Google Penguin Fixes & FAQ

by Jim May 9, 2012

How To Remove Backlinks

That depends on how you got them. Visit the site where you bought the links from and see if there’s a way to take your links down. If there’s a cost incurred to remove backlinks, wearing it would be a good move to ensure your site doesn’t get hit or so your rankings don’t slide further.

How To Check Links To Your Site

Checking your backlink portfolio is as easy as logging into Google’s free Webmaster Tools service. Under ‘Traffic’ in the sidebar is a ‘Links to Your Site’ link that will show you all the links currently pointing to your site.

Things you should be looking for in the Penguin aftermath include any links coming from a domain containing the words links, SEO or submit in the URL or a lot of links from the same URL that don’t look natural compared to the rest of your backlink portfolio. These links may be from a long lost era but unfortunately, Google remembers everything.

Paid services are also available such as Majestic SEO that can often find more links faster than Google WMT. It’s a premium service at a premium cost however so for most webmasters WMT should be sufficient.

How to Recover Rankings Post-Penguin

One school of thought is that Penguin might not be an actual ‘penalty’ in the same way Google’s Panda content farm update was. With Penguin we’re not seeing as much deindexation from Google, meaning sites that were hit by Penguin are still in Google’s index, but don’t rank anywhere near as well anymore.

It looks like Google is simply degrading the value of these spammy backlinks rather than deindexing pages entirely, meaning a website’s ranking will experience the same ranking drop without the pain of Google’s ban hammer.

The upside (kinda) of this is that there may be a way to get your rankings back on their feet. The key is to avoid the same types of webspam that got your site hit by Google in the first place. Stop looking for ways to build ‘natural looking’ spam links and start actually building natural links. Treat your backlink portfolio the same way you would treat your social media profiles and remember that if you have to think about it too much, it’s probably not a good idea.

Matt Cutts Penguin

Should My Links Be Do Follow?

If your backlinks all have rel=â€dofollowâ€ in them then you might be signaling to Google that your links are unnatural and set up for spammy behavior. Simply ensure that the links pointing to your site don’t have rel=â€dofollowâ€ tags to be on the safe side with this one.

Why Does Google Webmaster Tools Show the Wrong Rankings?

Many people confuse WMT’s ‘Queries’ section as a tool to see current rankings when in fact it displays averages of your ranking for the time period you set. If yesterday you ranked at number one and today you’re ranking at number 10, you’ll get an averaged position that will most likely be different from your current rankings.

This tool can be helpful in seeing your ranking position in the grand scheme of things but if you’re after tracking and up-to-date take a look at the many different keyword tracking software available on the market such as Web CEO.

But I Got Hit By Penguin Without Even Getting a Webmaster Tools Email. What Gives?

Not everybody got the warning back in March despite our best efforts. We’re not sure what gives but we’ve got a word in with Google for clarification and will update here when they reply.

Can A Competitor Hurt My Rankings By Buying Links to My Site?

Thankfully, no.

In the industry we call this Google Bowling, which was rife in the wild west of Google’s early days. Save your worries however (or your cash if you’re that evil) as Google has come out and said they’ve got that covered.

If we’ve thought about it you’d be crazy to think Google hadn’t. Just take a look at this search integrity meeting Google put out a few months back where the search team debates rolling out very minimal changes in excruciating detail. If Penguin allowed Google Bowling to make a resurgence, Google would never have rolled out the update.