Penguin Has Pecked At Your Rankings: Now What?

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Mar 022013
 

As more and more people are cranking out little niche sites and getting them ranked on Google more and more people are trolling the forums to find out why their website has lost all it’s rankings. The culprit for this is more than likely the Penguin update which was rolled out last year in April of 2012. This was targeted to combat spam on the internet. Lot’s of webmasters that were hit are reluctant to start over from scratch, but in this article I will talk about some things you can do to get away from these sudden loss of rankings.

One thing is evident maybe you hired the wrong person to do your SEO or possibly you did it yourself. Mistakes do happen, but don’t mope around because it can be repaired. Should you contact Google and ask for a re-inclusion? The simple answer is no! You might have no real technical knowledge about SEO but your backlink profile could be killing you in the SERPS (literally). Lots and lots of people would argue the fact that you should contact Google and ask why you lost your rankings, but often times that can mean your site will be down and out from Google altogether, as they manually review your site. Contacting Google is the last straw.

Great Content Is Vital

This may seem like an obvious question but does your website provide highly valuable content? Would real people like, tweet, and share your content? If not then you need to proofread it and yes constantly update your website. Google might give you a sudden boost for awhile, but once people start bouncing off your site because it’s of poor quality your answer to your question is make your website better. Provide some real value for people and don’t focus on just putting up stacks and stacks of low value content. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and just bolding your keywords, stuffing your title and meta tags, etc..

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404 Errors Kill You

Google has always tried to provide the best search engine experience for the users. So if you have lots and lots of pages on your website that are broken you need to 301 redirect them. If your using the WordPress platform there are lots of plugins that can check this automatically. I use “broken link checker.” Furthermore, you can always login to your webmaster tools and run a crawl test and make sure you don’t have 404 errors on your website.

Checking With SEOmoz or Majestic SEO

There are two big boys in the SEO game that I always check when a site suddenly drops in Google. SEOmoz which is $100 a month for pro, which can be expensive if your funds are low. Majestic SEO can be used for under $20 a month. Basically, you can cut and paste your urls that were ranking and look to see if your backlink profile shows 70-90% of the exact keywords you are ranking for. If so you are knocked down, but not out.

What you need to do is start building links at a steady pace via guest posting, articles, videos, press releases, blog commenting, rss syndication, social media, etc. Lots of SEO’s are talking about making your anchored text look as natural as possible. So this simply means you need to concentrate only using your anchors for 10-30% of the keywords you are trying to rank for. Depending on how bad your link profile is will determine how long it will take before you can recover from Penguin.

If your real low on money you could always check on Fiverr.com for people that have a pro account with SEOmoz or Majestic that way you don’t have to pay a monthly expense.

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Natural Backlink Profiles?

So what is a natural looking link profile? If you look at the top sites on Google and look through how they are getting links this will be your best bet. If they have 10, 20 or 30% of their anchors as exact and lots of urls, click here, more information, etc.. you can bet that Google sees that as natural.

To take it one step further you can go to http://ubersuggest.org/ or the free Google keywords tool and type in your keywords and use anchors that they suggest. Remember it’s about as looking natural as possible, so make sure you do it.

Have you found yourself being pecked by the dreaded Penguin? If so what other tips can you think of to help others that might be dealing with problems due to Penguin?

About the Author

This article was written by Rasmus Lindgren who focuses on working less and living more.

Penguin Has Pecked At Your Rankings: Now What?

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  • http://www.CravingTech.com/ Michael Aulia @CravingTech.com

    Traffic to my technology blog has decreased to a half, compared to a year ago. These times are tough and since I never really do any backlinking on my own, I’ve definitely lost some rankings on a few popular keywords

    Also hard to keep the bounce rate low, because most people come from the search engines, get the answer they want, and leave (well, some stay, but not all)

  • jon higgins

    Some great advice thanks, I am new to the whole internet business thing so new words of wisdom regarding penguin and panda are a great way for me to avoid being slapped!