It seems like everyone I’ve spoken to in the SEO Industry knows someone who’s been affected by Penguin 2.0. Whether it be rankings or traffic, everyone knows someone who’s losing out. So what steps can people take to help start off on the long road to recovery?
> Calm Down. It is not the end of the world. Tough love has to apply here as although your website may be losing traffic, at least you know what is causing this loss so you can create an action plan to tackle it. If there hadn’t been a large update and your website all of a sudden started losing rankings and traffic with no clear indication as to why, that might be the time to panic. Plus, if you’re remaining calm, you already have an edge over your rivals who have exhausted themselves flipping over tables and chairs and deciding to start from scratch.
> Think Long Term. I know as soon as something happens to your site that you want it back to where it was immediately so you start cracking the whip. WRONG. If you were to suddenly accumulate 20 pages of fresh content in a day alongside a multitude of keyword stuffed links, that’s like putting a fire out with petrol. Adopting a long term approach enables you to not only rank again organically, but to also keep your rankings once you get there. Otherwise you’re only set up to have a flash in the pan of good rankings using a rushed, drastic, i-want-it-now approach.
> Bring down the hammer, Hard. Penguin 2.0 was massively critical about the links you’ve been building and the anchor text you’ve been using and with Google’s disavow tool now taking centre stage, it’s time to use it and use it well. Matt Cutts himself has recently said that people using the Disavow tool aren’t using it in the way it was designed for. Matt said people were “Going through their links with a fine toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete” and this makes sense. Some of these links could have been hard work to get, but if you’re keyword stuffing them, they need to go. People also think if they keep some of their links then they might rank once they’ve gotten rid of enough of them. This again needs to be looked at as a bad link is a bad link, no matter how powerful you perceive it to be. With your rankings and or traffic in the toilet anyway, you’ve nothing to lose so get rid of all bad links.
Hopefully you won’t have been affected by the Penguin update, but if you have I hope this information helps!
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
