Addvisors Reklama

Caught by Google’s Penguin? What to do?

So you got caught by Google’s Penguin update and your rankings are close to nonexistent and your traffic dropped like womens pants does in a James Bond movie, what to do?

The short answer is removing all the bad backlinks you have acquired as fast as possible.

All?
Yes all!

Both Penguin and Panda was hot topics at the Pubcon Las Vegas conference back in October and there were quite some sessions with included Panda and Penguin updates either as a full topic or as questions in the Q&A part.
I especially remember a question in the Q&A part of a session on link building. The “poor guy” had got one of the “famous” warnings about “unnatural links” pointing to his site (translated: we know you’re breaking our Webmaster Guidelines) and his site was basically “gone” in Google.

The Q&A went something like this
Q: My site is gone in Google, got the “famous” warning in Webmaster Tools.
A: How many links do you have? And which topic?
Q: Around 10.000 backlinks. Its in the gambling area.
A: Gambling..  Casino, Poker or?
Q: Casino.
A: Hmmmm…  ouch.. The toughest area.. And how many of the 10.000 backlinks would you call shady?
Q: (not sure what to say..hesitates…) – I guess all…  sort of… maybe 98% or so..
A: Then you need to get all the 98% links taken down before you can hope to see your pages moving slowly up the rankings (over time)

One of points to take away from this is that just taking a little away (of the bad backlinks) and hoping that Google then will be “happy” is a waste of time. When you get Google attention through the Google Penguin update you need to clean it all up and hope for better weather. And unfortunately the word hope fits very well in here – you don’t want to catch Google attention.

Be sure you got hit by the Penguin update!
My advice in the top was to remove all, but please hold your horses!
First step would be to make sure you in fact got hit by any of the “animals” and Penguin in this case.
Penguin (and Panda) is an update, so one way to determine if you got “hit” by them is to check you Google Analytics and see if a decline in traffic matches the dates for a Penguin update.

Penguin dates in 2012
Penguin – April 24
Penguin 2 – May 25
Penguin 3 – October 9

And did you receive a message/warning in your Google Webmaster Tools account?
If you didn’t get any decrease in traffic around a Penguin update and no message/warning from Google you site most likely hasn’t been hit by the Penguin update, buuut if you do see a decrease in traffic and rankings there are probably other reasons…

I would like to finish with a warning.
If you still think its time to remove a huge amount of bad backlinks and you find it difficult to allocate time for it and decide to go the easy way by using Google’s new Disavow links tool…
DON’T

Google’s Disavow tool was launched at Pubcon Las Vegas, so I’ll explain more in my next blogpost..just remember Don’t!

/Niels
 

Search and social media conference in Las Vegas

Back in Copenhagen after a busy week in Las Vegas – first a 2 days weekend workshop with my partners at Addconsulta Peru and then 4 days of Pubcon Las Vegas conference with full day program and networking in the evenings. Yes, even though the 4 days conference is stacked with sessions by great speakers from the industry there’s still extra knowledge (some would say the bes) and business to get in the networking events in the evenings (plus some new good friends) and I was also joining a secret invitation only presentation in a suite at Mirage, except from the fact that it was very new and useful research I cant tell more here, because I was under NDA and can only use it in my work, not spread it…

Lots of people is smiling when I tell them I went to Vegas for a search and social media conference, but what started out with 125 WebmasterWorld (a forum) members  meeting and discussing at the Cittie of Yorke Pub in London for PubCon London 2000 (hence Pubcon) is now a conference with more than 200 of theworlds best speakers.

Matt Cutts at the scene in Las Vegas announcing the Google Disavow Link Tool

Over the next weeks I will try to touch some of the topics from the conference – topics like the 2 Google animals that everybody is talking about (“OMG I got hit by the Penguin” – nope, your problem started when you bought a 500 links for USD 100 package over the Internet…  😉  ), the Google Top Heavy update, the relative new EDM update (Exact domain match), the launch a Google Disavow link tool (was launched public at thePubcon Las Vegas 2012 conference), online reputation management, Google’s Author Tag and more..

/Niels