize you for it. If you removed all the harmful malicious things, they won't punish you. As to the porn and warez links, they are usually and mostly nofollow links.

Continue removing any and all bad links and continue link building and your ranking will improve. Getting from 2nd page to 1st page can hugely increase your traffic.

[eyepaq]

Congratz on the recovery. Can you share more on the service you've used to remove the links ? (process and all).

Thanks.

[sbrault74]

Honestly, I did nothing but ask the SEO company to remove the links.

This wasn't one of my most lucrative websites so I stopped updating it and focused on the most lucrative ones.

Come to think of it, I also removed a WP plugin which added keywords from incoming searches to the sidebar. I was concerned it could be perceived as keyword stuffing by Google.

My website had been hit twice by the Penguin update (1.0 and 1.1).

[sbrault74]

I used the same company that had built the links (submitcomfort.com). They charged me $250 to do so but this isn't only for the website discussed here, it's for 4 of my websites.

It was easier this way as they had access to the accounts they used to post the articles / backlinks (articlesfactory.com, articlealley.com, etc.)

[sbrault74]

Did you send a reconsideration request to Google? => No

[MarieHaynes]

I'm confused.  Did you have an unnatural links warning in your WMT?  Did you have a warning of malware in your WMT?

I'm guessing this is more to do with the porn on your site and recovery was connected to the removal.

With that being said, there are some grumbles around the SEO forums of something going on.  It certainly is possible that a Penguin refresh is happening, but no official word yet.

[sbrault74]

No I didn't get the unnatural links warning in WMT but that was at the time Google didn't send any warnings (late April 2012). Google started to send warning only in late June I think.

[sbrault74]

By the way, the website wasn't even ranking in the top 10 positions for it's own brand name... Now it's back to #1 and all it's social networking pages (FB page, Twitter page, etc.) are following just after.

[Webrevolve]

Interesting to hear a possible positive story of a site begining to recover from Google changes.

It sound like you have taken some positive action in rectifying the issues you became aware of, which is what Google is saying webmasters should do - so well done.

It would seem Google has picked up on this and re-indexed the site accordingly.

[MarieHaynes]

If it wasn't ranking for it's brand name it certainly sounds like a manual penalty rather than Penguin.

Regarding the unnatural links messages Google definitely did start sending them before June of 2012.  The big batch of 700,000 that got sent out to people happened in Jan/Feb 2012.

I'm thinking that there was something else going on here such as a malware issue, accidental noindexing, a robots.txt problem or something else.  Another possibility is if there was a duplicate content issue.  For example, let's say there was a lot of text on your homepage that was duplicated elsewhere.  Then, if the issue was corrected you could have regained your rankings.

At this point, really, it's a mystery, but the good news is that you are ranking again!  Woohoo!

[AndreVanKets]

Link Research tools by Chris Cemper has just released a "link detox tool" that you can use once for a tweet.

It highlights the most suspect links (based on a number of factors) making it "quick and easy" to identify dodgy pages with links to your site

Our websites haven't been hit by any penalties, but there are over 100 suspect links reported that i will manually go through to confirm, and then send removal requests where necessary.

http://www.linkresearchtools.com/news/link-detox-clean-backlink-profile/

[sbrault74]

There were indeed some duplicate content issues as I set a lot of pages to "noindex" (I forgot to mention this earlier).

That said, the website was hit on April 24 so I assume that the Penguin update was the major cause of drops in rankings.

[usef4u]

@marie I don't think it's a penguin update happening now, it might be a panda refresh, as last week itself matt cuts said next penguin update will be after few months because it's an early stage. Check seoroundtable's blog about it

[MarieHaynes]

I think you could be right.  I've seen a lot of people saying their SERPS are moving (either up or down) and of course everybody starts to wonder if something is happening Penguin wise.  But as the day moves on, I'm seeing more Panda related issues in the forum than Penguin.