My Penguin Recovery Attempt

[cbielich]

So I have decided today to attempt to beat the odds and try and do a full recovery from the Penguin Update. I am going to create a Google Doc in which I will make public and link at the end of this post for all of you to see.

I am going to meticulously go through a massive back link audit of my site and try to see if I can recover from my loss of some of my main keywords back from April 24th.

I want to clarify that I DID NOT get effected from Penguin 2.0, but  I did from 1.0 and have not recovered since. I have to be honest I feel like I have done everything up to now, but I realized I needed to make this a very long journey into a massive audit into my back link profile which contains thousands of back links which I have been honestly avoiding.

I just want to see if I put the work, I will see the results and maybe it can help others

I will document everything I do in detail as well as dates when I do them. I'm sure there will be plenty of coffee fueled nights of Jibber-Jabber...and I apologize for that ahead of time. I hope at the end there is light and can shed some on others.

I am starting with a blank canvas, so keep checking back on my progress. I generally work at night so you will see most changes in the morning.

Here is the link to my Doc - http://bit.ly/11dUkzc

Wish Me Luck

[MarieHaynes]

I am trying to decide whether Penguin is really penalizing links or whether it just devalues all of the self made links it can detect.  I have a question.  For your site, do you have many naturally earned links?  If not, removing backlinks may not do anything.

[jesse-landry]

YES I am wondering this too. I'd kind of like to see him do it without natural links (or somebody) to test this theory. I hope it's true. It would just mean that we can focus entirely on proper content and link building and forget about poison links altogether!

Since Penguin 2.0 is an overhaul though (right?) it should technically overwrite whatever damage was done from 1.0... by theory? So my next question would be, OP - Did you see any changes at all last night? even bumped up or down a couple spots for targeted keywords?

[cbielich]

I have many natural earned links, thousands of them actually.

But I do have spammy rich anchor text links as well that I created years ago.

My goal is to analyze every link I have manually by visiting each one of them. I am going to create a checklist tonight of what process I will determine to detect spam. I do code so I might make a tool for myself that can help me find things quicker.

Like the purpose of this endeavor is to see through all attempts I can come up with to get myself out of the Penguin Hold. I am so determined to do this its crazy

I am willing to spend whatever time it takes even if what I do, does nothing. Then at least I know what doesn't work and move on to the next.

[MarieHaynes]

Do you know where you were ranking before you started building the spammy links?

[cbielich]

I do. I have screenshots and stuff already. I will post them soon.

[MarieHaynes]

I might be missing something, but according to ahrefs you have followed links from 125 domains.  If the majority of those are spam links then there are likely not a lot of good quality links.  I would think that to compete against big brand names like Hasbro and Merriam-Webster it is going to take a lot more than that to rank.

[cbielich]

I am not competing against those sites, and prior to Penguin I was ranking almost 1st page on some keywords that I lost.

My goal here is to recover the ranking on particular keywords I had that I lost from Penguin 1.0

[jesse-landry]

I think what Marie is saying is that there is a disparity here somewhere. You say you have thousands of natural links, yet you only are showing 125 referring domains... Same thing on OSE *only 79 referring listed there but that's normal for ahrefs to have a more complete vision. Still not a ton of links.. I'm wondering if you would see improvement just by building some great content and gaining new relevant links..

[cbielich]

I see what you are saying, I was referring to total links. Not domains