My Panda / Penguin Algorithm Recovery Story

[mjonezy]

Hey guys,

Just sharing the presentation I did for the SEO Meetup group in Melbourne last night.

"My Panda & Penguin Algorithm Recovery Story - Cheers, Tears and Jeers"
http://www.slideshare.net/holidaypointau/my-panda-penguin-algorithm-recovery-story-cheers-tears-and-jeers/

The presentation covers everything from:
- What I was (and im sure everyone else was) was doing around SEO
- What effects the Panda / Penguin Algorithm updates had to my websites
- Everything I implemented to try to recover
- What finally worked
- The results i saw
- Key considerations & Take Aways

Please let me know if you have any questions, what you have tried in the past to recover and perhaps results you have seen by following the process within.

Thanks
Michael

 

[CyberClick]

A brave post. Refreshing to see someone being honest about their seo fall and sharing their recovery advice. Thanks Michael.

 

[Georgia Wilson]

Great talk

Really enjoyed your talk last night - thanks so much for sharing.

 

[chris]

Agree, fantastic talk! Just needed more animations

Seriously though, very interesting stuff.

 

[petermeadit]

Really sorry I missed that talk Michael. I really wanted to hear about how you recovered your site from penalty. I hope there was plenty of Memes. Anyways, next time.

 

[geodomains]

Hi Michael,
What a great slide show and presentation, best I've ever seen since Penguin.

I'm not afraid to say I was decimated by Penguin and I know of quiet a few members here who had websites hit.

I gave up with trying to get a couple of my websites reconsidered as the time and effort was to much, 5 times for one domain.

Question, have you ever heard of anyone buying a domain and asking G for a re-consideration as they were unaware of the penalty on the domain and getting it removed?

I often wonder if this would work, say change the ownership to a friend for instance.

I see G does say this when asking for a re-consideration.

Don

 

[James]

Good presentation, some good tips for those targeted by Google penalties, Have shared it on a few sites.

I am working with a few companies in US and Australia to fix problems, it is a long process and it can be very tedious.

 

[helloworld]

Great slide show. 12 years, wow. I guess with that length of experience it would have been easy to get caught in the gray areas.

I also wish i'd made it. Next time.

 

[mjonezy]

Thanks for all the comments guys. It's been a long journey over the last 18 months with Adsense income dropping 10 fold (still enough to pay for itself though).

I've been sitting on the data for the past few months to ensure that the rankings stick and all is looking good so far, if anything, my main site improved quite a lot after the Penguin update.

I'm glad to say as well that with the shares i got from Linkedin, the presentation actually is now featured on the "hot in Linkedin" section on the Slideshare Homepage, so please keep sharing!

Unfortunately we can't easily change the domains of established clients, but for these side projects we all have, definitely go for it if you have nothing to lose... im just kicking myself i didn't do it earlier. A word of warning though, this probably isnt going to work too well if you have no links to point to the new domain when you make the switch over... im just lucky that i have a range of social profiles, web 2.0 sites and properties i was easily able to edit and the fact i did acquire natural links over time (when sitting at #1 for a keyword, some bloggers assume you are the official website).


As per your question geodomains:
"have you ever heard of anyone buying a domain and asking G for a re-consideration as they were unaware of the penalty on the domain and getting it removed?"

I just happened to remember that Matt Cutts put a video out around this exact question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGUw9oS5csI

To paraphrase what he says, even if you get the manual penalty removed (assuming the domain had one, which you wouldnt be able to tell), the domain could be hit algorithmically, which would then warrant having to clean up the link profile and wait for the next algorithm update (pretty much what I did). But since there is no guarantee it will recover, and with the money and time spend to remove links, would the links the domain had be worth it?

There are always cases where a low quality domain might have referral traffic from real websites, but i still wouldn't link them to your money site... send them to an affiliate code (that's another story altogether)

 

[mjonezy]

You have no idea Helloworld! When i started, there was no offsite factors and we were dealing with the big 5! Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Yahoo and Msn.

I just happened to be talking about it last night, in the early days we were able to rank websites using a template of jibberish text, put keywords in the respective tags, maintain a keyword density and then cloak the page so users see the proper website.

The thing is as well, Inktomi was a crawler that fed data to many search engines and they guaranteed to crawl your website ever 48 hours. So in doing that, you could make tweaks to the template every 2 days and see if what you did worked.

How things have changed!

 

[helloworld]

haha yeah Good old netscape, altavista days. Feck I remember when Yahoo was manually edited and was just a page of text with links.

Black hat is still alive and kicking though. Some are killing it, quite an interesting strategy, happy to get into in person down the track.

 

[Blue Wren]

That was well worth my time to go through that. Very, very nice work there sir. Well done. Thank you kindly.

 

[petermeadit]

You have no idea Helloworld! When i started, there was no offsite factors and we were dealing with the big 5! Altavista, Excite, Lycos, Yahoo and Msn.

I used to like Altavista and Dogpile!