Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
In case you hadn’t heard, Google just rolled out one of their largest updates in a long time on the 4th of October (2013); Penguin 2.1.
Just to recap, Penguin updates are mainly focused on link building and penalizing sites that are manipulating their algorithm via various black hat methods.
While that’s what it’s supposed to target, like always you can read about hundreds of normal webmasters that have taken a hit for no apparent reason.
Checkout the following article for an overview of the update:
http://searchengineland.com/penguin-2-1-and-5-live-173632 (Checked as of July, 2024)
If you’ve been hit by this update, here are 4 things you can do about it:
In this guide
1. Don’t Give Up On SEO
First, don’t give up on SEO.
Whenever there’s a big update, hundreds of stories emerge about people losing their incomes overnight and quitting SEO. It can be tempting to give up when you lose a site to a penalty and move over to paid traffic.
If you can find a viable way of using paid traffic in your business, do it immediately. However for most businesses; paid traffic just isn’t viable. Google ads get ultra low click-through rates, the visitors are less likely to buy and it can get too expensive very quickly.
Then you have alternatives like Facebook advertising, video advertising, and media buying. While those are excellent strategies, they hardly work for most offline businesses like real estate agencies and locksmiths.
Ultimately SEO always has the highest return on investment. Even if you have to start over every 6 to 12 months. Don’t be afraid to start a new site a week after getting hit if your domain isn’t your brand name.
2. Detox Your Link Profile
Next you can always attempt to detox your link profile. Since the last couple of updates, several ‘link detox’ tools have emerged claiming to reverse penalties and recover your site.
While this doesn’t work 100% of the time, it’s worth doing. If your link profile is small and you’ve been hit by a penguin update, you can quite easily identify the ‘toxic’ backlinks that caused your penalty and remove them.
If you’ve spammed your site with millions of low-quality links, this strategy is almost useless. Check out http://www.linkdetox.com (Checked as of July, 2024) to start cleaning up your link profile.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →3. Don’t Stop Building Links
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they get hit by an update is stopping link building altogether. If your site goes from getting 500 links/day to none; Google will KNOW that you’ve been building them yourself. They’ll have caught you red-handed.
Instead, slowly taper off any low-quality link building and focus on getting high Page Rank links from relevant sources.
4. Build More Sites & Properties
Something I started doing a few years ago to spread my risk was publishing content on lots of different web properties. Youtube, Squidoo, Ezine Articles, all kinds of web2.0 sites and video sites.
You can publish content on them, link to your site and they’ll rank on Google. By publishing content on these high authority properties, the content will automatically rank and send you traffic. Of course, they’re very unlikely to get penalized so if your site tanks; you’ll still be receiving traffic.
If all else fails, simply start a new domain. You can log in to Google Webmaster Tools and tell Google to deindex your domain from the search results. Then simply buy a new domain that has never been registered before (important) and transfer all your content to it.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below. Also, opt-in to the email list on the right for more SEO tips, tricks, and secrets.
google penguin 2.1, penguin, penguin 2.1 update, penguin update, SEO
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
John Doe, October 8, 2013, 09:45
Great insights! The Penguin updates have always been tricky to navigate. Your suggestions make it seem manageable. Thanks for sharing!
Jane Smith, October 8, 2013, 10:05
Thanks for this. I was hit hard by Penguin 2.1 and was on the verge of giving up. I’ll try detoxing my link profile first and see if that helps.
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The part of this that sits oddly with me is step 4 — deindex the whole domain, buy a fresh one nobody’s ever registered, and start over as if the last site never existed. That’s not a technical trick, that’s walking away from whatever you built under that name. Might be the right business call, but it’s worth being honest with yourself about what it actually is.
Hollis, that’s the part that would eat at me too if I were doing it. Naming it plainly like you just did is probably the useful first step before anyone actually pulls the trigger on a domain switch.
Reading this as someone who over-prepares for everything: ‘buy a new domain and transfer all your content’ is the kind of clean instruction that would send me into weeks of deciding which content is worth transferring, second-guessing the new domain name, and never actually relaunching. The advice is sound. I’m just aware I’d be the guy still ‘preparing’ the transfer in March.
I spent years on the company side of a direct-sales business, so I’ll say upfront I’m biased toward keeping a brand rather than burning it down. What I saw happen internally when a site got hit wasn’t usually a clean restart — it was months of half-measures because nobody wanted to admit the old domain was done. The article makes starting over sound tidier than it is.