Penguin Recovery SEO

What is Google Penguin and how does it affect your website?

Google Penguin is an algorithm that has been introduced by Google in April 2012 to counter the menace of black hat SEO techniques that are being followed by Google webmasters to increase their search engine rankings. Specifically the Penguin update targets those websites that are involved in artificial techniques to manipulate the number of links pointing to their web pages. These include link schemes, link farms and other link building and promotional schemes. Websites that have links pointing to them from sites with irrelevant or unrelated or thin content are also penalized.

Penalization involves a manual penalty that is imposed by Google on a website. In such instances webmasters receive an email from Google informing them that a penalty has been imposed on them as their website violates guidelines prescribed by Google. Google stops indexing such websites and as a result such websites do not appear high in search results. Google also informs webmasters of the steps that they need to take for removal of the penalty.

Steps that you need to take for Penguin recovery or removal of manual penalty imposed by Google

Websites that have been hit by the Penguin update from Google need not despair as there are several techniques available that can help them remove the manual penalty imposed by Google and improve their search engine rankings.

• It is important to properly analyze the reasons leading to the penalty and not to rush into submitting the site again for Google reconsideration.
• Do a link audit of the site to determine the quality of the links and identify the bad links. There are several tools available on the Internet that can assist users in this exercise. Some of these are paid tools while the others are free. For starters Google Webmaster Tools provide an excellent insight in this direction.
• Create a spreadsheet where the bad links can be listed and work can be initiated on them. Work will involve listing down the links and the date on which a request was sent to the owner of those links for removal, when a 1st reminder was sent for the same purpose; when was it followed up by second or third reminders and the status of the link currently - whether it has been removed or not
• Create a Gmail account and use that for sending out emails to webmasters requesting them for link removal.
• Create an effective email for this purpose that conveys that you are a human being and not a robot as webmasters have started adding filters in their mailbox that treat any request for removal of a link as a spam email.
• Make a list of those webmasters that have not responded to your email and not removed a link and group them separately.
• For such webmasters use the Google disavow tool by submitting the list of such domains to Google and requesting Google to disavow them. This list must be accompanied with evidence that proves that you have made genuine efforts in contacting the webmasters of such sites and despite your requests they have not removed their links and so you want to disavow them.
• Going forward ensure that you follow Google Webmaster guidelines strictly and never ever violate them.