We haven been hit by penguin 2.0 what to do?

[GTGshops]

Hi,

Last week we got hit bij penguin 2.0. Our sites dropped on most keywords on average 10 places. We had a steady place for 2 to 3 years.

We have site-wide links in the  top of our websites to the other websites ( about 9 e-commerce sites). Today i have put rel= "nofollow " tags in all these links (accept on the hompages). To prevent spammy links.

Is there anything else we can do ?

Url  ww.klokkenpaleis.nl

most important keyword = klokken  ( previous position, 2nd place)

search engine = google netherlands

Thanks a lot for your help.

[TakeshiYoung]

The Penguin updates primarily target sites that have a lot of spammy external links with exact anchor text match.

So if your keyword is "klokken", and a large number of your external links (let's say greater than 40%) use the keyword "klokken" as the anchor text, then Google will think you have an unnatural link profile, and that you're just trying to game the search results.

The only thing to do with Penguin is to remove all the spammy/unnatural links coming to your site. For those links you can't remove, use the disavow tool in Google Webmaster Tools. Then file a reconsideration request, once all the links are removed.

Expect your site not to rank as well even if you recover from the penalty, since you've lost a lot of links. Then it's time to start building links.

[JesusD]

Takeshi,

How would you link for a particular keyword, i.e what should be the anchor text?Some of my sites have been penalized, i dont see much "spammy" links in our profile, i do see over optimized anchor text however.

[GTGshops]

Thanks Takeshi,

I'm going to change the anchor text's, and remove some.

There is one thing is still have a question about, did we get a penalty from google or did we lose the value from the bad links. Is there a way to find this out ?

[TakeshiYoung]

Try to keep anchor text links to 30-40% maximum if you want to steer clear of Penguin. The rest of your anchors should be things like your brand name, your URL, "click here", etc. Look at the link profiles of other sites to see what a more natural profile looks like.

Ultimately you want to avoid links where you have control over anchor text in the first place, and try to attract organic links to your site, which is ultimately what Google wants.