4 Steps For Google Penguin Recovery (SEO)
Hope you didn’t lose too much in the Melbourne Cup yesterday. Tragically my horse in the sweep got shot 🙁 . In recent times we’ve had an increasing number of clients come to us after they have been hit by Penguin. Unfortunately for them they have employed SEO tactics that focussed solely on increasing backlinks. As I’ve explained before this is a short term strategy for your business. You need to be playing the long game. Not only increasing the traffic to your website but making sure it is a site that has great content that people want to share.
1. Cancel Your Backlink Campaign
If you are still thinking in terms of having a “Backlink Campaign” you have got the wrong end of the stick entirely. Unfortunately I had to sack a client recently who was still insisting on using an article submission and creation software. The very same tactic that got him in trouble in the first place. We got the manual penalty revoked but his rankings had not returned as that is only one part of the equation. The second part is making sure his site is not only presenting well to Google but that it has regular content updates as well. We never got to that part of the project as I told him he was wasting his money with us if he went down the path of creating backlinks.
2. SEO Best Practice
Many business owners who focus on creating backlinks lose sight of what is important. Things like site speed, good navigation and no broken links. All these things are SEO best practice. Make sure you check the HTML suggestion in webmaster tools and also the crawl error section to see the big picture. Fix the things found in there that need to be fixed.
3. Use Disavow Tool & Reconsideration
Just over a year ago Google launched their Disavow tool. Use it if there are backlinks you cannot get taken down, regardless if you have received a manual penalty or not. If you have received a manual penalty you then need to make a reconsideration request within Google webmaster tools. It can take weeks for Google to respond so be prepared to wait.
4. Start A Blog
Not because Google loves blogs but because it is an easy way to add content to your site. It also gets you in the habit of communicating on a personal level with visitors to your site and that will be one of things that distinguishes you from your competition. Finally it gives you an avenue to use your keywords in a natural way like I did with the series of Melbourne SEO posts . Every time you write a post it is an opportunity to rank for something as well as speak to the visitors on your site. For example my post last week on Aussie SEO Experts now ranks no.4 in Melbourne, my post on SEO Next ranks no. 6 in Melbourne. That was simply from writing posts about the subjects and then linking to them from other posts where it helped the reader to find more information.
Google Penguin Recovery Looks Like This
Once you have done all of the above you will see a recovery and be better placed to avoid penalties in the future. Here is the graph of a very competitive keyword in the Sydney market for one of our clients.
This recovery took about 5 months work but we are now finally seeing the results we expected. In the case f this client, he ranked as low as 271 and over the last couple of weeks has come back into the top 10. If you follow the steps above and don’t deviate your rankings will eventually come back. You just need to hang in there.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
