Penguin 2.1: How to recover?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

I know Penguin focuses on links but do you need to personally reach out and try to manually remove the links, or can you simply place the bad links in the disavow tool.

I know for manual penalties you must manually reach out and try to remove and use disavow as an absolute last resort.

Does the same go for algorithm penalties?

Any insight would be helpful.

[RichardSEO]

You are suppose to reach out and have the links removed as disavow is suppose to be used as a last resort tool.

Penguin 2.1 is pretty strange, some of my clients sites got hit, others saw a rise. Whats weirder is that the larger companies (amazon, yelp, yellowpages etc) are dominating the first page. Theres a few local keywords where 8 out of the 10 rankings is yelp!

Anyhow, I think you should let the website sit a week or so and let the dust settle before resorting to disavow. I think Google is just shuffling.

[RobertFisher]

102drive

I think Richard gives some reasonable direction here. So, if you know absolutely you have a problem, you need to take action. If you are seeing some movement in a site(s), don't be too quick to pull the trigger. If the links are from many different domains you have a different problem than if the links are a lot from one or two domains. With a lot of links from a single domain, IMO, you reach out, and see if you can get headway with the owner. Then you use the disavow tool.

When we see outside domains linking to a site, we usually do not get too uptight unless it is one that is going nuts. An example is that we had a directory called pinhub with over 5K links all of a sudden to a single site. We did not in any way engage them nor did the client. For something like that, we immediately use the disavow tool as we know, based on experience, they will not do anything to stop their behavior. Might as well shutdown any negative effect. Note: the links are still going to show, but you are telling Google, you are disavowing the links. We still send the email for our own backup, but we expect nothing from the perpetrators.

Hope that helps,

Robert

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, technically, you're supposed to make a good faith effort to remove the links, but Google isn't clear on how many, how much effort, etc. This seems to hold true for Penguin in addition to manual penalties. Most of the Penguin recovery stories I've head have involved pretty deep cuts, to be brutally honest.