Recovery From Google Penguin – Tips From The Trenches

The dust still seems to be settling from the Google Penguin fallout. While none of my other sites were affected, one of our ecommerce sites, Pet Super Store, was hit pretty hard. After spending weeks analyzing our link profile, determining spam vs. quality links, and looking at on-page factors, I’ve decided to share how I am recovering from Google’s latest visit to the zoo. I’m giving you the no holds barred (yes, all the embarrassing stuff) that most likely contributed to the site’s penalty and what I have done to try and fix it. No major wins yet, but we are on our way to a better and cleaner site profile that we can be proud of.

Two years ago, I purchased www.pet-super-store.com. When buying the company and during due-diligence, the previous owner had spent a good deal of time on SEO. The link profile had a lot of good quality links, tons of keyword based anchors, lots of content and article marketing and *really* great rankings on some of the top performing keywords in the space. I had a list of 500, 2 and 3 term keyword phrases that were ALL top 3 in Google. Here are a few ringers: dog bowls, dog beds, pet gates. All of which were #1 on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! and not just short term, for over two years before we bought it – in total – about four years.

Enter: The 2011 Panda…

Quick Stats:

• 50% drop in Google traffic
• 2500 unique visitors a day turned to 1200
• The long tail basically disappeared

I still had top 3 or top 5 rankings for a bunch of terms, but all the long tail that was the highest converting traffic and represented the largest percentage of traffic was GONE. Immediately, I went through and removed thin content, edited low quality pages in terms of duplicate content, edited titles, meta descriptions, and checked for duplicate on page elements. I believe that a lot of Pet Super Store’s rankings dropped because of the high number of directory links, article links, and similar lower tier links the site had. As everyone knows by now, it wasn’t so much about site penalized as the value of the links being passed to the site. Over time, my efforts were being rewarded and seemed to appease the Panda. Traffic was starting to recover.

Enter: The 2012 Penguin…Then Insert Foot Into Mouth

Quick Stats:

• 66% drop in organic Google Traffic
• 1500 unique visitors a day to 550
• Lots of top ranking / high value terms dropped to page 2 or page 3 and some +100

So now we are dealing with what I’m going to call an up-side down pyramid. All the things that previously put us at the top of the search engines are now the reason we are at the bottom (ok… well penalized off the first page).

Snapshot Of Link Profile 4/20/2011

The Good

• The site had 900+ linking root domains (shown in SEOmoz).
• Previous owner bought a dog forum that had great authority as a community bolt-on.
• Many links were from guest writers (before it was cool) with high quality unique content.
• Decent link diversity with press release related links, high quality directory (yahoo etc), links from the brands we carried, and lots of niche pet sites.
• Many links were contextual from the guest writing and nothing was spun (awesome).

The Bad
We had TONS of everything that lost value:

• Directory links: All exact keyword anchors (which used to work).
• Article marketing: Ezinearticles, HubPages, Squidoo, etc. (another one that consistently worked).
• Site-wide links: Lots of “earned” blog roll links that were legit but now are marked as spam.
• Reciprocal links: We had a page of links going to great sites to get reciprocals… now dead.

The Ugly

• A couple years before I bought it (2008) the previous owner offered a free website hit counter that anyone could use that just so happened to drop a text link back to Pet Super Store. Literally hundreds of people used it on their sites such as blogger, wordpress, bravejournal, static sites, business sites, you name it there was a hit counter link back to our site. Since it is static code, there is no way to click a button and remove the links. Every one was an exact keyword anchor and “site-wide”.
• Almost every link we had was keyword anchor based so even the “good ones” were potentially hurting us as we had almost no brand related anchors.
• That forum we bought, had a “block” of 6 text links rotating at the bottom of every forum post (1.5 million pages, yes, you read that right).
• Directory Links: They did one of those “2000 directory link” packages with a low quality SEO service with the exact same anchor, description, etc (more on this later).

All Totaled Up, We Had A Cluster (Insert Expletive)

Here Is What We Are Doing To Recover (And Results From My Efforts)

First off, my day now starts off with a Monster energy drink because coffee just doesn’t cut it, then I do one or all of these four practices:

1. Remove/Replace crappy content on our site. There are about 1,500 products so this is not quick and it’s a daily activity.
2. Contact site owners with spammy links and ask for them to be removed or contact site owners and ask for the link to be changed (more on this in a minute).
3. New Content Production: This is finding authoritative people that can produce great content (this has been tough) and publishing articles and buyer’s guides on our own site plus some high quality guest blogger.
4. Building community: Adding additional media types (video mainly) and more emphasis on social marketing.

What I’ve Learned From The Trenches…

Use Your SEO Tools For Good (not evil)

I found out that those link building tools we’ve been using to build links also work for recovery. While going one by one through sites I identified as spam, it was slow and painful to try and find contact info on their site. When that failed, I used a registrar lookup site to find any contact info possible. If it was privately registered, I sent an email to the classic admin@ … off to no man’s land.

After a hundred of those I took my spreadsheet (SEOmoz export of external linking domains) and said “hey… I can put these in a link building tool I already have and send a customized email to everyone on here.” The tool I used was “Link Assistant” which we have used to contact site owners previously for ghost writing and similar content marketing projects. There is a lookup tool that will search a domain or url, pull contact info, and aggregate it into their interface. If they do not find any contact info, then you can choose a “likely” email that would go to the site owner such as (admin or [email protected]). The same tool will also let you setup custom email templates and send out the emails. There are a handful of tools that do the same thing… I’m sure you own at least one. I ran the spreadsheet (about 1300 domains) and pulled back over 50% of them with “actual” contact info and the rest with the admin or webmaster option.

Then, I organized the links in the spreadsheet into three categories: Remove Link, Change Link, and Personal Email.

1. Remove Link – Low quality sites we want nothing to do with. Can you say SEO directory site?
2. Change Link – A mid to high quality site that we had one or two problems with the link.
   1. Too many links – Some of our author boxes had 2, 3, and sometimes 4 links in them.
   2. Keyword anchor links were common and we want to change from keyword anchor to branded.
3. Personal Email – High quality sites that I wanted to send a personal email to without the use of a tool.

Next, I used the automated email tool to make templates for the Remove Link and Change Link groups.

Email Examples:

Change Link Email Example

Subject: “Please Change Link To Pet-Super-Store.com – Google Penalty” (yes, I said Google penalty to get their attention)

Dear owner of xsite.com,

I’m the webmaster of Pet-Super-Store.com,

There is currently a link from your site at http://www.xsite.com to our site at www.pet-super-store.com that uses “anchor text” for the link text (example: “premium dog beds”). We have recently been penalized by Google because we have too many “anchor text” links that do not mention our site name or brand (example: www.pet-super-store.com or Pet-Super-Store.com).

If there is any way you could change the anchor text to our domain name or branded text such as www.pet-super-store.com or Pet-Super-Store.com it would be a HUGE help to our site and our business.

You can also use the code below which will also show a branded text link on your site.

www.pet-super-store.com

Thank you for your time… We really appreciate the link from your site and helping to support our business.

Best regards,

X Person
xxx-xxx-xxxx (please call my cell number if you have questions)
[email protected]

Remove Link Email Example

Subject: “Please Remove Link To Pet-Super-Store.com – Google Penalty” (again, I said google penalty to get their attention)

Dear owner of xsite.com,

I’m the webmaster of Pet-Super-Store.com,

There is currently a link from your site at http://www.xsite.com to our site at www.pet-super-store.com that uses “anchor text” for the link text (example: “premium dog beds”). We have recently been penalized by Google because we have too many “anchor text” links and low quality links to our site.

If there is any way you could “remove” the link from your site at http://www.xsite.com it would be a HUGE help to our site and our business.

Thank you for your time… Any help is really appreciated.

Best regards,

X Person
xxx-xxx-xxxx (please call my cell number if you have questions)
[email protected]

What Were The Results?

Quick Stats

• Email Sent: 1,300
• Email Replies: 250+ (I still get replies daily)
• Links Changed: I’d say all but maybe 10 (so 240)
• Traffic Changes: Nothing yet…
• Time Savings: Weeks if not MONTHS of contacting one by one.

I was honestly blown away by how many people actually responded. Not only did they respond but most were glad to help out. The most eye opening part for me was that it was a relationship building experience. Most sites were pet related and they cared. Others had also been hit and they were happy to do it. The most surprising is that it generated new link and partnership opportunities. Once we got talking, a handful were open to guest writing, had other sites we could contribute to, or had marketing opportunities available that we did not know about (print ads in pet magazines, email marketing, etc). The 10 or so that did not change or remove the link were skeptical and thought I was trying to pull some sort of scam. Change the links? Why would I do that? For those skeptical ones, I educated them by sending links to SEOmoz articles and that changed two of the ten people’s minds. Hey, any I can the more proper links the better!

How many links did I actually remove?
Well we had a lot of site-wide hit counter links (many were removed), the forum links (Uh, hello… 1.5 million), blogroll etc. Google Webmaster tools said we had 1.6 million (yeah.. holy cow) linking pages, not domains. I think we are realistically down to around 1,000 linking domains (SEOmoz shows less) and 20,000 linking pages with the newly removed spam and sitewide links.

Out of all this work the free hit counter links have been the most difficult. There were so many free sites such as Blogspot, Bravejournal, Myspace, etc. using the hit counter that also have no contact information that I am simply not able to get all of them removed.

I now believe it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” we will see the positive effects of the hard work we have put in and continue to do. The next update should be telling and I will try to make updates as we notice any significant changes in traffic.

Guinea Pig Status: I’m officially offering to test SEO changes on our site. If anyone has suggestions to make to our site that could realistically fix or repair our Google standing that would be fantastic. I may have missed a very significant problem with our site (on-page), content, link profile, or some other glaring problem. Please let me know and I will make fixes and report on changes.

I’ve been doing this hands-on for months. If there is anything I can do to help others that have been penalized, please let me know, I feel your pain, and another free pair of eyes on the problem can always be very helpful.

Postscript:

After this post was submitted, the author received a notice that their manual penalties were revoked (reconsideration request submitted on July 27th, response received August 21st). They haven’t seen a change in results yet, but it’s only been a bit over two weeks.