Hi guys, I have a gaming news website related to one specific game that was affected by Google's Penguin update that FIRST happened in May 26th to be exact. My site was hit, badly, but wasn't as bad come the following update in June which took a MASSIVE hit on my site and took the top 4 keywords I was ranking high for pages 1 - 3 badly. Just to note, this is related to a football/soccer game which is hugely popular, my domain name contains the EXACT main keyword of the upcoming release of the game, no other characters, it's over 6 years... the current upcoming release of the game at the moment had LOW competiton according to the adwords tool, and currently has 201,000 global monthly searches. The previous game title has over 8 MILLION global monthly searches per month.. so this will be the case in the upcoming months for this game. In the MAY update, I lost a few places, which resulted in me losing around 70 - 80 percent of my traffic, however I didn't anything in that update UNIQUE content, and as the week's progressed, my rankings had climbed back up to a steady state as they were before. Then came the June update, the site to an ENORMOUS HIT. My main keywords dropped out of the top 100 and I was suffering badly. I didn't have a clue on what to do, I was panicking, I was mad.. sites that was so crappy, and rubbish where way ahead of me in the search engines for the specific keywords.. So I kept on posting fresh unique content, did some social media advertising, got loads of social shares on the posts, even with the little traffic I had. I also went ahead and hired some quality Linkbuilders on Odesk and told them to specifically build HIGH QUAILITY, authoritive backlinks that related to my site/niche, backlinks should come from sites that had a PR 6 and above, even though PR is not longer what it used to be before, It's still worth something... I also did a free trial with SEOMOZ.ORG (HIGHLY RECOMMENDABLE) SEOMOZ basically crawls the search engines and tells you, your current position. in the search engines, also tells you of your authority rank between you and your competitors and it also crawls all your pages and tells you of issues that should be fixed on the site such as duplicate title tags, duplicate pages, too many meta tags, missing title tag, content title too long, or two short.. I had over 12,000 errors, and still have a long way to go but I've managed to sort out a few of these errors. I also setted up a demo site a few months back before the update, to change to a new layout, and I stupidly forgot to site the the demo site to not to be indexed, and because of this I had in a way, two websites, with duplicate content, which was one of the reasons I believe I got hit, along with by terrible backlinks profile.. After I deleted the demo site, fixed a few errors, got the linkbuilders to do quality backlinks from high authority websites that related to me, my rankings started to pick up.. In the matter of a week and a half after the June 26th update, I started to get ranked on page 10 - 15 (rankings kept on fluctuating for my main keyword) I kept on doing the link building, and a week later to 8th page on google and a few days later I managed to get on to page 4 on google. I did the following: Press Releases High Authority Backlinks from websites that related to me Social Media Promotion FRESH, UNIQUE CONTENT. (500 words or more) Fixed a dozen of errors that were showing up the SEOMOZ tool. I did this the day after the google Penguin June update and this helped me tremendously. I should also note that I had ON PAGE SEO done for my site back in Jan-FEB this was an EXPERT SEO from ODESK he had great feedback.. I'm not good at SEO and thus really didn't know if he was doing a good job or what.. Anyway, he did the meta tags, homepage description etc and this was filled up just too much information and keywords that would set off spam alarm bells with google. So I changed this all, limited the number of keywords in the meta description to around 4 of my main keywords. He also filled in a lot of spam JUNK with the categories and the pages with descriptions, and meta tags, meta descriptions that wasn't needed at all. So I removed all of this and replaced it with description and keywords that related to that specific page/categories. In my posts, I also used a lot of tags in the post, I'm not talking like 20 - 30 I'm talking maximum 3 - 15 on each posts, So I cut down the tags on each posts to main keywords that were in each articles. After I did all of this, I then submited the site for a reconsideration request from google, they came back with no spam found but I believe submitting the request helped because google crawled all the pages again and see improvements have been made. Now, my rankings are steadily starting to pick up now. The site currently ranks page 1, 8 spot on the google.com search engine and second from last spot on the second page on google.co.uk I believe there was also a small minor update yesterday/day before which seemed to boost my site a little. Sorry about the spelling mistakes, lack of structure, this is a scruffy post but I'm sure i've got to the point in what you've got to do to recover in google penguin. Many thanks!
Thank you, really greate detail post. I think Social Media activities have more weight after this update. Specially G+
Gr8 information about Penguin recovery 1) Remove duplicate pages (Demo website) - We must create demo link with password protected so Google will not cached 2) Remove broken link from the home page and inner pages 3) Keep add backlink with your brand name OR Website Name 4) Don't add Backlink with your targeted keywords in first 3 months - After 100 backlink with your website name or Brand name you can start link building with your targeted keywords 5) Don't Copy contain from the other website - create natural contain for your website
Thanks for the detailed post. It seems that one of the penguin factors is the ratio of high quality to low quality links. It sad to see so many webmasters running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to get rid of the low quality links they created (which is very difficult and maybe impossible). I'm glad to hear that looking forward and building quality links to drown out the bad worked for you.
Please tell me how to write a title and key words that would not receive penalties from google? meta name="description" meta name="keywords"
Wow, you wrote a novel. Glad to see you escaped Penguin. What worked for me was blasting generics (click here) to the sites. Works 50/50 right now. Others have had success with 301 redirects.
This is a good story, I always enjoy reading how people recovered from the various animal slaps. I'll have to explore it more, thanks.
Another update, the site ranks page 1, rank 6 - 8 on page google.com AND UK search engines, what' I've done, has 100% helped. By the end of the month, hopefully I can go up another 4 - 6 places. Already have three TOP end PRWEB.COM press release packages up and ready for the site, which will give the site an even bigger boost of trust, authority and high quality backlinks.
Whoa what a post! Great stuff. Now I only have about 20% of my backlinks the actual keyword I'm targeting and it works for me.
You mention "happened in May". The Penguin happened on April 28th. Are you sure your site was affected by Penguin and not something else?
Details writing but all the same things discussed many time earlier. However nice to hear that you regained the position after being penalized.
Good to hear that you successfully recoverd from Penguin. Now Dont Make Mistakes you made at the time of Penguin to avoid future difficulties.