[Penguin 3] Partially Successfuly Ongoing Recovery

[Z0mbie]

I had one of my websites in the entertainment niche which had sailed through Penguin 1 and 2, hit by Penguin 3. Since then I've been unsuccessfully trying to bring back the traffic, but a change I made a couple of days ago seems to have had some effect.

As you can see, the traffic dropped to nearly 0 after Penguin 3, and it seems to have starting changing on the 24th, which is when I made the change.

Before now, I've messed around with nearly everything related to the backlink profile, and have made some on-page changes such as Titles, Meta, keyword densities on pages etc.

What I changed on 24th was the URL structure, I cannot go into specific details, but consider it like this:
Main keyword: English Movies XYZ
Semantic Keyword:Hollywood Movies XYZ
Previous URL structure: http://englishmoviesXYZ.com/Hollywood-Movies-XYZ/
New URL Structure: http://EnglishMoviesXYZ.com/XYZ/

I redirected the old URL to the new URLs as well.
/Hollywood-Movies-XYZ/ was a tag, and was noindexed,followed, and linked to from the Main Nav Bar at the top.

I'm going to stick with this for another couple of days and then experiement more with the URL structure, such as completely deleting it, removing "English Movies XYZ" from the site banner at the top(It's text and h1) and update the results here if there is enough interest generated.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Congrats OP, glad to see you made a recovery....

Doesnt WP automatically redirect if you change link structure?

I think there was an older thread floating around here somewhere with similar results. I am not sure if I am remembering this correctly but I think they had similar results and after sometime, the penalty returned. That said, if you continuously change link structure after a penalty will it work again? Would be interesting case study.

 

[cocococo]

give it couple of weeks time OP, the new url will tank.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

give it couple of weeks time OP, the new url will tank.

Thats what others have found but in the meantime if the kw was profitable you get that profit back, question is can you rinse-repeat?

 

[Z0mbie]

Congrats OP, glad to see you made a recovery....

Doesnt WP automatically redirect if you change link structure?

I think there was an older thread floating around here somewhere with similar results. I am not sure if I am remembering this correctly but I think they had similar results and after sometime, the penalty returned. That said, if you continuously change link structure after a penalty will it work again? Would be interesting case study.

I remember it doing that as well but on manually checking it didn't, so I used the Simple 301 redirect plugin to make the redirect.
I haven't seen that thread, do you remember if they changed url structure as well?

1) It still appeared #1 for "englishmoviesXYZ.com" with Sitelinks.
2) It is #1 for "http://englishmoviesXYZ.com" with links at the bottom: http://i.imgur.com/6v4qI.png
BUT it appears #36 when I search for "<Title>"
However, I do not have much experience with identifying penalties, but seeing the "<title>", I think it is.

give it couple of weeks time OP, the new url will tank.

Thats what others have found but in the meantime if the kw was profitable you get that profit back, question is can you rinse-repeat?

The URL that is ranking is the homepage, not the internal pages, if that makes a difference.
I do not care for this site ranking or not, I'm just experimenting with it now.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Thanks for the info, I just went to my WP and reset the permalinks for a penalized site that made it to page 1 for about a week before it got spanked, but in that week it made me $500...only been doing $20-$30 p/week since since it ranks in Bing/Yahoo...

I had the site links setup like this mysite.com/titleofarticle now it is setup mysite.com/date/titleofarticle we will see if the redirection helps at all. Everything is redirecting properly and all I did was push a button, well worth the effort if I can rank again even if its just a couple of weeks.


To answer your question, yes they changed the url structure a few let the redirects happen others let the old urls go to 404 pages but it seemed in all cases it helped for a bit then then went away....

 

[Z0mbie]

Thanks for the info, I just went to my WP and reset the permalinks for a penalized site that made it to page 1 for about a week before it got spanked, but in that week it made me $500...only been doing $20-$30 p/week since since it ranks in Bing/Yahoo...

I had the site links setup like this mysite.com/titleofarticle now it is setup mysite.com/date/titleofarticle we will see if the redirection helps at all. Everything is redirecting properly and all I did was push a button, well worth the effort if I can rank again even if its just a couple of weeks.


To answer your question, yes they changed the url structure a few let the redirects happen others let the old urls go to 404 pages but it seemed in all cases it helped for a bit then then went away....

What was it penalized for? Normal algorithmic penalization or panda or penguin?

The point of my post was that penguin 3 affected or atleast factored in url structures, not that url structures help with penalties, but please do keep me updated with your results.
But then, penguin affected websites only recover with penguin updates, afaik. With that being said, I've seen this website jump all around 200-300 and then back to nowhere several times along with a few other websites I'm monitoring.

I think panda and penguin are going to be merged into a single update and then start working as a normal algorithm rather than refreshes, that just makes sense otherwise it's going to be really easy to exploit google between refreshes

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

I was hit with one of the early penguin updates, bought a slew of packages here once I was in the top 10 as well as a blog network package which obviously got sniffed out. It has come back and forth for some lower value keywords but even those went away. I am guessing its algo based on the on again off again nature of the rankings.

I figure what the heck if it comes back at all it was worth the 10 seconds to change the permalinks and see if that changes things even temporarily...

 

[Z0mbie]

I was hit with one of the early penguin updates, bought a slew of packages here once I was in the top 10 as well as a blog network package which obviously got sniffed out. It has come back and forth for some lower value keywords but even those went away. I am guessing its algo based on the on again off again nature of the rankings.

I figure what the heck if it comes back at all it was worth the 10 seconds to change the permalinks and see if that changes things even temporarily...

I'd love to take a look at that site if you could PM me the url.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Interesting, I have been tracking google US and google Canada (due to me getting some conversions from canada) and whle my main kw is still nowhere suddenly the site appears on page 4 for a long tail version of the keyword. Low searches (just a few hundred p month) but quite a coincidence considering it has been gone for a while. Just figured Id put it out there, I will let you know if I have any more progress....

 

[Jenny30]

I am really glad to see your recovery. Many people don't usually make their way back

 

[masterjani]

Changing url and theme structure sometimes work. Keep informing about your updates

 

[AuthorityDomains]

I suspect the change you made was because of over usage of keywords. Changing the permalinks has helped this. The links to the page, were they mostly using the same anchor text, if so the page made drop eventually.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

I suspect the change you made was because of over usage of keywords. Changing the permalinks has helped this. The links to the page, were they mostly using the same anchor text, if so the page made drop eventually.

according to ahrefs my anchor text is 14% for my main kw and majestic says 5%

 

[_Chip_]

i changed the permalink structure to date/postname from just /postname... i will report back if anything happens in the next week..

 

[Z0mbie]

I suspect the change you made was because of over usage of keywords. Changing the permalinks has helped this. The links to the page, were they mostly using the same anchor text, if so the page made drop eventually.

No, my anchor text ratio is fine.
The URLs that were changed weren't even indexed(Since they were noindex, follow), which is what I find the strangest.

 

[Z0mbie]

Update: I was messing around with the website yesterday to replicate this:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...e-your-search-engine-optimization-reward.html
so I'm pretty sure the rankings are gonna drop again. Makes my website look like it's hacked.

 

[T2tkid]

Hello Getwhatchuwant, what button did you press to change your permalink? Is it a wordpress plugin?

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Hello Getwhatchuwant, what button did you press to change your permalink? Is it a wordpress plugin?

No go to dashboard>setting>permalinks then just select a different one than you had previously. I have had no further movement for now but I will run another report tonight to see if there is ANY movement. Again, I dont see this as a long term fix.

 

[CWonker]

Coming from a base of long term E-commerce site my input may not matter but just some food for thought, if you kept the onsite or on page content exactly 100% the same and just changed the urls with the redirects without adding additional links to that specific page could one concur that this may be a result of over deep linking to that page or perhaps just the ending url tag? Did you 301 redirect the old pages to the new ones?