Penguin :-(

[roydovaston]

Penguin certainly hasn't done us any favours so i'm guessing it's time to take a harder look at our linking profile.

Would anyone who subscribes to any decent SEO service be able do me a favour and run a full report on our link profile so i can figure out which links are the toxic ones causing our loss of positions since Penguin?

I've always used the free tools which have done fine until now and without wanting to sound tight, we're not really wanting to take the plunge into any subscriptions!!

 

[addz123]

I don't think Penguin is a simple case of remove/disavow links and get rid of penalties.

Rather, I think your site will still be damaged by trust given by Google and will thus continue to rank very poorly, albeit with a small comeback. I've seen this on a couple of my sites where I suddenly have rankings for inner pages on like the 3rd page of Google, but still not what it was.

It's not a simple case of you just need more natural, authority links either. I believe a brand new site without links will still rank better then a site that comes back from Penguin and has very little website trust.

 

[GreyWing]

Before anyone starts to alter their sites, take a look at what is ranking top. Then when you have stopped shaking your head, you can stick this in your robots file....

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: /

(obviously it will ban google from your site)

Then get on with your life, Google is currently schizophrenic, what is right one day is wrong another.

 

[Paullas]

Before anyone starts to alter their sites, take a look at what is ranking top. Then when you have stopped shaking your head, you can stick this in your robots file....

User-agent: GoogleBot
Disallow: /

(obviously it will ban google from your site)

Then get on with your life, Google is currently schizophrenic, what is right one day is wrong another.

I dont know how many times you have to say this to people greame

 

[Murray]

My advice where possible with penguin is start again with a fresh site.

I say this because it's been a year since penguin was first released and I've not seen or heard of any real definitive "recoveries"

It's very hard you know..

I was going to tell you that you need to focus on quality links, but If you can't recognise what a good linking opportunity is or isn't, then you will be hard pressed ranking a new site for very long either.

Saying the above it might lead me to saying you need to hire an SEO.. but I also wouldn't trust hiring an SEO company myself, no offence to all you SEO's out there but nearly every single one I've seen is ****, builds **** shit links (outsourcing to india?) and just takes peoples money whilst doing nothing for them and relies on people not knowing what they're talking about.

I don't agree with Graeme that you should forget google, that is silly, it can be a fantastic source of traffic & income, but if you're relying on it and you've built your house (site) on foundation of mud (spammy links) you're always going to sink sooner or later.

 

[spiderspider]

raventools.com offer a 30 day trial and it may help. It gets data from majestic.

Tip: After 30 days trial is up, sign up with different email

 

[GreyWing]

I don't agree with Graeme that you should forget google, that is silly, it can be a fantastic source of traffic & income, but if you're relying on it and you've built your house (site) on foundation of mud (spammy links) you're always going to sink sooner or later.

I don't agree that it is silly mate, this conversation could have been had 800 years ago when villages were full of people doing rain dances to make it rain. Then some chap pops up and says, forget the rain dance it's bloody stupid and has zero affect.... then someone argues, yes but we need the rain.

Of course you need the rain, but the point is your rain dance is doing sod all about it apart from in your own head. When you understand that, you now understand Google.

 

[Murray]

I don't agree that it is silly mate, this conversation could have been had 800 years ago when villages were full of people doing rain dances to make it rain. Then some chap pops up and says, forget the rain dance it's bloody stupid and has zero affect.... then someone argues, yes but we need the rain.

Of course you need the rain, but the point is your rain dance is doing sod all about it apart from in your own head. When you understand that, you now understand Google.

Oh so you mean you can't manipulate google rankings so why try? It's getting harder & harder no doubt..

Actually you're probably right saying that to the average Joe because they wont have too much luck trying to manipulate rankings (at least for very long).

 

[Skinner]

One of my sites was crucified by one of the black and white beasts last year, and I've just jiggled the content, added new content, rewrote and expanded existing content same as always. Revenue from Affiliate sales dropped from high xxx per month, down to mid xx per month, in the last month sales have been picking up and back at the early xxx, and climbing.

I'm not going to block google, but I'm also not changing what I do, I have an idea how to make a useful site, and I'm going to keep working on that.

 

[GreyWing]

Oh so you mean you can't manipulate google rankings so why try? It's getting harder & harder no doubt..

Basically that's about my thoughts on it. Your time and efforts are far better spent just building your site how you think it should be built if you were a user. Just forget about Google and you will probably find it likes you more because of it. Just build it as though you wanted to use it.

Advertise like you would before Google, radio isn't massively expensive, tv isn't massively over the top these days.

We block GoogleBot for some things as it makes sense for us to ban them off the site. But others we allow them on, the older redundant ones.

 

[roydovaston]

raventools.com offer a 30 day trial and it may help. It gets data from majestic.

Tip: After 30 days trial is up, sign up with different email

Thanks SpiderSpider, I think you're the only one who's come close to answering my original request!! I do enjoy the debate though!!!

Building a new site isn't an option for us, we've built a brand and spent way too much money on it to start over. By this I don't mean we've paid ridiculous money for dodgy seo, we've invested in many areas.

 

[Murray]

Thanks SpiderSpider, I think you're the only one who's come close to answering my original request!! I do enjoy the debate though!!!

Sometimes people with problems don't ask the right questions so there's no point trying to answer what they think they need to know.. better to tell them what they actually need to know.

Building a new site isn't an option for us, we've built a brand and spent way too much money on it to start over. By this I don't mean we've paid ridiculous money for dodgy seo, we've invested in many areas.

If you want to PM me your site I will have a look at it for you.

 

[roydovaston]

Thanks Murray but I'm sure all I really wanted was a report. Don't get me wrong, I like the debate too! My angle is that we haven't directly been hit by the update (no webmastertools messages). They've literally just devalued some of our links which we'd just like to get cleared up anyway before we continue on sourcing only the highest quality links.

 

[Marcoose]

www.linkresearchtools.com link detox feature. It's not perfect buy you're not likely to get anything automated that is better.

 

[Murray]

I like the debate too! My angle is that we haven't directly been hit by the update (no webmastertools messages).

Well this is the sort of thing you have to be careful of.

Webmaster messages are for manual penalties

You will not get a message if you are hit by an algorithm, panda, penguin etc

You can usually tell though if you were hit by an algorithm if your traffic drops on the day or perhaps around the next fews days after the algorithm was released.

^ The above is also getting harder now since google likes to release things in bunches

But you can usually tell what a sites most probable problem by looking at it's contents and links.

 

[boxfish]

You can usually tell though if you were hit by an algorithm if your traffic drops on the day or perhaps around the next fews days after the algorithm was released.

^ The above is also getting harder now since google likes to release things in bunches

If you have analytics than this is a great tool to see how you were affected by each update panda/penguin/other:

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

 

[Murray]

If you have analytics than this is a great tool to see how you were affected by each update panda/penguin/other:

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

Yep, you need some kind of analytics installed, personally I wouldn't like to allow a third party tool access to my analytics so I would just check against the dates given http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change manually