Recovered a Penguin hit site. Simple, but worked.

OK. So how do we tell exactly what update hits sites?
 
What was the do to no-follow ratio before and what was it after you seen the rise in SERP? I am trying to recover a site myself, I have already seen some changes adding more content. The no-follow links are out of control, about 1 do-follow to 2 no-follow links

It was about 55% follow to 45% no-follow. In my opinion, the Do-Follow should be at least 70%. That's why I strived to build only Do-Follow links to recover.
 
OK. So how do we tell exactly what update hits sites?

It's easiest if you have access to analytics and/or WMT, because you can cross reference the loss of traffic with what ever update/refresh rolled out at the time.

The harder way to assess the penalty is look at the on-page and backlink profile. If the site looks over optimized and/or offers a poor user experience, but the backlink profile looks fine, then it's probably a panda hit.

If the website is well built and provides a good user experience with good content, interlinking, and non-spammy factors throughout the website, but you see a bad backlink profile (not diverse, bad do:no follow ratio, etc), then it's probably a penguin hit.

SEO is more simple than people think.
 
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Adam,

Did you manually do your .edu/.gov links or hire a service? If you did hire a service could you pm me or just reply if that is ok. If anyone reading this provides this type of service let me know.

Thanks
 
Sorry if this post looks sloppy, as I live in New York City, and we're going through a hurricane crisis at the moment, so I'm 'battening down the hatch'.

Thanks for the post and I'm dealing with EMD penalty and with Hurricane Sandy. Good luck to BHW member dealing with Sandy! I have already lost some siding!
 
Thank you for the share. Hope you guys get through Sandy okay !
 
Adam,

Did you manually do your .edu/.gov links or hire a service? If you did hire a service could you pm me or just reply if that is ok. If anyone reading this provides this type of service let me know.

Thanks

All the tier 1's were done manually by my team. I don't sell a service or anything, but I'm sure you can find ******** edu and gov links around here.
 
I didn't just add content, I built good links to that content, which increased the quality of the sites backlink profile. More links spread across more pages is something that can certainly help.

Also, it could be that adding the articles wasn't what helped the site. I'm just going over everything I did in order to give BHW my full experience.

Doesn't matter... this isn't what Penguin does.
At any rate, not trying to bust your balls about it, but there are a lot more filters/algorithms than just the 3 you mention in this thread anyway. It could have been reduced for a variety of reasons, however, if it was Penguin it would have happened on 10/5-10/7 otherwise it was something else.

penguinm.jpg

Above is a Penguin hit site's rank. Why did it recover? absolutely JACK CRAP that's why... it went from #1-#3 (for months) to #200, to #15 .... by doing nothing to it.

This is in a niche so competitive, that top rankers (like myself) make low 5 figs/day profit. Of course, I have another site ranking top 4 already... which I had waiting for this.
Penguin is NOT what you think it is, and it's NOT heavily related to anchor text, no-follow or otherwise. Except on the extremes of course.

1site.jpg

The above is the anchor pie chart for the #1 site right now (post 10/7, before that my site was #1 for almost 3 months).
Notice that 41% of its anchors are the keyword it is ranking for or keyword XXXX
It also has 94% no-follow links

Penguin anchor diversity is a myth.F
Fair warning, no non-news/ultra authority sites made it through penguin 10/5-10/7, meaning that there may not be ANY long term strategy for ranking such ultra competitive keywords now. All niches I'm in, if the site was ranking for >3 months it's now not ranking on the first page (all but myself disappeared entirely).
 
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I have a 10/7 hit site and I am actually trying exactly what OP has said. Thing is I am working with 4 sites and I do 1 PR per day and mix in all of the sites so I am moving 1/4 as fast as I could. I too am adding content and then writing a PR about that content, pretty damn boring to write about the same thing twice I must say. Not where we were but some recovery 3 of the 4 main keywords hovering just off of page 1 and the 4th is still back on page 4 and a different page is ranking in that position. Doing quite well in Yahoo/Bing though so thankfully we still do decent sales from that.
 
It's good that you bounced back from that... a lot of people don't. These days we all have to be really careful.
 
what do you guys mean by sitewide links?

do you guys mean that the same link was posted for every page of http://www.example.com

Its a link on a site that counts for each indexed page on the site. For example, if there's a link in a footer, it counts for each page. Therefore, if there are 2,000 pages to that website, then the link counts 2,000 times.
 
kinda figured with name "sitewide" kinda makes sense that google devalues that strategy
 
Your site was not hit by penguin. Again, you are just speculating. This isn't even your site and you have no idea what backlinking was done and all you know is what some idiot told you. Why do people love spreading misinformation? Maybe it makes them feel just a little bit better?
 
Your site was not hit by penguin. Again, you are just speculating. This isn't even your site and you have no idea what backlinking was done and all you know is what some idiot told you. Why do people love spreading misinformation? Maybe it makes them feel just a little bit better?

Well, when you think some social bookmarks (from unindexed sources like stumbleupon or redirections from Digg), fresh content, and press releases which are deleted generally within a few weeks keep a site Penguin immune... I guess this whole SEO thing looks a lot simpler

Again, happy the OP fixed the site, whatever the actual problem was.
Penguin is always pretty easy to spot, because the filter is so aggressive, and so devastating that every medium/high comp keyword will be bouncing around like crazy for at least a week afterwards (changes happening even hourly in a lot of cases).
 
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Expertpeon said:
Fair warning, no non-news/ultra authority sites made it through penguin 10/5-10/7, meaning that there may not be ANY long term strategy for ranking such ultra competitive keywords now. All niches I'm in, if the site was ranking for >3 months it's now not ranking on the first page (all but myself disappeared entirely).

Oh well, back to good old churn-and-burn strategies then :)
 
Oh well, back to good old churn-and-burn strategies then :)

That is what I keep saying. If you are going to do SEO seriously and have a few sites, you will get ruined eventually. Unless you are doing SEO for fun I guess. If a site gets hit so what. Leave it and move on. You should have 100s of others to replace it anyways.
 
Oh well, back to good old churn-and-burn strategies then :)
One of the major niches I'm in (makes a LOT) had wal-mart/amazon ranking in the top 10 for the last several months. It was just a search result, with a list of products on both. I figured "Hey, penguin likes authority"

Well, on 10/7 that wal-mart page is on the 15th page of the search term, and Amazon's on the 5th and been there since. That's when I realized, if Amazon and Wal-mart aren't good enough then what chance do I have in the long term :)
 
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Are site-wide links detrimental? I have do-follow links at the bottom of my client websites that I develop will these hurt my rankings? I honestly just have them down there to hopefully capture more website development clients who like the page.
 
One of the major niches I'm in (makes a LOT) had wal-mart/amazon ranking in the top 10 for the last several months. It was just a search result, with a list of products on both. I figured "Hey, penguin likes authority"

Well, on 10/7 that wal-mart page is on the 15th page of the search term, and Amazon's on the 5th and been there since. That's when I realized, if Amazon and Wal-mart aren't good enough then what chance do I have in the long term :)

Expertpeon,

What sites are showing up instead? All my niches have amazon #1. If google were to replace Amazon and target listings, who would they replace it with? I don't think you could get more authority than that
 
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