Hit by Penguin 2.0

[pri391]

Hi,

The site I'm working on seems to have been suffered from the Penguin 2.0 algorithmic update. It used to rank at position 1 for its top traffic term (which is very competitive) but now ranks at position 12. The traffic seems to have dropped since 22^nd May 2013 when the update rolled out.

There aren't any dodgy backlinks to the site. The only two things that changed just a month before Penguin 2.0 were –

• The meta title, description and H1 of the site’s homage changed
• The site received about 30,000+ backlinks from its parent site which sits on a different domain. These links were as a result of the site being included as part of the parent site’s main navigation which appears site wide. The parent site is a reputed and authority site. So I don’t understand why Google would penalise the site for acquiring links from its parent site (even though they are site wide links). Also, the links acquired from parent's site were not just homepage links but also links to some of its other deeper pages.

Can somebody please suggest if they've had any similar experience and suffered the Penguin 2.0’s wrath?

Any suggestions or solutions, most welcome. Should I be thinking of nofollowing those links? Should I submit a reconsideration request to Google?

Many Thanks

Pri

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Pri,

First off let me say I'm sorry to hear that you're having to deal with this.

There is a tool called http://www.removeem.com

This is made by a company that is endorsed by Moz called http://www.virante.org

So I know it's a quality company. I have had some success myself and helping clients remove links prior to asking Google to disavow the ones that cannot you removed at all. With this tool.

I hope this will help shed some light on the issue. In addition this has a full-service option as well as a do-it-yourself option. My opinion would be to lean towards the full-service option where you have www.virante.org essentially helping you.

Other fantastic firms for this http://distilled.net ,  http://www.portent.com , http://www.seerinteractive.com & http://Internetmarketingninjas.com

I know this is never a fun thing to do and it is not inexpensive to do it the right way nor is it anything you can do overnight. However I do strongly recommend using a firm that knows what they're doing when you do this. Because Google is so finicky about who they actually release from their penalties.

Please let me know if I can be of any more help to you. I am sorry that you're going through this.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS

Hi Pri,

I am sorry I did not get any opportunity to paste everything I had written into this. Can you tell me first have you received the penalty for the parent domain as well as your current domain?

We are talking about two domains correct just wanted to be sure sorry for all the questions

If you know follow links it is effective in certain circumstances and others it is completely ineffective. For instance if you started a new domain and wanted to 301 redirect with a no follow or 302 redirect this would not help you.

If you have the ability to know all of these links I would strongly recommend deleting them instead of no following them Google is going to look at it and essentially assess all the issues and unfortunately they are not very forgiving with these things. Unless it looks like you put in a lot of hard work and trying to terminate the links that they had asked you to get rid of it will be very hard to get the penalty removed.

I have done for these so far and I can tell you in all honesty I don't envy your position. It is truly a long work and Google want you to show the work almost like in math class if you could figure it out you're head that  got you in trouble because "you didn't show your work" by putting it down on paper.

[MagicDude4Eva]

I don't believe that the parent backlinks have caused a drop in ranking. My first port of call would be to check Google Webmaster toolkit to ensure that you do not have any errors as part of the crawling or indexing.

I would also check keywords via SEOMoz and would then analyse who (and possibly why) took over the top ranking spots. The nofollow will not help you and the backlink removal also not (unless you have received backlinks of non-reputable sources).

[BlueprintMarketing]

If none of the back links are dodgy and if you say. Or bad. I would strongly suggest that you explained to Google how you got 30,000 links in one day. I'm sure that could trigger a response like this. Remember they are not always 100% correct every time

It is definitely worth going through those 30,000 back links and making sure that the anchor text is the way it should be along with the ratio of good to bad links

Changing your age one tag I do not believe would create this type of trouble for you. I do suggest paying for a month of

http://www.removeem.com

Their current deal and please don't think I'm trying to promote this company over any other it's the only Moz approved company that I have actually personally had luck with this well however I know this is a good price.

analyze incoming links from 3 sources 
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Only $499 $249 per website!

http://www.removeem.com/video-tutorial.php

888-906-2058 that way you will actually know exactly what you're getting.

The $249 seems to be what I remember as you can see I said under $300. However maybe their prices have gone up I do not know. This seems like a pretty good deal and I would at least give them a call

Or calling them up and actually asking them to do a quick evaluation on your website. Believe it or not they're actually extremely helpful with that. And the price of the tool if you use it is under 300 a month. I know that's not dirt cheap however this will give you a lot very good information in my opinion on what is and what is not a good link in Google eyes.

If you can do it evaluation with that tool and with 30,000 links it will separate the good from the bad for you very quickly as opposed to using open site Explorer and having to go one by one.

"The site received about 30,000+ backlinks from its parent site which sits on a different domain. These links were as a result of the site being included as part of the parent site’s main navigation which appears site wide. The parent site is a reputed and authority site. So I don’t understand why Google would penalise the site for acquiring links from its parent site (even though they are site wide links). Also, the links acquired from parent's site were not just homepage links but also links to some of its other deeper pages."

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LDSVAwlFf7c

[pri391]

Thanks Thomas for taking your time in responding to this. The parent domain hasn't seen any changes and as I mentioned earlier, the parent site is an authority site and a reputed domain so I don't see the links from that domain as spammy. So not sure if I should be removing those links as they are there for convenience of our customer so we shouldn't really have to remove them just because the linking is between two separate domains. I take your point of contacting Google for reconsideration though.

[pri391]

Thanks Gerd. Yes, that's what I feel as well but the timing of traffic drop coincides with the Penguin rollout.

Unfortunately, we didn't have Google Webmasters set up for that site so have missed out on important notifications from Google.

I'm thinking whether sending a reconsideration request to them is going to do any good or not.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi, I would not go as far as to make a request to Google for reconsideration simply because you don't know if you have no way of knowing if you have been affected by a manual penalty or not.

Sign up for Google Webmaster tools if you haven't already. And then make sure that they do and index of your entire site. I believe they would then send you the penalty immediately if they had assessed one to your website.

You're linking through two domains are you doing it for any other reason aside from the links?

If yes there is I'm doing this for any other reason other than to help and users then unfortunately Google will frown on the actions I do not know how relevant the first site is to the second site. So I would not be able to tell you if it is maybe because the second site is not relevant in all the first site which could be completely spam free

I would check the relevancy of the back links from the parents like to the new site and make sure that there are 100% relevant and at least helpful to that website that will tell you if you have an issue or not.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Google has not sent you anything right?

If not please have the site looked at before making changes

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools/link-depth-analysis

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools/duplicate-content

Look the best you can using

http://www.virante.org/seo-tools

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