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12 minutes
Penguin 2.1 has caused quite a shakeup in the SEO world these last few weeks. Launched not long after Google’s Hummingbird update, there seems to be fewer people talking about this then there was for the introduction of Penguin or even its version predecessor, Penguin 2.0.
Though I previously shared that I had a lot of success on the back of helping people get over Penguin 2.0 – especially since I own Penguin2.com – I’ve yet to write anything about Penguin 2.1 until now. The reason is simple: I wanted to be absolutely sure I was giving the right advice on what to do after this update. After looking at hundreds of sites in my own network (yes, hundreds) I certainly am now.
One of the things that really struck me was how many SEO’s came out and said “my methods are working as well as ever; not one site of mine got hit by Penguin 2.1.” Needless to say, I’ve pretty much lost trust in a lot of those people. I’m actually proud to have had sites hit by the update; It means I’m testing enough strategies when it comes to SEO.
Announcing that not one single website you worked on got hit – especially when you describe yourself as an SEO expert – doesn’t give me a lot of faith in your practices. Unless of course you were lying, which really backfired in my opinion.
What I’m about to share with you is nothing mind-blowing. It’s not some secret algorithm loophole that finally got blocked in by Google. In fact, it’s exactly what I predicted it was on Twitter a few weeks ago in the first 48 hours after the update was made official by Google’s Matt Cutts.
You can see I quickly got to work trying to analyse where I thought the problem lied (with a lot of help from Diggy too):
It’s also what we’ve been preaching in the forums for weeks now, but I wanted to do a lot more testing before I ran a blog post about it. The only mistake I made in waiting so long to write this post is that the rank tracking tool that I previously relied on the most – SerpFox – doesn’t give you ranking reports older than one month.
I’ve since moved away from Serpfox to another tool I’ll do a review on in my next post, but it has ruined my plan of showing you some great screenshots. Basically I wanted to show you ‘here’s where a site got hit really bad and here’s our gradual recovery’. We definitely have the recoveries, but there’s no screenshot to show the hit and the recovery in one.
Private Inc. is The World’s Greatest SEO Company
Though it may seem that these are being posted purely for egotistical reasons (wow, look how great I am at SEO) the truth is that I just want to show it would have been very easy for me to say I also have websites which didn’t get hit by Penguin. To say that my SEO is flawless and I didn’t lose a single ranking.
Of course, you could look at the dates and be skeptical about why I don’t have anything more recent. Damn, you got it me. Okay, here’s the real truth…
Private Inc. Is the World’s Worst SEO Company
I could totally lie and say that everything we showed in Backlinks XXX and my own personal sites were not affected. That’s not true. In fact, we’ve added 8 exclusive videos to Backlinks XXX in recent weeks (yes, that’s 8) which go into Penguin 2.1 in a lot of detail and the tools you can use to get yourself out of any rankings drops.
The date lines up perfectly with Penguin 2.1, as do a large number of other hits we received. Keep in mind that we’re tracking hundreds of websites here and though a small percentage of them were hit, we did get hit. Unlike others, I don’t mind sharing that at all.
Shocking right? A guy who studies SEO like it’s as important as the future of humanity and yet I still have sites that got slapped by Google. But then there are all those dodgy companies who still send spam emails about doing directory submissions and guaranteeing number #1 rankings in Google so maybe we’re not the worst. Here’s the real, real truth…
We’re a Team That Live and Breathe SEO. Fact.
And this team monitor hundreds of websites. This includes client of ours through our Private Inc. service (don’t waste your time going to the site, there’s nothing there), our websites which we actively try to rank and our sites which are nothing more than part of a high-PR network to build ourselves easy links. In other words, we have a lot of data to work with when this kind of thing happens.
Something interesting I want to share is that – for the most part – the sites which got hit and the sites which kept their rankings (or improved upon them) followed the same strategy.
The benefit of running our own network means it’s also much easier to dissect the sites which got hit because I’m handling all of the links myself. I can add and remove them all as I please. I’m not waiting for some disavow tool to kick into place from links I built elsewhere.
The following is examples of rankings which have increased (and thrived) since the Penguin 2.1 update
As I said earlier, unfortunately SerpFox doesn’t allow you to change the dates on how far back you can view a ranking (past 30 days) or my screenshots would look more impressive. Since I have (had) multiple SerpFox accounts, I never grouped the sites I was watching and therefore can’t change the date. I would have put up this blog post far closer to the event when there was actually buzz around it if I wanted to lie about this.
After editing these pictures to put on that fancy shadow I realised I had cut off the dates. Here’s one of the more impressive ones without the ‘special effects’ (I’m happy to share the rest in the comments):
Note that the rapid increase came a few days after Penguin was announced and has risen ever since. Diggy actually sent me a lot more than I included in this post:
The Two Obvious Things That Penguin 2.1 Hit
Anyone who is a member of our private forums will know that what I’m about to share was figured out within 48 hours. The reason I didn’t jump the gun to make a blog post is that I had to make time to make sure our sites actually recovered and improved upon their rankings before I shared it here. It wasn’t so much that we had to find the safe, just wait a long time for the Redditor to come back and tell us what was inside it.
First of all, Penguin 2.1 only affected a percentage of search queries. This means a ranking may have dropped naturally without being hit by the Penguin update and we could suspect it got ‘slapped’ when it actually hadn’t. I know this sounds unlikely, but after looking at hundreds of sites I would say a couple do fit into this scenario. Even without our own data, it’s very hard to analyse other rankings in other industries because, once again, we don’t know if that was an affected query or includes affected sites.
There’s also the angle that different niches still have their own types of bias, whether they were hit by the changes or not. Some search results are dominated by freshness, medical terms are still dominated by old authority sites and some search phrases have such little competition that poor sites are still going to rank well.
Hit Factor #1: Over-optimisation of Anchor Text
Keep in mind that the original Penguin update, launched back in late April 2012, was clearly focused on removing spam from search engine results. I’m not talking about what it targeted here (thin sites, blog networks, etc) but rather the aim of Google in order to improve their algorithm.
While we’re on that topic, I don’t think there’s a specific type of website that got hit. In other words, it didn’t seem to matter too much where the links are coming from, rather that they fit into a certain mould of over-optimisation. I’ve tested this with Negative SEO on my own sites and found that to be true; though I’m sure there are exceptions.
For the last few years myself and Diggy have been operating under the idea that we don’t want our core anchor text to make up more than 30% of our links. To put this into simpler terms, if I’m trying to rank for ‘cat toys’ in Google UK and I have 100 backlinks to my site then I don’t want more than 30 of them with ‘cat toys’ as the anchor text. This is much higher than I’ve seen other people preach, but it has kept us in fairly good stead and gave us something to focus on.
Don’t forget that, once again, there are obviously exceptions. Google are a company worth around 250 billion dollars. They have the funds and the obvious motive to make a search engine that doesn’t play by the same rules across the board.
Now, our internal metric is much much lower than this. I’m focusing my main anchor metric on small sites to not be more than 10% of my links while Diggy is quite a bit more conservative at 5%. This is quite a drastic change from what we’ve been able to ‘get away with’ previously. Two good tools to check your current anchor text distribution are my constant recommended resources, Ahrefs and MajesticSEO. It’s worth creating a free account on each.
Hit Factor #2: Huge Lack of Internal Links
As many of you know, Diggy is my business partner when it comes to all of my SEO operations and he sent me a number of notes that he wanted me to cover in this post that he thought were relevant. On this second point, here’s what he had to say:
“Another thing that we believe the Penguin 2.1 update targets is the comparison of links to your inner pages vs the links to your root URL. Some people doing SEO seem to build a gazillion links to their homepages, but none to the inner pages. This is a clear signal of unnatural linkbuilding, and by increasing the spectrum of the update from just looking at the homepage link profile to the entire site’s links, it was once again easy to take out a huge amount of SEO’d spam sites that shouldn’t be ranking at the tops of the SERPS.”
When anchor-text diversification couldn’t really seem to be blamed on some sites that we monitored, having an ungodly amount of links to a site homepage and non to internal pages was what really set off some flags.
As I often preach, SEO is rarely more complex than trying to think of any algorithm updates from a Googlers’ point of view. If you were the head ofweb spam right now, what kind of things would you be looking for to find sites ‘gaming’ their way to the top of the system? This is yet another obvious tell that you should be more careful about unnatural link building on sites that are important to you.
I’m not telling you to get into pure Whitehat SEO (see point one near the end of this post) but it definitely helps to play into their logic and give your website a more natural link profile.
Exception Example #1: Clicky Analytics
I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record here but I do not like sharing the results and tactics of other websites. However, without giving any examples at all it’s very hard to make points that backup what I’m saying to you. For the following two examples I’ve chosen very large companies both worth a few million, rather than highlighting some webmaster who relies on the internet income to save up for his dream car. I have those as well, but these two examples should be enough.
I wanted to show that not all sites avoid these two mistakes and have issues with ranking. Some clearly fly very much under the radar.
Clicky is an analytics software tool that I personally use and constantly recommend others to use via this blog as well. It’s totally free (up to a point) and you don’t have to worry about people tracking your websites via Spy tools like they can if you have multiple sites on a Google Analytics account.
Here’s some of the anchor text distribution for links that are pointing to the Clicky website:
As you can see, some of their terms have an abnormally high percentage of anchor text distribution. You would expect their website name to be right up there instead of their desired target keyphrases. Especially when they have millions of backlinks. Please note that this data was verified on other tools as well and while the amounts vary, terms like ‘Real time web analytics’ are found on a very high percentage of their backlinks.
So, how do you get millions of links for phrases like ‘Google Analytics Alternative’ instead of people just linking to your website URL like you would expect? Well, when you use Clicky tracking code, they sneak in a little linked image to show you use their service. The alt tag of the image and the title of the link both show the terms they want to rank for.
Fortunately it’s possible to remove this if you have even just a little knowledge of HTML (or find that very small checkbox in the corner showing how to turn it off) but it’s clear that millions of people haven’t done this. Every single time you refresh the page for your tracking code, a new phrase they want to rank for replaces the previous text…
I really wouldn’t have expected something like this to work in this day and age but it clearly hasn’t gone under any kind of manual review. I have no qualms against them putting the link in there by default – it grows the Clicky service and improves their offering – but the mixing up of those anchor texts is no doubt done to get top rankings for relevant phrases to their business. Something that is far from ‘natural’ surely in the eyes of search engines.
I took the hardest phrase they’re trying to rank for and you can see they’re sitting at a pretty 5th on my end:
Trust me when I say they’re doing much better for other terms you can find if you keep refreshing that tracking page code and see what they want to rank for.
Exception Example #2: Infogram
Infogr.am is another example of a service which utilises its users in order to get better rankings for its website. Like Clicky, they have a service which means their end result is something you want to paste into the code of your website, which they really take advantage of. To be fair, Infogr.am seem to offer a great service and have built up a brand at a great time where Infographics still seem to be all the rage is a digestible way to enjoy content.
They’ve also been fortunate enough to get regular embeds on one of the biggest blogs in the world, The Verge. Here’s one of the more recent graphs posted on The Verge courtesy of Infogram:
If the arrow doesn’t give it away, that’s a nice juicy link at the end of every embedded infographic. This time I will show you an anchor text distribution chart from Majestic SEO just to keep things fair.
As you can see, the majority of their links are for the text ‘infographic’ (how lucky!) and over 18% of them that have been picked up by this tool are for ‘create infographics’ which can be found embedded in said infographics. Even luckier is that it does transform into rankings as well:
In both cases here, just by looking at the source code of the links, I would not have thought of them to have a big impact on search rankings. After all, the links for Clicky are just image links with some ‘alt and ‘title’ info and while they do help, it’s still an image link. Similarly, they are linking to affiliate links in that code so they must be doing some sort of 301 redirect from the affiliate link back to their homepage in order to pick up that link juice.
If you look at the source code of Infogr.am links on those charts then you’ll also see that the link isn’t very ‘clean’ when it comes to HTML standards. They have the link code in there with the desired anchor text, but it does look a little messy. It’s still clearly working though.
This is the kind of thing that Google have publicly said they don’t want companies doing over and over again yet it still seems to be working. My main point here however is that just because I recommend your anchor text for your ‘money terms’ to be under a certain number, it doesn’t always have to be. Clearly.
Were You Hit? Here’s A 3-Step Action Plan
The most obvious lesson first of all is to head into Google Webmaster tools and see if you have any warnings about your site. If you have been a ‘bad boy’ and building bad links, you may need to look into disavowing some of them to have any chance of a comeback.
#1 Make sure you have a website which breaks all of the rules
This major update, and big updates prior, have not pushed me to completely clean up my act. I still think it’s very, very valuable to have sites which go against the conventional methods of building a website that Google will love. It’s very easy to spend $50 on Fiverr and run a few thousand dirty links to a test website or pick up a copy of GSA (full video guide inside Backlinks XXX) and run that on a VPS 24/7. Keep the website thin – just a few pages – and use an expired domain if you can to give yourself a little credibility.
Not only do I think you’ll be surprised that these kind of sites can have quite a bit of life in the right industry but you’ll also be able to figure out what updates hit for yourself without waiting for other people to share their findings. This is especially the case if you have a few dozen websites or, like us, a few hundred.
#2 Slow down on what you’re doing to have an unnatural profile
Hopefully one or two of these points fit in with your own site if you have been affected by Penguin 2.1. The simple idea then is to ease up on what you’re doing for this to be the case. If you have an overly high anchor text distribution for certain words and phrases then consider changing those up in continued link building efforts.
Similarly, if you’ve been solely focused on building links to your homepage or just a small percentage of your site then slow down those operations too. There are cases where Penguin 2.1 (and all of the Penguin updates) seem to have hit some sites unfairly, but in most cases there are a lot of unnatural elements to a webmasters SEO efforts. If that’s the case for you, then you need to be focusing your efforts on other avenues.
#3 Diversify your anchors and internal linking
I’m not going to turn point-three into some huge section on how to build backlinks. I’ve covered that in a huge blog post in the past which is still just as relevant today as it was back then, bar one or two examples. Something to keep in mind is that your links don’t have to be followed links in other to help with your anchor distribution and getting links to internal pages.
Meaning, you don’t have to get high-quality links in order to help with your backlink profile. Simply getting links from places like blog comments, forum signatures and guest blogging (again, even with nofollowed links) should help you to build a more natural, diverse set of links.
Since it’s soon to be Thanksgiving in America, the internet is going a little crazy with all of their Black Friday deals. I don’t like posting on Friday’s since less people are online, so I’m making this offer available now. For the next 48 hours, you’ll be able to reserve a 100% free SEO call with myself or Diggy to discuss your website for 20 minutes.
We’ll get on Skype with you and look at your website and offer advice in real time and you’ll be able to ask us any questions you have as well. Since we wouldn’t be able to handle hundreds or thousands of people taking up this offer there will be a $500 deposit required. This will be 100% refunded after the call, Paypal fees and all.
The deposit is simply to make sure that people who reserve a slot to chat with us will actually turn up for the call and we’re not sitting in front of Skype waiting when we could have been doing something more productive. If you aren’t able to do this in the next week then I would refrain from reserving a time. To guarantee your spot, here’s our link to Paypal for payment. Sorry, received more than I expected so have to close this early.
I tend to do this kind of thing once per year to have a fresh idea on what problems are bothering people (last year it was Blogging focused) and what common mistakes I see people making with their sites, so we hope to get as much out of this as you will with the free session.
Have a great Thanksgiving to all of our American readers and to everyone, thank you for reading as always. If you’ve had a site affected by Penguin 2.1 then I would love to hear your story in the comments…
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Cheers for the post Glen. Link building diversification to inner pages is a practice you hit straight on.
You’re welcome Dan!
Great post Glen.
Just sent my deposit, look forward to the call.
Cheers
Zach
Hi Zach,
There have been a few payments but not with the same email as your comments. Could you reply to the payment email with a note to me?
Look forward to the chat 🙂
Just sent you an email to your paypal email.
Talk soon
really good to read that.. I’ve been hit, If we diversify anchor text to bring down and also balance the links to inner pages as you suggest and this works..will we still have to wait until the next penguin update for rankings to improve or should they improve straight away?
It’s not going to happen instantly. Our common results took 2-3 weeks (it takes time for new links to be crawled) but you don’t have to wait for a new Penguin update, no 🙂
ah thanks! that was my biggest concern is waiting possibly 6 months for a new update..
nice one mate. Nice one.
What about youtube videos? How would you go about ranking it within the first 7014 days? Spammy fiverr links or high pr links?
What do you mean by 7014 days? If you mean 7-14 days then we’ve been discussing that in the forums 🙂
It’s not only links that matter; the on-site Youtube metrics will need to factor into it as well (thumbs up, comments, embeds, etc).
how do i get link to the forum? thanks pal in advance
Just posted it in a comment below 🙂
Glenn,
Is there a way to create a post on the common problems you are answering after the interviews? I think that would help a lot of us
Hi Mike,
Probably on the forums, here: http://privateinc.com/hq/
If there are a lot – I don’t expect there to be too many – I’ll make a separate post but more than likely I’ll write about it on the forum.
Hi Glen,
Well said! Link diversification is huge.
I change my anchor text up a ton and do more long tail or even irregular keywords these days as there seems to be a bigger emphasis on non-traditional keywords with Google’s changes.
Link up to internal pages aggressively. Google wants you to build a network within your blog, not some linked up beast leading to your home page.
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Hello Glen,
Thanks for the post..
1. Is there a percentage for links to home page and the inner pages that you would suggest ? Something like 60% home page and 40% to all the other pages ?
2. What percentages do you suggest to be the maximum for our anchors so to be “under the radar” ?? Something like under 10% ??
Thanks again for the great post.. 🙂
Hey Thomas,
Already got question 2 answered in the post. I say around 10% now while Diggy says 5%. Obviously though, there’s nothing set in stone.
1. Nothing clear cut that I’ve noticed. As always, just try to diversify things as much as possible. The more natural looking the better.
Thanks a lot guys..
Really appreciate this…
Hi Glen,
I’ve sent Payment and sent you e-mail.
Hope you got it.
Muhammad
Got it!
Thanks Muhammad 🙂
Thanks for more great info. I was hit by Penguin 2.1. Specifically sites where I had used dirty links with the same anchor text pointing to the homepage. After disavowing a fw links and building a more natural back linking profile I am starting to see these sites improve once again.
Awesomeness.
It’s so easy to be lazy with following these updates when you guys have such a big network, keep track of everything and share your results. hah.
I am 90% sure that some of my websites got hit because of #factor 2… Will try to create some links, and will let you know if that helped to recover.
Good luck Felix 🙂
Let us know how you get on!
Glenn
Penguin 2.1 and hummingbird are two different updates not one and the same. Unlikely hummingbird will have much effect on people.
Joe
You’re right, I totally messed that up. Will fix now 🙂
Hummingbird, Penguin, Caffeine, Panda…
Hey Glen
Another awesome post, thanks for sharing your insights… like you say, keeping it as natural as possible is the way to go, for valuable sites at least… i need to increase my volume of testing, be great to have a chat – I’ve just made my deposit 🙂
Cheers
Si
think many sites got hit by this update since almost everyone over-optimizes the anchor texts. Many useful things here, i think natural link building is what i need to do to recover faster. Thanks for the great info!
I see what you did there 😉
Hats off for not putting a “dog training” phrase as an example 🙂 !
Very valuable information as always, thanks !
Maybe my first time? 😉
Hah!
Hi Glen,
I’m glad that I have one site that is built completely on XXX methods and got hit by Penguin! I was very worried at first, and began to email u n diggy. But I know you guys sure got hit definitely, so I try to control myself by not pestering you guys with solutions.
And now it’s out! Thank you so much!
You never fail to amaze me, and now with your new videos in the backlinksXXX portal, I’m glad I invested in it back then in May. Now is my time to get my penguin-hit site up again! Will update you with my success story soon!
Great stuff as always Glen.
What are your thoughts on the following:
1. Poor quality links. We seemed to see a lot of sites that dropped after 2.1 despite not having over optimised anchors or 100% links to homepage and suspected Google was either discreditting poor links (links that are easily auotmated) or even penalising them. Do you think this is an issue? (several sites around now for analyzing “toxic” links or do you think thye’re just scaremongers?)
2. Everyone preaches tiered web 2.0s and that kinda thing at the moment (Apart from personal blog networks). Makes me nervous that these are in line for a hit in the new year.
cheers
Rob
As one of your oh so valuable clients 🙂 do I need to pay a deposit?
Send me an email with your Skype details 🙂
As a proud member of XXX Backlinks, I got this information weeks ago 🙂 Good stuff Glen. As an alternative to SERP Fox, I recommend AccuRanker (www.accuranker.com) – Specially if you run a lot of sites. Check it out.
Good job Glen. Keep it up!
Hey Glen,
Great post! Thanks for this!
I have one question. If you could you tell me is there update still roll up? I got an news portal (on English). 1 year old, and have on it about 1300 posts. All was fine, all was unique, no single unnatural link. All was linked from other people, and recieving about 600-700 unique visits a day from Google. But on 23th November, my traffic from Google dropped for 95%.
I have changed on 13th November my title (from Brand name to Brand Name – 4 words) and meta description. But only for Home Page. On posts (where i am getting traffic from Google) nothing has changed, all is same. But traffic is still down. No rankings for some easy KW…strange to me.
Do you think that this title and desc change could be a problem? To back it on old, or to wait? 🙂
Thanks
Thanks for the offer Glen, sent the moula, look forward to a chat!
Cheers,
Chris
Sent you an email.
Thanks!
Hi Glen
Great post as ever. Andy here from your home town Newcastle which is cold and miserable at the moment! I have just taken you up on your offer and looking forward to arranging a time to discuss one site of mine in particular with you guys. Cheers
Thanks for a great article. I especially liked the Clicky bit and Infographics bit. I have been thinking that sites probably are doing this kind of thing!
Great post Glen, thanks. You are one of the bloggers i really respect, since you’re not just talking the talk, but are actually proving your statements. This also includes proving that Google ain’t god, and you shouldn’t listen to all the crap they tell us. 🙂
Btw. Search Metrics would have helped you out on looking back in the history of your keyword rankings.
It’s possible to see the history of how a website ranked on a certain keyword, for up to 2 years with their tool. But it costs arround €399/month if you want to be able to look back for 2 years, and that’s pretty expensive thought. I use the €69/month package myself, but then you only have the option to compare a keywords ranking with the previous weeks result. IMO it’s still the best SEO tool ever made, because of it’s originality and quality.
Thanks for the recommendation Sillas,
I actually found another tool which is significantly cheaper and allow this which I’ll be covering in my next post 🙂
Hi Glen,
thanks for sharing.
Just sent my deposit.
Looking forward to the call 😉
Cheers,
Tom
Awesome, Tom.
Hey Glen,
Just checked out the updates to BacklinksXXX. Awesome stuff!
I’ve already read about Diggy using GSA and FCS in his strategy on the Niche Duel forum and it’s awesome to have the detailed step by step now as a member of BLXXX.
BTW it’s not often that I see people giving such a major update to a $97 info product. It’s things like this that make me a customer for life of all your products and the ones you recommend.
Keep doing what you do. Deliver great content and products. You’re much appreciated.
Thank you Rob,
We really appreciate that 🙂
Great share thanks Glen. I also try to create plenty of internal (Wikipedia-style) contextual links too and not enough SEOs seem to recommend that.
Good point Terry,
Glad you liked the post!
Very nice list of updates!
Thanks for sharing all that.
I would like also to comment on Hit Factor #2. At our SEO agency, we confirmed similar findings as well that the backlinks must not get concentrated on a single URL provided that the diversification is hitting pages of related content. This is especially notable for websites that tries to target multiple niches that are related to each other to a certain extent. It is natural for the home page though to have at least 3 times the backlinks of any internal page. When this percentage though get multipiled exponentially as in 15 times more or so, it will start alarming the automated algorithms of Google.
Thank you very much for confirming all those stuff along with many others.
All the Best!
One of my sites got hit badly by Penguin 2.1.
Now I got few clues to recover it. 😉
Thanks Glen.
Hi Glen,
So in regards to the inner page linking, does this mean we need a balance of root url backlinks and inner page backlinks to look natural?
If I just backlinked my inner page ($ page) and not my root URL or other inner pages, surely this looks unatural also?
Nice article thanks.
Sure, but who does that? 😉
I think that would be an interesting experiment; I’ve never built internal only links to be honest.
I don’t mean internal linking, I mean back linking to a inner page which happens to be my $ page.
Should I also back link to the root url as well as the inner $ page?
Thanks
Hey Glen can I get an answer to the above comment, thanks!
Got my deposit in – thank you guys for all that you do!
Got it, Ted!
I always get fired up to see a viperchill updates in my news feed. Got real excited when I saw the bit about the free 20 minute call. Deposit sent, looking forward to the chat!
Cheers,
Dan
Looking forward to it too!
Great post Glen!
Tracking and testing are essential! Thanks for showing your findings and keeping it real!
You’re welcome; couldn’t agree more!
Appreciate the comment 🙂
Hi Glen
I tried to access a number of threads on the forum but I guess it is premium. Where can I check out the cost and whilst I’m at it, is there a discount code!!
Cheers Mark
Thanks for the opportunity. It’s also possible to review a dutch website?
Was Diggy your dutch partner?
Hi Glen,
Would the 20 minutes of coaching be enough for you to tell me how to (hopefully) get a site out of a Penguin 2.0 problem (not 2.1) but the one that hit in May. The site has no GWT warnings.
Thanks,
Mikael
Just sent my deposit. Looking forward to it. Thanks!
Hey Glen, I jumped on the chance and sent you the money.
Looking forward to the conversation.
“It wasn’t so much that we had to find the safe, just wait a long time for the Redditor to come back and tell us what was inside it.”
brilliant.
Deposit sent, email sent – look forward to our call. Please confirm you received it 🙂
Thank you!
Hey Glen
Thanks for all this. Up for the call – I’ve a pretty much brand new site, purely speculative, is this something you’d be interested in a call on? I would be, just don’t want to waste your time by not having done the basic stuff. If so – will deposit!
Cheers
Rob
We had a few client sites hit by penguin.
None of the above factors in this post seem to apply to us.
After looking at all of the variables, I came to the conclusion that we were hit because we looked like a poorly disguised blog network which makes me think Google went after blog networks but the now standardized practices of diversifying IP’s, hosting, etc. saved most people from it. This is what I mean:
I don’t run a blog network, so naturally, I feel like I have nothing to hide. My client sites (whose websites we run, we don’t always run our clients’ websites) are all on the same reseller account and hence, the same IP. Well, we also blog for most of them and then in the blogs, we put 3-4 links to quality information.
All of our sites that got hit in Penguin were the client sites we blogged with and linked out with a lot, that were on the same IP. All client sites that were not on our hosting were fine (although we don’t blog on those) and all clients on our hosting that didn’t blog the way we blog were fine.
So, it looks like Google did go after blog networks but only hit the ones that weren’t doing the #1 rule in running a blog network which is disguising your footprint. That’s what you probably didn’t hear too much about it from anyone.
Also, I had some sitewide links in those same sites pointing back to our website showing attribution for the website design. I have since removed those.
Another amazingly helpful post from Glen. This site continues to be the most up to date database of SEO knowledge on the web.
Hi Glen. Regarding the exceptions, I would think that their ranking ability may be due to other factors. I heard awhile back that Google also pays attention to user activity. So for example, if someone searches for “create infographics” and infogr.am comes up and the user actually stays on the site instead of bouncing back to Google, then it would be a good sign of relevance, which is what Google ultimately wants.
In other words, the high link volume combined with other factors, like user activity, might be strong enough to overcome any over-optimization penalty from the link text.
Awesome post again Glen. 🙂
Very detailed post. It takes me a lot to finish it all…
Very useful insigths. Thanks.
Awesome post, as always. Glad to be part of backlinksxxx, got that stuff in there sooner 🙂
Would love to take you up on the SEO call but I only have $100 in my PP right now 🙁 Any chance to take that as a deposit, too? Oh please…
Another fantastic post of awesomeness Glen!
Anchor text over optimisation is an all too familiar problem, but it’s important to point out that keeping this in check simply isn’t enough. It’s essential to combine this practice with quality and relevant links pointing to your site. So many webmasters think they can continue to use low quality link building strategies such as mass article submissions as long as they vary their anchor text.
I have tested this on many affiliate sites and with an SEO friend of mine and the sites were all hit by various Penguin updates to varying degrees. From this testing it makes sense why some sites continue to rank well even with over optimised anchor text. The links pointing into their site are of such high authority and relevancy that they seem to act as a protective shield.
There also seems to be different rules for different niches. An example is Web Design where a large majority of companies will add an attribution link within the footer of the sites they design. These are almost always keyword focused, and since this is a niche I keep a very close eye on, it’s clear that this still works! If you analyse any of the top ranked sites within this niche you will begin to see for yourself that it’s the main contributor to these rankings.
Lastly I’d like to address HOW to obtain a natural link profile. We all know we need one but I have never found any decent information on strategies you can actually use to make this easy, affordable and painless. One of of the techniques I use is blog comments (just like this one here).
1. Create a Google Alert for your main keywords
2. Set the result type to “Blogs”
3. Comment on any relevant “quality” posts using only your name
This works great for your homepage but is trickier for internal pages as often there seems to be URL length restrictions on comment URLs. This is where social bookmarks or naked URLs within posts can work well.
I would love to hear the strategies you guys use to help diversify your internal pages anchor text Glen.
I agree, you need to take account of link quality. Send a ton of low quality links to a site and it won’t stay up there, regardless of whether the anchor percentages are fine or the home/inner split is ok.
One thing about blog posts using your name – Google recently came out and said they disregard these type of links (i.e. using a name) Not sure how true that it, if you look at Josh Bachynski’s videos on Youtube it was in one of the recent ones.
Great post as always Glenn, great job
Any idea if you’re gonna incorporate call-to-action boxes in optinskin one day?
Thanks for the very helpful article Glen.
I now realise I have some work to do getting backlinks to my internal pages. I don’t have the time to do all this – can you recommend someone who is trustworthy and competent to help me?
Thanks, Julie
Just sent payment. Look forward to chatting!
Awesome Tarek,
Let’s do it 🙂
Google is making it dead simple to rank these days and these algo updates are the key. Glad I’ve been tending to my inner page/deep linking along the way; just seemed like the thing to do…
Another amazing & helpful post, Glen!
Thanks Bizz,
Glad you found it useful!
Glen, you have been showing great internal linking on your blog posts for years already. I liked the bit on using Clicky to get around spy tool tracking. Had not thought of that. Thanks for the tip and good luck in art class.
Haha! I was waiting for someone to comment on that 😉
Just booked a free consultation 😀 Thanks for doing this man, very excited to be getting advice from a ‘guru’.
Look forward to it!
Hi Glenn, just made a deposit for the review, much appreciated and great post.
Greg
Thanks. Educational post. I have been having success with a particular Fiverr gig that gives me thousands of directory links and tier 2 comments and social bookmarks. Within a couple of days of completion of this gig, my page starts to rank on first page of google. Costs me 25$ per gig. So far, it works wel.
Sounds good. I would be very careful if you’re sending those to your main domain though.
Hey Glen,
Great post and insights mate! Thank you…
Do you or Diggy know if anything happened at the beginning of November perhaps? Some of my sites, all sites that I’ve neglected this year (haven’t built content or links to them for most of the year), are showing a slight drop at the beginning of November. Penguin 2.1 was on the 4th of October, right? And all these site’s were climbing in traffic or steady until the first week of November. The drop is probably around 10 – 20% down starting the weekend of the 1st of November.
If there was no update, it could be something unique to my sites like Google deciding they lack fresh content and should be devalued or something.
Any thoughts?
Thanks.
B
Definitely seems to be something going on. I know though that a slight Google design changed messed up some trackers (trackers that look at not only rankings, but a daily ‘weather report’ of the current Google results).
You’re not alone, we actually discussed this on the forum 🙂
Sadly not many people could relate to it.
Mmmh, interesting… perhaps something we can discuss when we chat on the call I reserved… 😉
Hi Glen,
How do view the google webmasters. Do you need to insert a tracking code to your wordpress before the tool can send you any warning message if they see fit?
You need to verify your site there first, yes.
http://google.com/webmasters 🙂
Cool article, well written and documented. Thank you for taking the time to give us some solid tips on recovering from Penguin.
Thanks Owen!
I think you hit the nail on the head. I believe I inadvertently over optimized my anchor text. Let’s say my site was about back pain and the brand was something like TheBackPainDoctor.com – I built some really great, authoritative links to this site, however, the anchors ended up being over optimized for back pain when I wasn’t even trying to rank for it! My anchors would be things like:
Back Pain Doctor
Remedies for back pain
TheBackPainDoctor.com
click here for back pain remedies
back pain cures
chronic back pain
The site got hit HARD even though the anchors were all on REALLY strong sites. I assumed I would be fine because there wasn’t a single repeated anchor text, but it totally did not occur to me that I was over optimizing for back pain.
I have begun building out links now that are contextually about backpain, however the anchors will be LSI type keywords and generic keywords. Do you think that this could fix the penalty?
I would have much preferred a cast study on how you got one website out of penguin rather than some theory which all of us know. Most people know after getting hit from penguin unoptimise anchor text, make natural link profile etc.
At least three of the screenshots above are from Penguin recovery.
If you read the post you’ll see that I couldn’t post longer timeframe screenshots because of SerpFox settings. I have since moved to another rank tracker. The whole point of the post is that it was no longer a theory (we had the theory within 48 hours but now actually proven from our rankings.
Which ranktracker are you using/recommending now?
Hey Alex,
I’ll reveal all in my next post 🙂
I meant if possible do a case study on all the actions you have taken to get the website out of Penguin 2.1 penalty. I can see the graphs and couple of action points like internal links and reducing anchor text optimisation. But it would be better if you gave a detailed case study like I did step 1,2,3,4,5 to get this site out of penguin 2.1 penalty
Wow, Glen, quite a post. I learned a lot from this post. I do not think I was hit by the recent update but your points are well taken and need to be kept in mind when updating and constantly improvising your site. Thanks so much for the insights.
One point I was not clear on when you state: “Well, when you use Clicky tracking code, they sneak in a little linked image to show you use their service. The alt tag of the image and the title of the link both show the terms they want to rank for.” Does this mean that we should not use Clicky or if we use it we have to remove the HTML? I am afraid I do not understand this point.
You don’t have to Steven, but I do personally yes.
Great post Glen,
I used to work with a company that made little effort with their website yet it had a pr6 and strong authority. Turned out it was due to all their clients sites having a graphic on their websites linking back, providing hundreds of nice links for large brands.
Need to come up with something for others to embed on their sites and give the links back to me 😀
HI Stuart
Thats interesting info. Were all the links the same? Were they all pointing to the homepage? Also I don’t know to much about info graphics but I’m assuming that their isn’t any anchor text because its a graphic. Any information would help.
Thanks
Mike
Hi Glen, I paid on Thursday mid-day and haven’t heard anything from you in spite of also sending you an email yesterday – when can I expect to hear back? thanks
Hi Julie,
I’ve replied to every single Paypal email. Let me know if you didn’t get anything…
Sorry Glen… I found it – not sure what happened there – it was put into junk by an over aggressive spam filter
No problem!
Wow I completely misunderstood what the update was all about. Thanks for such an informative post as usual.
It is much appreciated. Really looking forward to your next post, about the rank tracking tools you using, which you alluded to.
Cheers
Thanks Just!
Hi Glen, This was useful, thank you!
If i check some of my Backlinks with majestic seo. there are infos like: “Trust Flow” and “Citation
Flow” in the row: “Domain Flow Metrics” is it a sign for a “bad/harmful” backlink if the numbers are low? (for example: “Citation Flow: 15 / Citation Flow: 8”) Should i delete those Backlinks with the disavov tool?
Cheers
It’s not ‘bad’ if it’s low, but higher is better 🙂
Hi Glen,
You are damn good at research and analytics. I love the sincerity in your tone when you said you will be a liar if all your SEO recommended practises works 100%, unlike other vague and untrusted SEO professionals.
The depth of your analysis amazes me and the correlation of your data with analytical facts blows me off.
To me, SEO simply means doing things with common sense. Google has repeatedly told us to basically forget about the practice and focus on user experience.
Thanks Glen for taking the time to share your research and I’d sure implement the advice given.
Thanks.
Thanks James,
I really appreciate that 🙂
“and use an expired domain if you can to give yourself a little credibility”
Aren’t expired domains sandboxed?
Absolutely great research! I will take the time to use this advice for my websites. Thanks for sharing Glen, this is really useful!
Hey Glen,
Have you guys started scheduling the calls? I just wanted to make sure my reply e-mail with availability didn’t end up in the spam.
Thanks!
Dan
So Penguin 2.1 is basically aimed at correcting the rubbish link profile ranking sites issue you found a while back then Glen?!
Glenn,
Please let me know if you get any openings for your SEO review. I know the link is down now, but if someone drops out let me know.
Thanks for the great post.
Awesome post Glen! Thank you for taking the time to put together these case studies and tips – they have been very insightful indeed 🙂
Hey Glen,
We loved your article and included it in our monthly round up http://www.northcutt.com/blog/2013/12/november-resource-round-up-best-of-seo-social-media-content-marketing/.
Cheers!
Thanks Nicky!
Hi Glen,
Great post !!!
You wrote that you recommend to use the exact match anchor text in 10% of backlinks.
What should be the average PA of those 10% of backlinks? High PA? Diversity of blog comments,
forum profiles…?
I love to read your blog!!!
That was a great article! Quite long but worth reading! Good job!
Hey Glen,
Tom from Serpfox here. Just wanted to let you know you that we do provide ranking reports for any length of time. You have to generate them with and provide a date range. The graphs available in the tracking dashboard just display a limited amount of data so they present nicely.
Great article!
So much excellent and useful information in one FREE post. You rule Glen.
Great post and good call about an abnormal number of links pointing to the homepage. Penguin all along has been about picking up outliers, and a site with an unusual number of links pointing to the homepage is a natural target.
Another thing I noticed with the 2.1 update is that it seems like sites with unusually high trust flow (majestic) can get away with just about anything – high % of anchors, sitewide links, etc. One of your example exception sites, clicky.com, has a very high trust score. Granted, it is hard to inflate trust score, but it is a trend I have noticed on many exception sites that seem to break the known penguin targets but still rank anyway.
It was coming with all the spammy links hovering in the web for all these time. Is there any way of disavowing all the links that were created or linked by the low-quality sites?
Dang, wish I had seen this post a couple weeks ago. I have a site I’d love for you to take a peak at. Anyways, great information Glen, I’ll definitely be checking back more frequently!
I think more people need to approach SEO with less SEO if that makes sense. I think often times people forget that it is more marketing & creativity than it ever has been before. Without a marketing hat on no SEO campaign will take off because the mindset required has changed and it is continuing to change.
Hey Glen,
Thanks for the post. I sure you had spent tones of hours to come out these results.
I guess some of my sites are get affected by hit factor #2. There got too many homepage links and very less of internal links although we have put in variation of anchors text.
Thanks for sharing again 🙂
“One of the things that really struck me was how many SEO’s came out and said “my methods are working as well as ever; not one site of mine got hit by Penguin 2.1.” Needless to say, I’ve pretty much lost trust in a lot of those people. I’m actually proud to have had sites hit by the update; It means I’m testing enough strategies when it comes to SEO.”
THIS is like an overview of my view on life and why most people suck/are unhappy – they just do what’s comfortable instead of trying things to see what works / what they like. Like so many people get told they’re “stupid” or “lazy” or a “failure” and then they find a hobby and slowly get better and become successful. The trouble is you only find that thing which you’re NATURALLY good at if you’re trying a bunch of shit and so many people are afraid to leave their comfort zone. weak bitches 🙂
shit man i hate to make suggestions on how to do what you do (cos you’re really awesome at it so it’s like giving michael jordan basketball advice or something) but please label your graphs. label the heading and the x-axis and the y-axis and include units of measurement too. sorry just i know your articles are really technical and it almost brings down the scientificness of what you’re saying if the graphs are just “props”. like you would never in a million academic articles see a graph without labels onnit. and i’m selfish and wish i could understand em cos that sudden cliff graph looks so epic but not sure what it’s depicting 🙂
It wasn’t so much that we had to find the safe, just wait a long time for the Redditor to come back and tell us what was inside it. DUDE ALIENS ARE GOING TO COME AND OPEN THAT SAFE IF THAT MOTHERFUCKING OP DON’T POST PICS
shit man looking at anchor text distribution is so smart
that graph of referring pages for anchor phrases (much better with the labelling 😉 ) is that from clicky? if not where’z it from? ahrefs? so cool! and great insight that their name should be number 1. this stuff is so so cool man! so smart for clicky to insert that in their tracking code. i wonder if facebook does it for conversion pixels with their facebook ads?
“Trust me when I say they’re doing much better for other terms you can find if you keep refreshing that tracking page code and see what they want to rank for.” – SO SNEAKY OMG!
“My main point here however is that just because I recommend your anchor text for your ‘money terms’ to be under a certain number, it doesn’t always have to be. Clearly.”
Man really cool that you give a rule of thumb AND the exceptions cos makes you understand the underlying mechanism so much better.
man your advice on keeping websites that break the rules to have data on what’s negatively impacting you is SO GENIUS. serious respect. gonna inspire so many similar ideas for me in some of my financey work and can think of all kinds of cool IM applications.
The obvious solution to the anchor text distribution problem is to look at the anchor text distribution for the top 3 results of the keywords you’re targeting. what kind of distributions are you seeing? I’d love to see how that changes for different niches or categories and what the percentage difference between the first, second, third, etc rank is so you can find hte most natural spread of distribution to use for your own links. potential blog post? 😉
i’m sure google obv looks at % of links nofollow vs follow too. would be cool to check “natural” nofollow vs follow distribution across niches.
wow free SEO call idea is great fuck wish i caught it 😉
haha
such a great article man so much value it’s insane and you’re doing shit that most financial analysts I do couldn’t dream of even just in terms of being able to think outside the box so massive respect! keen to start doing more im stuffs!
Hello Glenn,
Very nice article. i am impressed this content. informative & helpful post.
thanks for sharing I sure you had spent tones of hours to come out these results.
Hi,
Just one thing to note. Infogr.am doesn’t have a link back from The Verge. As far as I can see, the infographic is in an iframe. Still, as the Majestic data show, they’re pretty rich in that anchor text.
A
Hello! Great post
Everybody talks about backlinks in 2.1, but I strongly believe that we were hit by having 45+ inbound links with tasty anchors pointing to our authors internal page (Iam no SEO expert, but as my business depends pretty much on SE I do follow the industry a lot). That mistake happen coz we put the brand and keywords as authors signatures links for each post we had on the home (big site).
We changed it 3 months ago and still tanked. Any suggestions? Am I completety off track here? Is there evidence of this kind of hit in 2.1?
Thanks in advance! Nobody could reply to this isse yet, we hope we have find the right place
Thanks for the test work, guys! Having a max percentage for link diversification is a great idea. Have you ever tried changing up the anchor text in something like footer links (where they appear on every page on the website) within a single domain?
Good rule for penguin 2.1. thanks for sharing this post. very informative post..
That’s awesome again! It gave more in-depth knowledge to me what to try and what to avoid. Thanks a lot Glen!! I’ll be watching you. 🙂
Thanks for this guide! I’m starting a new website and have had over a year break in seo activities. My friends were affected by penguin and they are scared to do anything now. But I see that natural link building and anchor diversification is always working.Cheers!
First of all, thanks for a great post! I have a question about one of my sites. I checked my anchor texts and 20% of those are exactly the same as the domain name. There is no anchor text that has a higher percentage than that. However, if I check which words that are used in my anchor texts, then I have one word that exists in about 45% of all anchor texts. My website doesnt have that many links and my questions is if its likely that I was hit by 2.1 because of my high density of a specific word in the anchor texts?
I am looking forward to link diversification to save me from the next google update. These things are killing me and some of my better sites!
Thanks for the great info. I never thought that SEO will take up so much of my time when I first dived into it..:/
Great post. In depth with graph and complete analysis.. I didn’t even find this type content in the premium ebook. My few sites have been hitted by penguin update. Now i will try to recover it by following your guides.. Thanks
You really hit the bull’s eye with the emphasis on link building to internal pages. I even liked the idea of setting up a website that doesn’t go in accordance with Google to figure out what hit us.
Cheers!
Thanks for this guide!. Thanks for sharing this post.
Hey Glen,
Thanks for sharing your findings. I think all your 3-steps process still apply even though it’s 2015 now and Google has since released so many algorithm updates!
I think you hit the “nail” with being natural, some people might argue SEO is dead after all these major update by Google but SEO is far from being dead.
Keep up the great work Glen!
Well, I heard that Google punched pretty good a lot of websites lately, and many other updated are coming to clean the internet.
How do view the google webmasters. Do you need to insert a tracking code to your wordpress before the tool can send you any warning message if they see fit?
Apparently Penguin algorithm go real-time from now onwards but I believe your 3-step methods would still applicable. Thanks Glen 🙂