How To Recover From The Penguin Algorithm In Less Than 1 Hour

Rankings decreased after a Google update? Have you suddenly lost traffic and you suspect Google Penguin has filtered your website from the search results? I know how you feel, because I've been in the same situation as you are now. But, don’t get discouraged, there’s still hope you can recover your rankings and traffic. I'm going to share with you my whole story and walk you through how I managed to recover my website from a Google Penguin penalty. This post is going to be a step by step guide, and if you follow my strategy, you can recover all your rankings and traffic as well. Any Google Penguin penalty can be defeated using the right techniques.

What exactly is Google Penguin -

Along with Google Panda, Google Penguin is the most common penalty that affects websites that are involved in aggressive link building strategies. This algorithm penalizes websites that are attempting to manipulate Google’s search results by building low-quality backlinks and over optimizing anchor texts.


When Google detects unnatural links to your website, it will penalize you for the group of keywords you were targeting. The result is less traffic from Google and for online businesses that rely on this traffic, this can mean bankruptcy.

You Can Also Read - Top 10 SEO Mistakes That'll Put You On Google's Naughty List

How do you know if you've been penalized by Google Penguin?

The easiest way to detect such a penalty is to check when Google has released an update for Google Penguin. Since 2012, several Google Penguin updates have been announced. These are as follow:

• Penguin 1.0 – April 24, 2012
• Penguin 1.1 – May 25, 2012
• Penguin 2.0 – October 5, 2012
• Penguin 2.1 – October 4, 2013
• Penguin 3.0 – October 17, 2014

If you lost traffic right after these updates occurred, most likely your website was filtered by the algorithm change. To be 100% sure this is the case, you’ll also have to look at low-quality backlinks and your website’s anchor text distribution. If your backlinks are unnatural and most of your links are of low quality, most likely you were penalized by Google Penguin.

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Fixing Penguin Does Not Result in Recovering Lost Traffic 

What we have learned from Google’s disclosures about how their algorithms are processing link data is that your site receives good link value and bad link value.  If the bad link value starts to outweigh the good link value your site begins to lose “rankings” and “search visibility” (really, what you lose are search referrals from Google).

Rankings and search visibility are two SEO metrics that have been overrated.  We talk about rankings and search visibility with our clients but we don’t measure search engine optimization success by those metrics.  We only use the metrics based on search referral traffic and overall traffic coming into a Website.

Every link you obtain should provide some kind of value other than mere anchor text.

If you have been obtaining links that you believe pass good value while killing links that you think pass bad value while you wait for your magical Penguin algorithm recovery, there is a reasonable chance that your traffic will grow when Google updates their data again.

But if you have just been disavowing or removing links all this time, you won’t see a huge boost in traffic.  You’ll probably go back to about where you were before you started all that toxic link building.

You won’t recover the value you had right before Penguin shut you down. You’ll have to grow back into that kind of traffic.

And you could have been doing that all along, for the past 18 months, without all the complaining and figurative beard-tearing you and your SEO providers have been going through.

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You Have Wasted 18 Months of Good Link Value -

All those “good” links you have obtained over the last year-and-a-half might dig you out of a mild Penguin hole but they would have helped a new subdomain or root domain gain a lot of traffic.  You could have been doing better than you are.

The uncertainty about when Google will update its Penguin scores should have compelled you to take action, not to wait.

The certainty that you will never recover the once positive value that became negative value with the last Penguin update should have compelled you to stop and think about why you continue to follow bad SEO advice.

You should have been driving new links toward a promotable domain or subdomain that has real growth potential, realizable in the immediate, near-term future.

How much money has your decision to wait for Penguin cost you so far?  How much more money are you willing to throw away on waiting?

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What Bad SEO Advice Looks Like -

The worst SEO advice you can follow usually comes from the most popular Websites.  These sites sell dreams and they don’t have to take accountability for their inexcusable pseudoscience.  They publish or praise or fail to point out the flaws in the worst-written SEO case studies.

• Bad SEO advice takes an uncritical view of any case study that purports to explain some algorithmic process.

• Bad SEO advice promotes unlimited growth potential with new-found techniques and strategies.

• Bad SEO advice tells you that search engine optimization has changed in the last 5, 10, or 15 years.

• Bad SEO advice blames Google for your problems.

• Bad SEO advice never acknowledges the mistakes that preceded it.

• Bad SEO advice rewrites what other people say to make it support bad SEO advice.

• Bad SEO advice takes quotes out of context.

• Bad SEO advice comes in the form of “50 SEO Experts say …” articles.

• Bad SEO advice almost always comes gift-wrapped in blog posts with fifty thumbs up.

• Bad SEO advice never points out or admits to the problems with “great articles”.

It’s always Feel Good Day when you are wallowing in bad SEO advice.  The future is bright and rosy, you have new tools to play with, and you can put the Dark Times behind you if you just charge forward and do what these guys did to get 150,000 visits with 1 article.

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The Penguin Algorithm Should Have Been Your Wake Up Call -

The reason why many SEO service providers are now struggling to find good clients is that a lot of people have been burned by the bad advice that so many SEO experts have handed out in the past.  They promoted stupid ideas like PageRank Sculpting, buying links indiscriminately, using guest posts for links, and moving content from subdomains to subfolders.

There is no SEO case study that proves anything.  A well-written SEO case study should make you think and look deeper on your own site but every site is different and those differences mount up when the algorithms are evaluating your site.

You would never have earned a Penguin algorithm downgrade (or “penalty”) if you had not been following bad SEO advice in the first place. It would not have happened.

My partner Subhadeep Patra and I have never had to deal with a Penguin issue on any of our Websites.  Nor have any of the clients we advised come back to complain of Penguin downgrades.

How do you tell the difference between Good SEO Advice and Bad SEO Advice?  Good SEO Advice makes no ridiculous promises about the bright tomorrows of the future and it admits to the limitations of search engine marketing practices.  Bad SEO Advice pretends that nothing bad will ever happen again if you just follow it.

Bad SEO advice led you to the Penguin algorithm.  Why are Earth would you follow the practitioners of bad SEO advice on their next great journey of discovery?  These people don’t know what they are doing, what they are talking about, or what real search engine optimization is really all about.

You don’t need any more help from the people who gave you the Penguin algorithm, and their name is NOT Google.

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Fixing A Penguin Penalty Is A Business Decision, Not An SEO Strategy -

The SEO decision is simple.  The SEO decision must support the business decision.  If the business decision is to move to a new subdomain or root domain then the SEO decision must be to do that quickly while ensuring that none of the toxic link value follows.

If the business decision is to wait for the Penguin Algorithm Fairy to come waive her magic wand then the SEO decision is to sell more snake oil promises about how bright the future will be tomorrow.

Technically, according to Googler John Mueller, it’s conceivably possible that you might be able to acquire enough positive link value to outweigh all the toxic link value that the Penguin algorithm is throwing at your Website.  SEO doesn't really have anything to do with obtaining good link value (SEO was never about links).

Your business decision should be your focus, not what you hope will be the right SEO decision 

Seriously, the only good SEO decision where anything like Penguin is concerned is to get off the damned Website as quickly as possible.  But that’s not the SEO service provider’s decision to make.

If you have contracted with someone to help you with your Penguin problem and those were not the first unmoderated words out of their mouth, why are you doing business with someone who refuses to give you the best possible SEO advice for a Penguin downgrade?

I have no problem with a contractor doing all the work required to “recover” from Penguin if you make the informed decision to stay with your toxic domain name.  I do object to the way contractors mistreat clients by not telling them up front and for no charge what it takes to get out from under Penguin without any effort.

There is no excuse for saying, “You can move your content to a new domain but I would not do that” if you are an SEO service provider.

Why are you doing business with someone who advised you to stay under the Penguin algorithm’s downgrade?  What do they get from such a relationship?  More money from you while they do Penguin busywork?

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The Best SEO Advice For The Penguin Algorithm -

• Get off the damn domain.  Go to a subdomain or a new root host.

• Don’t redirect your old URLs.  Don’t canonicalize them to the new domain.

• Ask people whose links you trust to link to the new domain or subdomain.  Live with their decisions and move on.

• Build value in something capable of growing.

• You can always save your old domain and go back to it later.

• You SHOULD choose achievable growth in search referral traffic over dreams, promises, and what ifs.

• You SHOULD question the value of someone who advises you to continue giving them money to chase down rotten links rather than get out from under the Penguin algorithm right away.

• If you make the business decision to stay with your domain, then it’s all on you.  Then I support hiring someone who is experienced in tracking down suspicious links.  But the chances are high that they will kill good links, too.

• That’s just the way it is.  And you still won’t be able to grow your traffic very fast while you host your business on an easily replaceable domain name.

• You may feel it’s not easily replaceable but it really, really is.

Recommended Read - 

• The Evolution Of SEO Trends Over 25 Years
• Why I Love These SEO Secrets (And You Should,Too!)
• How To Submit Your Website To Search Engines
• Top 15 SEO Techniques I Forget To Do

Conclusion

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