How to Recover From a Penguin Penalty

  • Added:
    Sep 10, 2014
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How to Recover From a Penguin Penalty Photo by Cris Monde

Penguin was launched in April 2012 when low-quality link building strategies are so rampant. Up to today, Penguin continues to wreak havoc on those unscrupulous companies. Oh okay, in some instances, firms are not fully-aware that their SEO provider is employing processes that go against Google’s quality guidelines. Recovering from a Penguin penalty is possible.

1. Conduct a thorough link cleanup

Penguin punishes a site due to a high number of unnatural links. The higher the bad links, the lower the trust rating of the site.
With this, you can simply remove the links after a link analysis manually. If you need to scrutinize every page in your website, then do so. You can also disavow the links although Google recommends doing both to ensure that the site contains no unnatural links.
Disavowing links is practical when you cannot remove links that you have no control over. Disavow links that you cannot control on their domain level.

2. Wait for a Penguin refresh

Penguin refresh is not implemented on a regular basis; it could be between three and eight months or could be even longer. You can only determine if the site recovers after a refresh and Google decides that your website can be trusted again.
Depending on the severity of the penalty, it may take at least two refreshes before the site recovers fully. One reason is it takes at least four months before Google can completely process your disavow files.
Let’s clear the air. Disavow works right away. When Google tries to crawl a webpage and discovers that the URL is already included in the disavow list, it will apply a no-follow tag to those unnatural links pointing to your website.

If your disavow file contains URLs or links found on pages that Google rarely crawls, then it may need several months before Google get to crawl these pages. Disavow is only applied after Google crawls the pages.
If you have not seen any positive changes after a refresh, it only means Google re-crawled only a few URLs in your disavow file.

3. Put more natural links

While waiting for a refresh, why don’t you put more good links after removing the bad links? Removing unnatural links would not be enough for Google.
Remember Google is using high-quality back links as a positive vote to your website’s trustworthiness.

Evidently, recovering from a Penguin penalty is possible. However, it is not as easy as you may think. The bottom line is to build your website in a way that Google will perceive it as trustworthy enough to rank it high on results pages. Think white hat!

Author's Profile

Cris is a blogger and a freelance writer currently working in a digital marketing agency in the Philippines.


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