Hi,
I have a site that was hit by the Penguin algo change and decided that it was time to try to get to the bottom of what had caused the penalty and what I could do to recover from it. The other main driving factor was that I wanted to ensure that I didn't make the same mistakes again.
The best resources I found for explaining what caused the penalty was this http://searchengineland.com/study-g...thm-triggered-by-fewer-links-over-time-152213.
After doing some analysis with Majestics site explorer I decided that it was lack of anchor text diversity combined with a poor backlink strategy (over 50% of the backlinks were targeting just three pages on the site).
Next I looked at what could be done to rectify the situation, this was a great article to help with that http://seofen.com/google-penalty-step-by-step-recovery-tips/.
Removing offending backlinks is not an option as most were created using services bought on BHW so my strategy is going to be to get lots more backlinks with a greater anchor text diversity and dilute the affect of the existing links.
This should be a lesson to anyone planning their backlinking strategy and also to service providers on BHW, from what I can see it is critical that no more than 40% of the anchor text targets the keywords on a site the rest should be generic anchor text, also link diversity should be taken in to account in regards to where the backlinks are coming from.
I know there isn't anything particularly new here but it may be helpful to some of you.
Gone are the days when you could spam a site to death and expect to get decent SERPS, a clear strategy needs to be put in place and most importantly you need to keep track of your overall campaign. This is where I went wrong with the site that got hit, I lost track of exactly what I had done with it, I was buying services on BHW and thinking that everything combined was improving the sites ranking when behind the scenes some of what I was doing was actually slowly killing the site.
In future I will be using services that can provide good link & anchor text diversification and will probably restrict my keyword anchors to no more than 20% of the total.
Interestingly although the site was hit the blog which carries numerous articles & press releases relating to the sites products was not and still maintains page one positions for many of the keywords, at least that has helped maintain most of the traffic.
Over the next few months I will be working to recover this site by diluting the current keyword focused backlinks down to around 30% and hopefully it will be back to its former page 1 position. I will be logging everything I do so I will be able to see what works and what doesn't and will update here when I have something interesting that has happened.
I have a site that was hit by the Penguin algo change and decided that it was time to try to get to the bottom of what had caused the penalty and what I could do to recover from it. The other main driving factor was that I wanted to ensure that I didn't make the same mistakes again.
The best resources I found for explaining what caused the penalty was this http://searchengineland.com/study-g...thm-triggered-by-fewer-links-over-time-152213.
After doing some analysis with Majestics site explorer I decided that it was lack of anchor text diversity combined with a poor backlink strategy (over 50% of the backlinks were targeting just three pages on the site).
Next I looked at what could be done to rectify the situation, this was a great article to help with that http://seofen.com/google-penalty-step-by-step-recovery-tips/.
Removing offending backlinks is not an option as most were created using services bought on BHW so my strategy is going to be to get lots more backlinks with a greater anchor text diversity and dilute the affect of the existing links.
This should be a lesson to anyone planning their backlinking strategy and also to service providers on BHW, from what I can see it is critical that no more than 40% of the anchor text targets the keywords on a site the rest should be generic anchor text, also link diversity should be taken in to account in regards to where the backlinks are coming from.
I know there isn't anything particularly new here but it may be helpful to some of you.
Gone are the days when you could spam a site to death and expect to get decent SERPS, a clear strategy needs to be put in place and most importantly you need to keep track of your overall campaign. This is where I went wrong with the site that got hit, I lost track of exactly what I had done with it, I was buying services on BHW and thinking that everything combined was improving the sites ranking when behind the scenes some of what I was doing was actually slowly killing the site.
In future I will be using services that can provide good link & anchor text diversification and will probably restrict my keyword anchors to no more than 20% of the total.
Interestingly although the site was hit the blog which carries numerous articles & press releases relating to the sites products was not and still maintains page one positions for many of the keywords, at least that has helped maintain most of the traffic.
Over the next few months I will be working to recover this site by diluting the current keyword focused backlinks down to around 30% and hopefully it will be back to its former page 1 position. I will be logging everything I do so I will be able to see what works and what doesn't and will update here when I have something interesting that has happened.
