SEO SERVICE TIME

Wednesday 3 September 2014

How to Deal with Penguin Algorithm Penalty?

Penguin algorithm is based on unnatural links or as per Google webmaster guidelines “any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”

Every month approx 400,00 manual actions are taken on websites. Manual action messages are sent when a Googler manually check your website and found it’s violating Google quality guidelines or not. Second is algorithmic penalties which are automatically done through algorithm update without any information. You can analyze this update with drop in your rankings.

Google webmaster guidelines “any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”

Now question is how to deal with this Penguin update? We will do it in 3 phases:

1. Audit

After drop in rankings or traffic go to Google Webmaster Tools >> Search traffic >> Links to your site and download the list. Audit can be done in 2 ways:

a) Analyze all backlinks created from the start of project
b) Analyze latest backlinks created after last Penguin update

Now first check websites which links to you most. You can use third party tools like MOZ, AHref, Majestic SEO to check deep quality of all backlinks. In quality factor you can consider PR, outbound links, domain trust and content ratio around your backlinks, sitewide link, anchor texts etc.

Google is also against guest blogging through link networks. To check a website is in a guest blogging network or nor sign up on that network and check manually using search option in dashboard.

2. Removal

After complete links audit not it’s time to remove them. Create separate list of spam and low quality links. We have two ways to remove bad backlinks:

a) Using Disavow tool : This feature is present in Google Webmaster Tools. Create disavow file with care in proper format and submit it for removal.

Example of a Disavow File
# example.com removed most links, but missed these

http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html

http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html

# Contacted owner of shadyseo.com on 7/1/2012 to
# ask for link removal but got no response
domain:shadyseo.com

You can disavow a full domain or an individual URL. You may ignore nofollow links or backlinks from social media sites – I don’t think they are spam.

b) Try to contact webmaster and request to remove backlinks of your site. Though this method is very tough and many rumors have seen like website owners will ask money to remove links. It’s not only you who will create bad or spam backlinks for your website. Sometime competitors will do or people who need money from you will do negative SEO of your website – an interesting example of extortion email published here. So go for disavow only.

3. Recovery

After phase 1 & 2 when you see a decline in number of backlinks submit a reconsideration request (in case of manual penalty or wait for next Penguin update for algorithm penalty).
Keep on watching the rankings and traffic. Hope you will get better rankings in upcomingPenguin3.0 . Good Luck !!

Resource:- http://www.neotericuk.co.uk/blog/how-to-deal-with-penguin-algorithm-penalty/