Google Penguin Update – Get your traffic and SERP Ranks BACK

Google Penguin Update – Get your traffic and SERP Ranks BACK

If you were like many and hit hard by the Google Penguin update, here are a few tips and tricks on how to get your traffic back, getting your SERP back and getting your website or black back to nornal!

•Links that Come from PR-n/a or PR0 sites. REALLY – ARE YOU SURE?
Fist off the bat, if you discount all those links which are on PR N/A or PR0 pages, you will be discriminating against around 90% of the pages on the Internet! I’m sorry, but just because a page is currently PR0 or PR N/A doesn’t mean its toxic or bad IN ANY WAY and when has anyone from Google ever said it was? In fact this is not the first time a so called authority has suggested such links are bad and this has been a common misconception which I’ve seen espoused in pretty much every major article on this subject in the last year.

Moreover this is probably the quickest way to build a list of FALSE POSITIVES which will have a negative value and end up causing even more anguish, confusion and harm to a domains ranks if you used this as a signal in your LINK AUDIT and subsequent link removal campaign.

AND THE REASON? It could simply be a newly found page (within the last 4 months) and hence has not yet been updated as part of Googles Pagerank updates (which take place roughly 4 times per year), or it may just be a page on a large site which doesn’t have enough Pagerank (Juice) to pass around all of its wonderful pages and thus is unable to send them pages into the so called SAFE ZONE of a PR1 or above…

This is one of them myths that seriously needs to be put to bed and I welcome the day when someone asks one of the vocalists at Google for clarification or advice on this much lauded white elephant in the room. If you’ve been sold on this as a method to locate your bad links you will have wasted all following efforts in getting them links removed and no doubt done yourself a disservice in the process.
And what about all the other RED flags raised by the so called experts?

•Links that are site wide
This is undoubtedly true and the only question left is to how to most effectively find such links from the data you have. These links are normally located in the side bar (blog roll) or footer of bunk domains often along side a bunch of other similarly smelly links all with clear money term anchor texts.
•Links which come from very new domains. REALLY – HERE WE GO AGAIN – MORE BOLOGNESE!

New domains typically have no Pagerank or Juice value and since new domains are sandboxed (Googles penalty on new domains which have not yet earned trust), Google sandbox outbound links (on new domains) in the same manor, hence if anyone tries to manipulate the SERPS with such techniques they fail. This is not a widespread problem that Google are still grappling with and hence singling out the new domains where one has a link from is just going to add more white noise to any data you end up with.

•Links which come from domains with little traffic.
This just shows a complete misunderstanding of firstly the nature of the Internet and secondly the problems that Google are grappling with. If Google was to use such a metric or signal for improving the SERPs they would end up with so much false data that they would be totally lost and have no idea what was an authority or why. Most articles have a spike of traffic when first published then that traffic dwindles down as it is buried away. When you build a module into an algorithm you want data which means something significant, not something that will result in pure white noise. There has NEVER been anything said or even suggested by Google that they use such a signal to lower ranks and in all my years in SEARCH I’ve never seen any evidence that such a concept is being used to qualify the value of links! Despite the beliefs to the contrary.
You can put this one into the quack box along with another similar signal I’ve seen used to mark links as suspicious, one called Low Link Velocity, which is apparently when a domain or page is no longer attracting backlinks as quickly as it once did and hence is therefore likely to be a domain which has been sold to a link spammer and is now being used as a link farm. This again could never be used as a signal by Google to qualify links as many domains and pages attract a natural spike of back links when they are first published and interest generally diminishes as time goes by. That’s pretty normal and certainly not a signal which could be relied upon to qualify a link!

•Links which come from sites with identical C class. FACT OR FICTION?
In general there is some truth to this one, however, its not a simple case of black and white though it’s certainly a useful signal for Google to see whats connected during a manual inspection, certainly also once they have smelt a rat but it is most likely treated as a SOFT signal in the SERPs. They would most likely limit the Juice being passed from one IP to another and these links should most certainly be avoided as it would help them find networks. That said theres another problem which I’ve seen here, I have seen historical data being used in some link audit reports whereby the hosting was changed years ago and the IP data being supplied is historic and hence misleading. Its a good signal ONLY if the data is reliable and fresh!

•Links from pages with a big number of external links. ANOTHER FALSE ASSUMPTION?
While I’d tend to agree that if a page has lots of outbound links its most likely of low value, though in some instances there are pages that do contain value and have lots of outbound links. Typically where all the links are natural and relevant to each other and where the anchors were not money terms you could be safe to assume the page was worthy. So crudely treating all pages as bad based on the numbers of outbound links alone would undoubtedly raise false positives and there is no evidence to suggest Google is that crude.
So where does that leave us? Pretty much in a mess based on some of these very unsound signals. Raising flags which are unsafe results in huge amounts of ‘possibly’ suspicious links which then have to be reviewed again manually which totally defeats the whole purpose of having a link audit in the first place!

SPONSORED BY: HostGator – Get your first month of unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth hosting for FREE!