A Theory for Preventing & Recovering from a Google Penguin Penalty

Even though Penguin 2.0 didn’t leave the masses in utter horror the way Penguin 1.0 did, it still took many casualties. From small mom and shop sites to massive Authority sites, many saw their site’s visibility, and their revenue, cruelly slashed to pieces.

What most people don’t understand is that Penguin Penalties can be prevented. With the right information, you NEVER have to suffer from these terrible penalties that take away between 20% and 60% of your site’s traffic.

In this guide, I am going to give you suggestions for to protect your site from Penguin Penalties, and keep your site ranking well in Google.

What is the easiest way to identify sites that are manipulating their backlink profile?

Footprints. Typically, SEOs and/or link builders leave footprints. They do one thing over and over again, and these elements eventually become apparent to algorithmic filters. So what’s the easiest way to look for these footprints?

Backlink profile ratios

Whenever you look at a set of sites, they will each have commonalities. The keyword itself will create a certain set of characteristics for the set of ranking sites. For example, if the keyword is “Game of Thrones”, this is a trending keyword, so automatically it will trigger a certain backlink profile: high link velocity because it’s trending, lots of links from Entertainment and News sites, high volume of “Brand” terms in anchor text. When you compare a site across others in the same industry, it’s easy to identify areas where one site has statistics that are significantly higher or lower than others in the same niche.

It is these ratios that contain the key to the Penguin puzzle.

So what was Penguin 2.0 about?

I believe Penguin 2.0 heavily focuses on evaluating a number of factors and finding out where a site has “red flags,” with ratios that are different from other sites in their competitive niche. If a site triggers enough red flags, then a penalty follows.

I’m going to list a few of the ratios that I believe Google uses:

1. Backlinks to domain
2. Unique C class links
3. Number of keywords ranking
4. .EDU backlinks
5. .Gov backlinks
6. Link Velocity
7. Site Wide Ratio
8. Deep Links Ratio
9. Domain Age
10. PageRank
11. Indexed Pages
12. Links from pages that are not indexed in Google
13. Traffic to the domain (Analytics)
14. Impressions/Clicks: Clickthrough ratio
15. Page Authority
16. Domain Authority
17. Social Votes

If too many of your ratios are too high or too low, I believe this creates red flags that could end up triggering a Penguin Penalty.

What are some of the factors that Google looks at?

Money vs Brand vs Other Keywords in anchor text

Of all of the sites I’ve looked at since May 22nd (and trust me, I’ve looked at a LOT), the most obvious commonality between sites that were penalized or lost rankings is that they seem to have an abnormal ratio of “money” terms in their anchor text profile.

For this guide, I will use Elearners.com as an example, as I recently published a very in-depth, detailed case study of the reasons they acquired a Penguin 2.0 penalty.

The first step is to categorize the anchor text:

Next you look at the comparison between Brand, Compound, Money, and Other anchor text:

As you can see, they have a higher percentage of Money terms in anchor text, as well as a very low percentage of brand anchor text. You can see in more detail here:

Here’s what a healthy profile looks like:

Much more natural, isn’t it?

Now I will review a few other factors. Keep in mind that these are numbers based on a set of sites that have common keywords. My methodology is to type in a “Head” term in Google, and then type one of the top ranking URL’s into SEMrush*. Then I get a list of competitors for that site. I compile a list of the top 10 competitors for that keyword, and then I run that in LinkResearchTools*. This should give me the averages for the top 10 ranking sites for that keyword category. So everything you see in the images below is a summary of the AVERAGES. The orange is the target site that I am investigating and the others are the AVERAGE of the top 10, top 5, and top 3 ranking sites.

* Both SEMrush and LinkResearchTools are paid tools that I use in my link analysis methodology in conjunction with OpenSiteExplorer.

Link Status

How many of the links are “follow”, “no follow” or “redirects”?

Link Type

Here you can see the distribution of the types of links sites in this industry have. As you can see, the site in question here, Elearners, has an abnormally high number of iframe links, creating a red flag.

Deep Links Ratio

What is the deep link ratio of the inbound links of sites in this competitive niche? The deep link ratio for Elearners is higher than others, and the average of the other competitors is a bit lower, making Elearners stand out.

SiteWide Links Ratio

Sitewide links ratio is another area where I noticed an obvious commonality between sites hit by Penguin 2.0 Many of penalized sites had a high sitewide links ratio, where they had a large percentage of their links coming from a smaller number of domains. This is an area that needs to be monitored, as sometimes people link to you from a footer or sidebar, thus generating thousands of inbound links from the same domain. If done excessively, this can create problems.

Pagerank Distribution

This shows you the distribution of inbound links based on Pagerank. In the case above, you can see that Elearners is actually healthier than the average. They have a smaller number of inbound links from domains that are not indexed in Google, and a higher percentage of high PR links. The problem is that the ratio is abnormal as compared to others in the niche, which raises a red flag.

The key takeaway here is that even if your site is BETTER than others in a certain area, if the ratio is abnormal, this is a problem. It’s fundamental to keep your ratios normalized. Having higher quality backlinks didn’t save Elearners from a penguin penalty.

Link Velocity Trends

How quickly are sites in the niche gaining links? Link velocity indicates link growth percentage.

There are many more ratios that Google must look at, given the sophistication of their engineers and algorithms. Of course as SEO’s we only have access to a small number of variables. Fortunately we have enough information available to us to gain an idea of how Google analyzes our site and competitive niche and keep our site safe from algorithmic penalties.

Ok, now I know what to look for. How do I ACTUALLY protect my site?

Start by running a baseline link report to determine how your site’s backlink profile compares to competitors. Find out where your ratios are too high or too low, and create an action plan to normalize these ratios.

Your action plan can include the following:

1. Contact backlinks and request them to change anchor text
2. Contact backlinks and request them to remove your link
3. Disavow low quality sites or sites that alter your ratios
4. Start building high quality links with a “normalizing” profile
5. Focus on creating backlinks with only brand and noise anchor text

So for example, if your Deep Link ratio is low as compared to your competitors, create an outreach campaign targeted at increasing the number of links to internal pages of your site.

If you have too many “Money” anchors, focus your next set of links towards Brand and Other anchor text.

Monitor your Backlink Profile!

Run a backlink report every month to keep up with your backlink profile. At any moment you can unknowingly trip your ratios, and start sending out red flags. If you make backlink profile analysis a part of your SEO process, you can keep an eye out for how your profile is evolving and make sure all of your ratios are still safe.

What if I already have a Penguin 2.0 Penalty?

Now you have to enter into the recovery phase, which is never quick or easy. Here is an 8 step penguin recovery guide:

1. Pull your backlinks from Google Webmaster Tools
2. Run your links through Link Detox
3. Reach out to webmasters of toxic and suspicious links 3 times
4. Document date and message of each outreach attempt
5. Disavow the links that didn’t get removed manually
6. Build high quality authority, contextual links
7. Run your profile again to keep monitoring your ratios

Wait about a month to see how your traffic changes based on links removed and disavowed. If your traffic doesn’t increase, continue with your outreach and link removal efforts, as well as disavowing links.

Simultaneously, you have to build high quality, “Normalized” signals that fit in with the averages of other sites in your competitive niche.

Build safe links using content marketing, social media marketing, guest blogging, infographic marketing, broken link building, and community outreach. These healthy authority links, using brand anchors, will rebuild your site’s trust from Google’s point of view.

Stay safe from the Brutal Penguin

Creating links and social signals is never easy, but by staying within these ratios and building slowly and surely, you may end up being the “Last Man Standing”. Your competitors will blindly stumble onto Penguin Penalty mines while you swiftly, safely navigate your way to high organic rankings, traffic, and profit.