Google Penguin Recovery Tips – A Personal SEO Strategy

If you are somehow related with web industry, then you probably already know about Google Penguin update. It has been at least a year that people hated Panda and now it is time for yet another animal to be disliked by online marketers. Google Penguin up-date is the name of latest Google algorithm revise which occurred few days back.

In the last year, we have seen numerous forum and blog posts of webmasters discussing about getting hit by several versions of the Google Panda up-date. It sometimes actually was Panda. Often it was not. Needless to say Google makes algorithmic modifications almost every single day (more than 500 per year).

Now, we can most likely assume an identical craze with online marketers and webmasters assuming they have been hit by the Google Penguin.

What Was Google Penguin Update?

If you are not familiar, the Penguin up-date took place on April 24, 2012 and was made to cease spam websites from getting rank on search page results of Google. You can read the official statement here.

Despite the fact that websites are viewed as spam for many factors, some key reasons are here –

• Substantial backlink building regardless of quality.
• Deceitful doorway web pages and others black hat techniques used.
• A lot of keyword stuffing.
• Writing plenty of worthless content in order to get search engine ranking.
• Bad on page SEO

It means if your website do not stick to Google’s official SEO guideline then your website is a spammy one.

In terms of enhancing search quality, this is an excellent change. It’s also perfect for companies and business owners legally looking to get good search positions without the problem of rivaling sites that are trying to game the system.

But, as occurs with most “basic” modifications such as this, there’s been some collateral injury. Even though Google states that the latest up-date has affected just 3 % of sites, there has been several declarations over the world wide web of it resulting in a bloodbath. People are even going to the degree of reducing their staff members and substantially climbing down their businesses.

Are you currently among those badly impacted by the Google Penguin update? If you’re, it is possible to salvage the circumstance if you take corrective steps. If you are not, it’s also wise to consider preventive steps so that you don’t get trapped within the fray the very next time something similar to this occurs.

P.S: There is already another Google Penguin refresh called Google penguin 1.1.This is not a major change. A simple data refresh which was announced by matt cuts in twitter status.

Matt cutts announced Google penguin 1.1 at twitter

Why techtipsportal.com is publishing this article about Google Penguin update after one moth?

The reason is simple, I do not believe in guess works. I have been experimenting on several things in the past few weeks. I was analyzing several methods to recover and I am pretty much successful now and I think it is a good time to write an article about it. So here are some recovery tips –

Phase one – Cleaning up after Google penguin update

Cleanup spammy backlinks:

This is the hardest part but the most necessary one. You need to remove all low quality backlinks which are pointing towards your website.
Some backlink checker you can use:
1. ahrefs.com/site-explorer/ – you need to register to see complete list
2. backlinkwatch.com – no need to register
3. Webmasters tools account – you can check all of your backlinks from your Google webmasters tools account.

Some properties of low quality backlinks:

1. Not related with your website theme.
2. The backlink website is only used for link exchange purpose.
3. The backlink page should not have external links over 15-20.
4. The backlink page should not have any banned website link along with your site link.
5. The backlink page should not have only external links in it. It should have a little bit of original content which is related to your website theme.
6. The backlink website should not be banned from Google. Keep in mind a website can have Google page rank even if it is banned from Google.

How to remove those spammy backlinks?

1. Check out their contact us page and contact at their email ID or even you can call them if phone number is provided.
2. If phone number or email-id is not provided at the backlink website then you can check the domain registration data via whois.net

Stop putting your website link at the theme footer you developed:

The majority of the website design and Development Organization and theme design farms like to place their website link in the footer of the site or theme that they have designed. This kind of hyperlinks may not be related with their website and doesn’t produce any value and also Google may detect it as an unnatural link building pattern.

Phase two – On page SEO after Google Penguin update

Avoid Keyword stuffing:

Check your site content once again. Remove keyword stuffed content and write original new content only for visitors. After Google penguin update the ideal keyword density ratio is 1-2 %.It means you can only use your targeted keywords 3 times in a 550 words article. Check your article with keyword density checkers.

Remove Spun content:

If your site is having spun article (articles made from some other original articles by spinning sentences, using synonyms and inserting meaningless words) then this is the very best time to remove it. Just go through your textual content, Google is now able to pick up semantic grammar. Whatever appears to be fake, will likely be discovered as a spammy site.

Remove unnecessary Footer Links From your website:

If you are having excessive links at your footer then try to remove duplicate links from your website footer. It will be search engine friendly. Excessive links at footer increases unnecessary keyword density and also below 70 (external + internal) links/ page is ideal for search engine crawlers.

Meta Tags:

Do not write your Meta tags filled up with huge list of keywords and do not use “comma”, “hyphen” and “dash” in Meta title just to highlight your targeted keywords. Write your Meta tags as a normal sentence.

Example:

Suppose you are having a seo blog to provide seo tips and social media news and your targeted keywords are 1) SEO blog 2) Social media news 3) SEO tips

Spammy Meta title –

SEO Blog – SEO Tips – Social Media News

Correct Meta title-

Leading SEO Blog is Providing Latest SEO Tips and Social Media News to help you out

Only 5-6 keywords/page will be enough. Do not try to add 20-30 keywords in your Meta keyword tag.Also always use unique meta tags for every web page in your website.

Remove Huge Tag cloud from your Blog:

A small tag cloud is search engine friendly. However a huge tag cloud which contains excessive keywords is absolutely a no no.

Page load time:

Decrease your page load time as much as you can. Google is now giving more importance to page load time of a website. Avoid using excessive JavaScript, flash and huge images. The official Google page load time checker is here- https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Remove external links from your website:

You need to remove unnecessary external links from your website. If you can’t remove external links then at least use rel=”nofollow” tag. Even add rel=”nofollow” tag to the social media buttons in your website like Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter etc.

Suggestions from webmasters tools account:

Check out your webmasters tools account. Check HTML improvements to find out if there are any duplicate title tags or Meta descriptions and fix it.

Phase Three – off page SEO after Google penguin update

Use natural anchor texts while building links:

The majority of Micro-niche websites which got hit by Google penguin are caused by anchor-text distribution. The majority of IM’s utilizes appropriate Keyword and key phrase with anchor-text to receive back links from almost everywhere. For those who have carried out exactly the same, you need to focus on enhancing the diversion of links. Make an effort to get back links for your website and pages with various anchor-texts.

Try to use natural anchor text like “click here”, “your domain” or your brand name. You can also use this format – “your keyword – your brand name”. You need to get 50% of these natural anchor texts of your total back links.

Stop Blog comment spamming with keywords:

Do not use automated software for blog commenting. Always manually comment on good blogs and use your genuine name at the name field instead of your keywords.

Stop Link exchanging with bad sites:

Link exchanging still works but always utilize 4 way link exchanging strategy and choose only good websites with proper content and page rank. While exchanging link always be careful about the backlink profile of that website.

Stop submitting one single article to 100 article directories

This is the ideal time to stop submitting one single article into hundreds of article directory sites. If you still want to use the article submission strategy to get backlinks then choose only high quality article directory sites like ezinearticles, articlebase etc. But submit one content to only one article directory and often use natural anchor texts as told before.

Guest posting is still a good idea

Guest posts have proved helpful once and for all and definitely will continue to do so. You should only publish your very best article to others blog since after looking at your article visitors may choose to go to your site.

 To get site visitors from guest posts you need to post on a blog which relates to your specific niche market and with a lot of active readers. The quantity of genuine comments or feedback a blog post receives is a fairly good sign of how active the readers are.

Always careful about the following points while guest posting –

1. Google page rank
2. Backlink profile
3. Visitor engagements
4. Previous published contents are genuine or not
5. Domain authority of the blog or how old the domain is
6. Related to your niche or not

Do not post on private blog networks like BMR or Linkvana.

Some others good off page strategies are –

1. Getting link back from wiki sites.
2. Getting both nofolloow and dofollow backlinks.
3. Getting backlinks from different ip locations.
4. Getting backlinks from high quality forums.
5. Getting backlinks from news sites.
6. Getting backlinks from hub page and squidoo.
7. Getting backlinks via PPT,PDF and Video submission
8. Generating high quality content to get visible on social networking sites.
9. Getting backlinks from various question-answer sites like Yahoo answer and ask.com
10. Press release submission is still a very good idea
11. Submit in relevant directory only and use anchor text like this – “your keyword – your brand name”

Some Don’ts after Google Penguin update –

1. Do not use Paid link strategy
2. Do not overuse your targeted keywords while building link
3. Do not use any black hat techniques like cloaking, doorway pages
4. Do not use duplicate or spun contents
5. Do not use keyword stuffed content
6. Do not submit into private blog networks
7. Do not build links in spammy websites
8. Do not submit one article into thousands of article directory websites
9. Do not overlook social networking sites
10. Do not only think about search engine crawlers.Think about visitors and search engines will automatically love you.

So what do you thinks about my report? Do you have any other strategy? Let me know via comment or simply contact me. I am waiting for your feedback on techtipsportal. Signing off.