Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Local - My site was severely hit by Panda 3.5 and Penguin 1.0.   Bing results held steady.  Eventually a slight decline in Bing but I attribute it to the loss of the FB Likes that resulted from my taking a break in the "community" (think "Free Beer") and taking a break from developing IBL's, new postings, etc.

As a Penguin victim, I believe what you're recommending is not enough to be safe.   I was even penalized for using my name as the anchor text.  Some of the sites where I used my name might have been unrelated and a few might have been moderated too loosely but the high degree of danger greatly outweighs any benefit.  Whatever you do, do NOT point the links at your homepage!  Other people seem to believe there is a benefit but it's probably too marginal to be worth the time required and the risks.

Penguin attacks rankings of the pages which ranked for searches where the links that caused the penalty were pointed.  So, you could have a home page that is penalized (b/c the offending links pointed to the home page and the offending links contain high traffic terms) and some, all or none of the individual pages in the blog.  The wild (temporary) fluctuations in the SERP results might be Panda related.

You probably omitted the "www" prefix.  (Without the prefix, OSE says DA = 1).

I searched first with the "www" and came up with the same numbers as Dana.

Francisco raises some excellent points.  In evaluating the risk of the link being bad -- I'd avoid sites that are filled primarily with  "guest posts" or have much (perhaps no more than 10 %) "off topic" posts and also consider how close (or far) the topics are "off topic" on the blog you're considering contributing too.   Many websites feature almost entirely guest blogged stuff but remain consistently close in the topic.   Most that accept lots of guest contributions seem to be no better than the old BMR sites (i.e., lots of off topic stuff).   I expect the day is not very far away when only the strongest sites which consist primarily of guest posts pass along much juice.   My $. 02

@ Bizzer -  I don't disagree with what you're saying.  The issue is more complex and isolating one factor (even a major factor such as duplicate content issues) is often very difficult to do if you are comparing small sites with very large ones such as Mashable of HuffPo.  Mr. Cutts has avoided answering whether non-analytics data about time on site is a ranking factor.  I believe it is.  Many other factors favor larger "high authority" sites.  Even if you select better material and make more useful editorial comments about it (as evidenced by better time on site), G is going to favor the larger sites.

@ Marie : I agree with you about much of what I'm observing about guest blogging.  I get neg'd whenever I say so.  Many people must disagree.  But G appears to be culling the heard of sites.  (I expect this trend to continue and the price of entry into the game to continue to steadily increase). The sites that post a couple of articles a day utilizing entirely guest authored blogs who are likely to be devalued substantially in the next 1 - 2 years regardless of their DA/PA or psuedo-PR.

@ SEO Bunny - It's increasingly coming down to who you know.   I'd start by approaching my friends within my industry who also have blogs.   Although the stats of many of these sites are quite low (I'm not a prof. SEO), some of them may improve over time and the contextual links will be HIGHLY relevant to both sites because both of the sites concern the same fairly narrow topic. In a sense, these links are "harder" to get.  There will be few OBL's to brand sites because of the level of trust / personal relationship required.

Ryan - Thanks for taking the time to discuss Penguin recovery.  Your initial thread and follow-up Moz article were very informative.   On a lighter note, I moderate all of the comments to my blog.   I almost fell out of my chair laughing when an automated spamer targeted the keywords "click here".  LOLZ.  I suppose they were going to use a bot to attempt to spam a more "natural" link profile.  Only one comment like it I've seen and I was tempted to award a small amount of creativity points although their clients are probably being sold a terrible bill of goods about how to acquire a "natural" link profile.

Thanks.  I've watched the video before but it's worth reviewing.  Still seems a bit strange that someone can violate terms of service which G never bothered to enforce for years and get slammed with "Double Secret Probatiion" while a malicious site can clean up and eventually get the penalty lifted.  No doubt a malicious site manual penalty should result in a long time in the penalty box but at least it's obvious what to fix.  There doesn't seem to be a reliable consensus or even many case studies on garden variety Penguin recoveries yet.  Not knowing what Dean Wormer wants me to change is irritating.

InHouseSEO - It's not an e-commerce site. (It's a blog with a couple of hundred posts many of which need pruning but many of which are high informative and written by someone with substantial experience in the subject.)

Sounds like you're telling me the best gamble is put in the work on this blog to try to grow the legit links so that the bad ones dip below the "tipping point" which prompts the Penguin attack.  Have you had success with this tactic?

The home page appears to be penalized b/c of keyword rich text from relevant blog comments on mostly relevant blogs/pages. (It's also quite possible it's just a rather severe devaluation 30 or so spots in the SERPs for the EMD keyword).  Other pages are hit or miss but the stronger pages (high bounce but very high times on pages) are beginning to return to some of their former strength (probably 50% of peak traffic).

Site traffic declined just before the 25th (the date that is associated with  Panda 3.5) and resulted in a 20% hit.  After Panda 3.5, the G traffic dove steadily (which I assume is Penguin added to the mix).  Traffic is now off by around 2/3 without excluding the Bing traffic.  (Have probably seen 15 -20% improvement recently with no new posts and only added one authorative directory link (Nat'l Trade Assoc. picked up the blog).

I just reread all of the comments in the thread you linked to.  (Never received a warning in WMT so I assume the penalty is algo.)

Reading your comments, it sounds like you recomment attempting to remove any blog comments that I created. (I don't expect much success based on what people are sharing.

If  my pet Penquin is algorhythmic and isn't scheduled to lift anytime in the next several months, should I try to guest blog my way out of the penalty?  (Assume I have access to decent releveant indy blogs that are low authority but extremely legit.)

Thanks for the reminder to re-read the thread with you and Egol.

InHouseSEO - this is a GREAT question.   I wish there were more discussion of realistic case studies like this one rather than so much "focus" on negative SEO and a handful of high authority sites that were probably hit by mistake.

The consensus seems to be that you can file for lifting a penalty IF you can show you removed bad links AND document the efforts you made to remove the bad links that remain despite your efforts.

Matt Cutts appears to say you're more screwed if the penalty is algorhythmic.  Huh?  Buy BMR links, remove them and escape the penalty G imposed on your site for 50  -100 presumably manual and relevant blog comments?  Gimmee a break!

The 50 -  100 blog comments are probably going to be the worst of the lot to attempt to remove.  Have you had any sucess removing the trash directories?   You might be able to out grow the penalty by developing new links so that the number of suspicious (or bad) links falls below the tipping point.  On a recent WBF, Danny Sullivan opined that Penguin is just a devaluation of the bad links. (Not my opinion but it's an interesting opinion.)    No one has shared results but some people have suggested combining removing links with developing new strong ones.

Penguin is bizarre.  Some of my pages are (very) slowly returning to their former top positions even when some of the bad links point to them.   New pages with extensive content (think 2,000 words of unique/expert content) were among the first 2 - 3 to cover the event but now rank around 120. (Ouch).

I share your suspicion that for many of our sites, it's aggressive use of anchor text.   Developing non-aggressive links may dig us out.  Would love to hear from anyone who had tried this and what results they acheived.

Ben - I agree.   Using a shared hosting service and a CDN provider, 1.5 is probably better than my average load speed especially on pages that have earned extensive comments.  Everyone using shared hosting would be penalized.  Sounds like someone is selling patent medicines to me.

Alan - I haven't seen any postings by anyone who has tried this but several people have suggested this tactic in various forums.  If you try this, please share whether it works.  Given the lack of success in response to deletion requests, a more direct route would be much more effective and preferred if G wants to favor it.

Jamie :  Pls. share what you are able to about G "partially" removing the Penguin penalty.  How extensive & what type of offending links?  How severe was the penaly "-X" or Delisted?  To what extent did G lift the penalty?   Your insights may be useful to many of us who are facing decisions similar to Mr. Partyman.  Thanks.

Riplash & PVB : Thanks for sharing your observation about local.    2 - 3 months ago, I joined a thread and asked whether anyone thought optimizing for local would decrease national search SERP rankings and no one seemed to think it would.  My main site got mauled by B&W critters in April.  So, if I set up a new site to replace it, I'll set up a micro-site optimized for local and move the good local links there rather than to any replacement non-localized site.  Again, thanks for sharing this useful info.

Cesar :

I looked at your Scrabble Dictionary site. (Nice).

I probably wouldn't blog but would spend time trying to involve the user with the site and try to build loyalty or continue to build authentic socials.   (On other info search sites, forums seem to do pretty well and moderating the UGC to exclude spam is far easier than sustaing a blog.)

The scrabble game is buried in a secondary page and takes a LONG time to load.  (The ads for "Buy A Link" which appear to delay the game loading up in Java do not help.)

I'd consider moving the game to the home page or at least makiing it more prominent as a choice on the home page.  Then, I'd consider awarding some sort of prize (a Scrabble game?) to whoever scores the highest on site that month.  If you can restrict the prize to those in your FB community, you'd limit the CPU drain and gain community in FB. (Sort of a take off on EGOL's "Free Beer").

Just my .02 drachma/euro....   We'll see what far more experienced people suggest.

Marie - I share your concerns.

I looked at MBG  1 - 2 months ago and carefully looked at the age of the sites which were seeking guest postings.   The vast majority of these sites were launched right after BMR etc. got delisted.  This did not appear to be a coincidence.

There are a few quality sites with invitations to guest write on MBG.  For that, we should be greatful.  Most of the select sites have strict content requirements which appear to be highly selective. (Think the kind of product that could take someone familiar with the subject 2 - 3 days to do even with the running head start).  For a 50 - 60 site, a small author attribution and no key words in the text seems rather "pricey" in terms of author time.  But, I suspect the stricter blogs are more likely to be around and pass along some authority beyond the next 24 months or so.

I agree with many of the reasons EGOL often states for not guest blogging (why would you ever create a competitor for your keywords by giving someone your valuable content?)   An exception I see is where the content is a "one off".  If you market only residential real estate and there is a quality, high authority website that will accept a great article you wrote about commercial real estate, the trade off between the link and giving up the possible links to your own site becomes more attractive for those of us who are not over the hump and need opportunities for quality IBL's.

The remainder is a rant but I feel like venting my frustration today.

Whether we want to recognize it or not G is culling the heard of websites and will continue to do so for the next couple of years.  The cost of entry and wait required until a site is profitable has increased over the past 2 - 3 years and will continue to climb.  G's algo is weighed toward "high authority" sites written by content writers (not experts and seldom local) rather than weighed towards experts (why not favor blogs written by licensed experts in the searcher's local rather than "about.com" and the like?)

I fear that after G devalues the MBG sites (for whatever reason G makes up), any professional sites which allow others of the same profession to guest blog could easily be deemed an impermissible "network" and would not carry much link juice anyway.

Whatever Penguin is, I will bet many more people on these forums will be affected by the time it reachs Ver 3.5.   G sat on so many violations of its sacred "Terms of Service" for so many years, it would be deemed to have waived them in any private commercial transaction.

Perhaps another search engine which weighs authorship authority on more than "links" from the "abouts" of the www and even weighs in locality more will pick up market share.  I'm not going to hold my breath waiting though.   Selling ads in organic and social is far to profitable to give the traffic away to content providers who are unlikely to advertise.

Zachary : I believe Penguinn attacks for a lot LESS than the volume you're describing especially if there are few powerful links to begin with.

Donnie - Great point about avoiding the Fiverr.  LOL.

Right now, I'm watching competitors stack on modest amounts of FB Likes & Tweets (say 10 - 15) but very few G+'s.  Since Penguin, I believe I'm oberserving more of this sort of optimization.

I've been wondering what the "over / under" is on when the search engines decide "enough social spam", let's penalize them.   Based upon how horribly long it took G to unleash the nasty little Penguin, I'd give it four years.   Probably worth it on a disposable site but I would not set up a flagship site for penalization / fail in the future.

Wianno168 - Did you change anything that you believe may have lead to the partial recovery (from 95 hits to 550-700)?   If so, please describe what you did.