manny521
Supreme Member
- Sep 15, 2011
- 1,449
- 370
Woke up today and ran my SERPs and what do you know, most of my rankings have returned pre-penguin...
Did google run a penguin refresh? Maybe, its been a little over a month since penguin 1.0 (April 24th)...
Seriously, I started to weep like a child after I saw the increase in rankings...I could not be happier...
Has anyone else experienced this?
So, the obvious question all of you will have is what did I do to escape penguin?
I did four things over the past month and I don't know if these things are what pulled me out of penguin, but I will state them here b/c this is an obvious question that will be asked.
1. I have been building an authority site and currently it has a little over 1,000 indexed pages, prior to penguin I did not interlink any of these pages. I had been studying what characteristics an authority site had and one of the biggest characteristics is that an authority site has super strong interlinking between most/if not all pages on the site. My template for this was looking at wikipedia and noticing the super heavy interlinking between all of its pages. Pull up any page in wikipedia and you will notice the heavy interlinking. For full disclosure, I have only completed the interlinking on about half the pages as I am doing this by hand. There are some wordpress plugins that automate this and I used one briefly, but it didn't do as much interlinking as I wanted or could be doing so I uninstalled the plugin and proceeded to start this by hand. Also, I started to heavily add outbound links to other authority sites in my niche, I even linked to my competitors, I gave the google bot some link love.
2. Major diversification of anchor text. Used my brand name for the site in most if not all of my anchor text. And never used any "money" keywords.
3. Prior to Panda 3.3 (Feb 17th, yes I received unnatural links message and -50 penalty then, and recovered all of my long tail keywords and was on good trajectory on short tails and then penguin hit (April 24th) and destroyed everything), most if not all of my link building has aimed at five of my money pages and there was a very big imbalance between links to money pages versus links to the other pages on my site which are informative about the program I sell, so what I have been doing is trying to create more links to my other pages so there is a greater balance of links to all the pages on my site. There is still a great imbalance so I don't know how much this would of helped in what occurred today.
4. I decreased my keyword density on my money pages, I don't know what the percentages were before I decreased the frequency of keywords and I don't know what it is now, but I decreased the number of times the keyword was mentioned. Did this help? I don't know, I think my pages were more naturally written with the higher frequency of keywords, but I did this b/c I was reading so many people mention it that I thought I would give it a try.
A couple other things to note, after penguin hit, all my pages were not displaying correctly for their keywords, for example, my blue widget page was showing when someone would google for the red widget product I was selling. This has changed today, now proper pages are showing when customers do the appropriate search term. You might ask, what did you do to correct this? I have no fucking idea, I didn't do anything, I think that was all on google, so ask them.
My opinion is that penguin only affects certain pages on your site as most of my blog posts target super super super long tails and all of those pages were never affected by penguin, it was only my money pages where 99% of my links were built.
Lastly, this could be a flash in the pan, one time ranking increase so I could of written this all in vain only to see that all my rankings crash again. If this happens, I will probably weep like a child again, but I feel good today so I am going to go with this feeling for now.
Did google run a penguin refresh? Maybe, its been a little over a month since penguin 1.0 (April 24th)...
Seriously, I started to weep like a child after I saw the increase in rankings...I could not be happier...
Has anyone else experienced this?
So, the obvious question all of you will have is what did I do to escape penguin?
I did four things over the past month and I don't know if these things are what pulled me out of penguin, but I will state them here b/c this is an obvious question that will be asked.
1. I have been building an authority site and currently it has a little over 1,000 indexed pages, prior to penguin I did not interlink any of these pages. I had been studying what characteristics an authority site had and one of the biggest characteristics is that an authority site has super strong interlinking between most/if not all pages on the site. My template for this was looking at wikipedia and noticing the super heavy interlinking between all of its pages. Pull up any page in wikipedia and you will notice the heavy interlinking. For full disclosure, I have only completed the interlinking on about half the pages as I am doing this by hand. There are some wordpress plugins that automate this and I used one briefly, but it didn't do as much interlinking as I wanted or could be doing so I uninstalled the plugin and proceeded to start this by hand. Also, I started to heavily add outbound links to other authority sites in my niche, I even linked to my competitors, I gave the google bot some link love.
2. Major diversification of anchor text. Used my brand name for the site in most if not all of my anchor text. And never used any "money" keywords.
3. Prior to Panda 3.3 (Feb 17th, yes I received unnatural links message and -50 penalty then, and recovered all of my long tail keywords and was on good trajectory on short tails and then penguin hit (April 24th) and destroyed everything), most if not all of my link building has aimed at five of my money pages and there was a very big imbalance between links to money pages versus links to the other pages on my site which are informative about the program I sell, so what I have been doing is trying to create more links to my other pages so there is a greater balance of links to all the pages on my site. There is still a great imbalance so I don't know how much this would of helped in what occurred today.
4. I decreased my keyword density on my money pages, I don't know what the percentages were before I decreased the frequency of keywords and I don't know what it is now, but I decreased the number of times the keyword was mentioned. Did this help? I don't know, I think my pages were more naturally written with the higher frequency of keywords, but I did this b/c I was reading so many people mention it that I thought I would give it a try.
A couple other things to note, after penguin hit, all my pages were not displaying correctly for their keywords, for example, my blue widget page was showing when someone would google for the red widget product I was selling. This has changed today, now proper pages are showing when customers do the appropriate search term. You might ask, what did you do to correct this? I have no fucking idea, I didn't do anything, I think that was all on google, so ask them.
My opinion is that penguin only affects certain pages on your site as most of my blog posts target super super super long tails and all of those pages were never affected by penguin, it was only my money pages where 99% of my links were built.
Lastly, this could be a flash in the pan, one time ranking increase so I could of written this all in vain only to see that all my rankings crash again. If this happens, I will probably weep like a child again, but I feel good today so I am going to go with this feeling for now.
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