How to Recover From Penguin 2.0 ?

Google’s first or we can say initial Penguin update was rolled out in April 2012, after Panda. Since then Google released many versions of Penguin. Penguin is totally different from Google Panda update as it penalizes webmasters for only thin and duplicate content, Whereas Penguin penalizes webmasters for linkspam or we can say duplicate or irrelevant link to their websites. The latest version of Penguin rolled out on 22^nd May, 2013 which impacted the minds of many webmasters about how their websites are going to be affected this time by Penguin 2.0. Penguin 2.0 is much advanced and comprehensive which goes far beyond than initial Penguin or Penguin 1.0 update as Penguin 1.0 looks only for your homepage links but Penguin 2.0 will monitor your internal links as well. 
If you are new to this, please go through my previous article on:

• What is Google Penguin and what are its functions?

It seems that Google is increasing relevancy to the content of the websites which links to you giving more weightage to them and reducing relevancy on Anchor Text. So, if your website’s rankings and traffic dropped suddenly after the released date of Penguin 2.0. Surely you have been hit by it.  These all results from bad or blackhat SEO practices. It’s the correct time to scrutinize your link profile. There are some best methods which we will adopt to recover from Penguin 2.0, let’s see how?

Steps to recover from Penguin 2.0.

There are basically three methods which we will adopt to recover from Penguin 2.0.

      (1)   Link Analysis

      (2)   Identifying Harmful Links

      (3)   Removing Harmful and Suspicious links.

Link Analysis- The first and foremost step which we have to take in overcoming Penguin 2.0 is to perform a deep link analysis. Links analysis refers to deep lookup of all the links which points to your site, to determine what links harms you or make your site caught by Penguin 2.0 update.

         

      

      (a)    Firstly we have to download the list of all inbound links which points to our website. You can do this via Google Web Master Tools and many other online tools which are available free of cost, just use them to download your link list. I have already written an article on 

• How to check Backlinks of your blog? 

  

      

       (b)    Anchor Text- So, you have downloaded your link list, keep it aside, we will use it in step no 2 i.e. “Identifying Harmful links”. Now use the tools mentioned in above article to see if your Anchor texts are over optimized or I mean to say that if you are punished for over optimizing your Anchor texts. From over optimization, I mean to say that if majority of links pointing back to you are using your targeted keywords. Most SEO experts believe that your site or blog should contain 60% genuine or branded keywords (ex- bloglution); only 20% keywords for which you want to rank for (ex- SEO) and another 20% are miscellaneous such as click here, source etc.

Just go to the ‘Anchor text’ tab in the online tools which are listed in above article, this will clear if there’s a problem with your anchor text.

Identifying Harmful Links- The second step towards recovering your website is Identification of harmful links. If we are able to identify which links are harmful for our site, half of our work has been done. Now the question arises which links are to be considered as Harmful. All links are to be considered as harmful which posses the following characters:-

•       Links from inappropriate website. (ex- adult or porn sites)

•       Links coming from irrelevant sites.

• ·     Backlinks generated using Blackhat methods.

• ·     Paid links from link farm (site created only for SEO).

• ·     Links created using other methods such as link scheme or link wheel.

If some links are coming to your site from an unrelated site, it’s not a matter to worry but make sure they don’t make up the majority.

Pagerank is another aspect of a website which helps us to recognize that if a website is of good quality or not. If we get a lower or no pagerank of a website, it’s not necessary that its quality is low but it can be a new site and on the other hand if an old website posses a lower rank or no page rank, definitely it would be a solid sign that it’s a low quality site.

A perfect sign of a bad link is that none of its pages are indexed by Google; it means that its pages are deindexed by Google and definitely you don’t want a deindexed site links back to you.

Now before identifying harmful links I suggest you to create a spreadsheet with some headings such as Website Name, Website URL, Anchor Text, Email, other contact details. Now use the link list which we have downloaded earlier for analysis and note down the details of bad links in the spreadsheet which will use in step no 3 “Removing Harmful Links”.

For building quality Backlinks refer to my previous article :-

• 5 Best ways to build quality backlinks ?

Removing Harmful and Suspicious Links- Now you have looked your link profile and identified bad or harmful links which needs to be removed. So now, start Contacting different webmasters with details and request them to remove your unwanted links. I know this is a tough job but you have to do it. If you are unable to get contact details of some webmasters, lookup their domains with different free domain tools generally it starts with admin@domain.com etc

Google Disavow Tool- Last but not the least, don’t worry if you have a huge no of spammy or bad links and requesting webmasters become a headache for you. We have Google’s ultimate tool left with us which is Google disavow tool, but use it as a last resort because using it incorrectly may harm your site’s performance. Use only if you have considerable number of artificial, spammy and low quality links.

•  How to use Google's Disavow Tool?

Penguin spam report form- It is also released by Google, so if you are seeing spammy websites ranking in your niche, you can send them one.

Google reconsideration requests- Reconsideration request forms are also available after Penguin 2.0. So, if you want than you can send one to them.

Wait and Watch

So, if you have taken all the steps which are mentioned above, it’s the time to wait and check if you have recovered your rankings or not and let me know also.

You might also like: 

• What are Google search Algorithms and their functions?

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Article by Sandeep Gupta

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