Question for those with sites hit by Penguin...

Does anyone have a site that has less than 50% keyword anchor text that was still hit by Penguin?

I'm sure most of you have seen this article floating around http://www.micrositemasters.com/blo...need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/

They drew a few conclusions based apparently on a large data set.

Something sticks out to me when I look at that article:

1) Not every site that had a high % of anchor text backlinks what hit (I know this already from some of my sites, but it makes point number 2 very interesting)
2) Apparently out of all the sites they track NONE of them that had <50% of their backlinks with keyword anchor text were hit by Penguin.

If that is true, then having a high % doesn't necessarily mean you will be hit, but having a low percent would (according to their data) guarantee you will not be effected by Penguin. Based on the wording of their article, I'm guessing that they count various longtails and keyword variations within that percentage and are only counting things like raw URL, brand, click here, etc as non-keyword anchor texts.

I generally don't do a ton of backlinking to my sites with "click here" though I do some brand and raw URL it's not in THAT quantity in general.

IF their data is correct, it would lead me to believe that there are other factors in play with penguin but the main trigger is a lack of non-keyword anchor texts. If the algorithm deems you lacking in variety there, then the other factors come into play and you may or may not be hit. If the algorithm thinks you have enough non-keyword anchor backlinks then the other factors never even come into play.

Again, this is just a logical examination of the data presented in that article. I don't have enough of a sample size myself of sites that were hit by Penguin to make a judgment call on this.

I'm wondering though if anyone here has a site that contradicts this(it is a whole lot easier to disprove a theory than to look at all the examples that confirm it)? i.e. a site that has at least 50% of its anchor texts consisting of raw urls, "click here", "this site", brand name, etc and yet that site was still significantly dropped by the Penguin update?

Yeah, this theory is possibly true. The thing we need to remember is that google has to take into affect the computing power they have and what strain is undertaken to the system according to what they want the algorithm needs to analyze. This would seem to be very easy for them to compute and analyze without taxing all of their data centers.

The only thing I don't like about this theory is that this is exactly what Panda 3.3 was about + blog networks being taken down. Or, maybe Panda 3.3 was not about anchor text at all and it was all about blog networks exclusively.

If we assume Panda 3.3 was only about the private blog networks then this theory makes even more sense at this point in time.

After Panda 3.3 hit, I made every link that I built de-optimized. I don't know the exact percentage of links I have that point to my site that include my keyword, but before Feb 17th, I think almost all my anchor text had my keywords in it, but with great variation.

The thing that kills me is that it took me 60 days to recover from Panda 3.3 and I was finally back to making the income I had made previous to that update and then almost immediately I git hit again by penguin.

manny521 said:

After Panda 3.3 hit, I made every link that I built de-optimized. I don't know the exact percentage of links I have that point to my site that include my keyword, but before Feb 17th, I think almost all my anchor text had my keywords in it, but with great variation.

The thing that kills me is that it took me 60 days to recover from Panda 3.3 and I was finally back to making the income I had made previous to that update and then almost immediately I git hit again by penguin.

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I think the de optimization of anchors will help, but I don't think google will ever allow these sites to truly recover for right now. Not sure what to make of it, honestly, but most large sites are abandoning their sites (as far as SEO goes) or 301ing them (less common)
The only site of mine that was hit had a lot of blog network links coming in, and a few hundred from BMR. I suspect that had more to do with it.

Google will go for the thing that is hard for blackhats to do.

The anchors can easily be fixed, and rank may or may not recover. But everyone knows what to do from now on.

The thing that is harder, and is mentioned in that article, is on-theme link building. Thinking guest posts (hard), and massive private blog networks. This one is a lot harder.

blackieman said:

Google will go for the thing that is hard for blackhats to do.

The anchors can easily be fixed, and rank may or may not recover. But everyone knows what to do from now on.

The thing that is harder, and is mentioned in that article, is on-theme link building. Thinking guest posts (hard), and massive private blog networks. This one is a lot harder.

Click to expand...

Anchors are not necessarily that easy to fix, it really depends how many links you currently have indexed. Lets say you have 100,000 links indexed, then it would be pretty hard to fix this in a short period of time, not that I have 100,000 links to my site, but I had around 15,000 and that took me around 6-8 months to do. So, if I were to fix this, it would probably take me another 6-8 months. Not exactly easy.

I've noticed that a lot of the sites that were unaffected has quite a few image links, I wish there was a way to automate this in bulk.

islandcoli said:

I've noticed that a lot of the sites that were unaffected has quite a few image links, I wish there was a way to automate this in bulk.

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Certain blog comments generate image backlinks... depends if avatars are present.

as with pretty much all theories out there - this holds true for some of my sites, and totally wrong for others.

private blog nets aren't as hard as you think. they dont all have to be pr5 + 3 and 4's you can get for $10 if you know where to look and are lucky. Especially at the moment as the market has certainly taken a hit. not as many buyer sin the market anymore. 5 or 6 hosting plans around the web is all you need to get a decent blog net going. yeah there is some money involved but it can be done reasonably cheaply

partymarty4870 said:

as with pretty much all theories out there - this holds true for some of my sites, and totally wrong for others.

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Which I tend to agree with - hence the question of if anyone has (or specifically knows of) any websites that contradict the theory. The reason I locked on to the specific concept of non-keyword anchors is because according to their data there were NO sites within their sample that had >50% of their anchor texts without keywords which still got hit. Meaning at least within their data set there were no contradictions.

Now it's debatable how accurate their data is since they don't give us a whole lot of information on how they did this study, but that's what made me curious if anyone here had an example of a site that directly contradicted this theory.

I wanted to add here that Penguin highly targets on-page SEO. Over optimization plays a high part here and something tells me this is more about on page than off page. I currently have a site that targets keywords with searches less than between 500-2000 with very little SEO competition and more than $1 CPC. Pre-penguin all my articles were in the first page without any backlinking. All i did was put the keyword in the title,desc and Heading.(which I believe is over optimization post Penguin) . I usually ad one tag per article which is same as the keyword. All the articles were unique with quality content.

Post penguin all the articles have lost rankings and surprisingly the tags have replaced the article position more or less. As the tag only shows the snapshot of the article with [...] option the only thing I can think of is the exact occurence of keyword is less in tag page and it is able to rank better than article now..

Also for people thinking links from related pages matter now, search for "acai berry" in Google...You will notice that the domain related to windows 7 issues rank well with backlinks from domains not related to acai berry in any way...

Of course, some off page SEO would have been hit by penguin, but for pages ranking in top positions without backlinks getting hit there is a major on-page factor in play here...

I have a MNS banned by Adsense , It is ranked top spot(no 1) just one week ago and already made 3 sales.May be this is because new google update

I always vary my anchor texts like maybe 20 keywords to one url. But truthfully, I'm not really sure If I got hit. I accidentally deleted some seo search terms tagging on the date penguin rolled out so not sure if it's the accidental deletion or penguin. I'm giving it some time.

p.s. My traffic just went down 50%.

islandcoli said:

I've noticed that a lot of the sites that were unaffected has quite a few image links, I wish there was a way to automate this in bulk.

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NoHandsSEO - the program that was advertised on the site flagged as spam in the official Google penguin update

Penguin hit and our main KW (3rd - 4th pre-Penguin) dropped off the results or was 150+
The KW stayed like that until tonight. It's now up to 20ish range.

The keyword is about 9000ish Local

What we've done (hopefully someone can benefit from this info):

We were determined to sit back and wait it out. In the meantime we cleaned up our Webmaster's account (minor duplicate content issues, other site errors). It's an ecommerce site so we had some erroneous product pages etc. These errors never effected us before and were considered bigger obstacles than necessary to change.

The wait was killing us. We paid for 3 services through BHW.

Small package of .edu and wiki links (no more than 20ish) - completed
50 Facebook likes randomized from real accounts to various products throughout our site - completed
We have a company currently dripping 3-4 unique articles (non spun) with 1-2 anchored keywords (one of them is always my top KW we're seeing gains in) this service is for 100 total links - still dripping
We just paid for another diversified package but haven't heard back on it yet. - not started

All of the above are BHW members or services offered here on the forums. We're not going to disclose which ones just yet but we will write reviews once they are all complete.

Pre-Penguin we had BMR for a month and some horrible backlinks mostly coming from comment spam.

We are currently losing between $3,000 - $5,000 in sales a day.

My advice would be to clean up your sites, do some spring cleaning and stay persistent. I would also recommend diversifying your goals. In our case we relied on Google SERPS entirely too much. Lesson learned the hard way.

I know I'm listed as a Newbie and unfortunately, I'm a damn lurker but I've been around the boards for awhile. I'm only sharing this information because it might be valuable to someone here who is more of an expert.

LikeaSir said:

NoHandsSEO - the program that was advertised on the site flagged as spam in the official Google penguin update

Click to expand...

Pinterest!...look in the BST section and you can purchase the service... http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...st-account-followers-pins-likes-comments.html