Penguin 2.0 The Painful Truth
Remember Matt Cutts back in August last year saying that the next Penguin update would be jarring and jolting? Well there have been a couple of Penguin updates since then but they weren’t that bad. Five days ago however the big one hit. 
What We Are Seeing
A few of our clients had participated in link building schemes in the past through various avenues such as software or link building membership sites. These clients seem to not have only lost any link juice they had been getting but have also been penalised. Where Google could work out a pattern in the backlinks they have been severely punished. If you had simply posted articles on random sites purely for backlinks you would have lost the link love but not have been penalised.
What Now?
I met with one potential client this week that had 175000 backlinks. They were no.1 for everything in their industry they have now been blown off the front page. The no.1 result has less than 100 backlinks. It’s important now if you did have link schemes in place get rid of them. Try to take them down if you can. Any backlink you have out there that is not for traffic but for link juice, get rid of it. If you have too many you may want to try the disavow tool but it will take weeks or moths for that to have any effect. If you have been hit really bad you may want to think of building a new site at a new domain. As Matt Cutts says, you have to dig yourself out of a hole before you can even begin to start ranking. Love to hear your experience good or bad.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
