I think I've been hit by Penguing - Strategy Discusson

[MangoMan16]

Hi,

I have a network of 50 to 60 domain names which have duplicated content and whose domains are basically a geographical location + the industry I am in.

All of these websites have links to my main site. Over the weekend I saw my traffic fall. I attribute our drop in rankings to what people are calling Penguing 1.1.

I want to keep my other domains as we are slowly creating unique content for each of those sites. However, in the mean time, clearly I need to deal with the inbound linking and anchor text problem. Would adding a nofollow tag to all links that point to my main site resolve my issue with Google's penguin update?

Thanks for the help.

[Nobody1560986989723]

Your problem started with 50-60 domains with duplicate content - why do this? If you are working in different geographical regions then honour those places by giving them some unique content to justify your presence in the local search results.

I'd either nofollow or remove the link to your main websites as you have essentially 50-60 identical websites linking to your website - so, from Google's perspective, why should they improve your rankings?

Do a search across the Q&A's as there are loads of threads on Penguin recovery but in short it's about doing positive things

• Un-spammify any of your pages - so any on-page/site issues must be resolved (In your case, this means changing your unique content problem)
• Do positive link building
• Ensure a natural anchor text profile
• Don't seek any quick fixes.

Unfortunately for you that may mean changing 60 sites, but as that's where your problem started, that's where your clean-up starts.