Recovering from an algorithmic bodyslam

[MickEdwards]

Are you sure about the direct algorithmic penalty/penalties, do they tie in with the update release dates and was there significant drops in traffic to identify which update version/s caused the problems?

I've worked on sites where I would describe as suffering the residue of penalties from linking domains, along with masses of on-site technical issues.  Typically organic traffic has declined over a 1-2 year period.

I'm not suggesting you don't clean up your link profile, it is the right thing to do, but you want to be real sure what is causing the immediate problems.

[Boogily]

Thank you for the response Eric. I may have mistyped, there were lots of links through hundreds of domains. It's still a smaller local client in a field with a bad stigma (attorney), but other than OSE and WMT I'm not sure what else I can do to grab all of the incoming links.

If you're suggesting that I should force Google to recrawl the nasty links after 6 months, I'll try anything at this point. How would you recommend doing that?

Thanks again,

[Boogily]

Thank you so much for the thoughful response Wiqas. The thing is, we've done a good amount of good link building as well. There are quality links from relative industries that are just branded (no keyword insertion). There are a lot of government sites, edu, even Harvard (a small no-follow but still).

I apologize for leaving that nugget out of there. With Matt Cutts and his stance on Guest Blogging, we are treading very very carefully. She's in tons of local directories now too. This effort was done right away, and the client surprisingly had some decent backlinks as well, in which we kept.

We continue to press forward for link building, but not sure if that will lift the algorithmic choke hold that is on this site.

Thanks again,

[Boogily]

Hey Michael,

The big slam occurred in late march. It coincides with Panda Update 25. The only other thing that occurred around that time is that the site had a graphic overhaul, getting a new template on the CMS and new graphics. The content stayed the same. The site on the Moz pro dashboard continued to show no errors and a few warnings, nothing major.

For scrubbing on page content, accessibility, etc I use WMT and Moz Pro tools like campaigns, crawling, on page keywords, etc.

Are you having an inkling that there is something else at play? Please let me know, I'll take any help I can get.

Thank you,

[Boogily]

Also, to reassure you I've used the Moz on-page grader for all pages and they all rank at about an A or a B. WIthout stuffing of course.

Thanks for the tip though,

[Boogily]

Here is the latest update.

The rankings have still not recovered. The pages that do rank in the 60-170 SERP for the bad terms are not the pages that are built for that keyword.

So, I dug even further and used ahrefs (great tool). An "ah-hah!" moment came when I noticed the % of incoming anchor text seemed to directly correlate with the SERPs that have been negatively effected. Long of the short, further proof that Penguin has stomped on this site. Those nasty anchor texts have been disavowed a long time ago obviously.

Funny, we have an old Penguin recovery post on this from our site. But we followed that to a "T", and appeared to do the right steps. We can't really disavow anymore, and the link profile that we did not touch is a good one. This site just seems so far down the rabbit hole that at times it feels like we are wasting a lot of valuable time and money. I wonder how much more time we can invest in it (Creating content, getting higher quality links to it).

Has anyone encountered a Penguin attack that they couldn't recover from? Or one that took over 10 months or something like that?

[MickEdwards]

From a cleansing point of view we have to take your word that all relevant links have been removed or disavowed, just having a couple of "dodgy" ones can hold the site back.  When removing links have you manually checked the remaining links - a tool is not really adequate in many cases?

This is an interesting issue that happened to someone - http://moz.com/community/q/disavow-links-leading-to-404

Also,are you sure your disavow file is accumulative and contains ALL URLs?

[Boogily]

We have gobs of spreadsheets. We wanted to keep the good backlinks, so we disavowed all of the "dodgy" ones. It was a disavow on the domain level and it totaled to over 50% of all incoming domains.

As for manually checking the remaining links, the ones that we chose to keep on the spreadsheet are from relative, authoritative niches with minimal exact match keywords, so we chose to keep them. We did manually check every single one too.

We will continue to press on, and I will update here in a month to note progress if any.

Do you know of any way to see if the disavow even took? Is there a way in WMT to see what you have selected for Google not to use when looking at backlinks? http://moz.com/community/q/why-does-gwt-still-show-some-links-from-a-disavowed-domain That link doesn't give me much confidence in finding out if my disavows are even taking effect. It's almost like I have to do it, and throw my hands up in the air and who knows.

[Boogily]

Just an update, the penalty was FINALLY lifted. Our client soared the rankings. WOOT

[MickEdwards]

Good news!