Life After Penguin Diagnose, Recover,
Rebuild Ian Howells @ianhowells

DIAGNOSE

Diagnosis Steps 1. Confirm the
date you got hit 2. Confirm if your hit is site-wide or page specific 3. Find the problem areas halo18.com

In Case You’ve Been Asleep
April 24th – Shit got real. halo18.com

Which Update Hit Me? Google’s
rolling out multiple updates in a short time frame. 3/19 – BMR/ALN get de-indexed 4/19 – Panda 3.5 4/24 – Penguin 4/27 – Panda 3.6 5/26 – Penguin 1.1 halo18.com

Site-Wide or Page Specific? 1.
Did every page lose it’s rankings? 2. Can you rank a new page for a lower competition term? halo18.com

RECOVER

Causes Luckily, this isn’t all
that complicated. We’re essentially looking at: 1. Over-optimized anchor text 2. Lots of low quality, off-topic links halo18.com

More than 65% Anchor? Good
Luck Bro (image via @MicrositeMaster - http://bit.ly/PrEduZ )

RECOVERY EXAMPLES

WPMU.org Recovery Ross Hudgens worked
with WPMU.org to recover by… 1. Removing 15,000 site-wide footer links from an owned property a. Matt Cutts says this did it 2. Misc on-site issues like canonical URLs halo18.com

WPMU.org’s Recovery (image via @rosshudgens
- http://mz.cm/MwwveE )

My MFA Test I started
wondering if the penalty could really just be linked to the URL. Could I really just paste the content onto a new URL and rank off my content and what’s left of my domain authority? halo18.com

Sure Can

My MFA Test I then
tested if a 301 from the “penalized” page will pass the ranking hit to the new URL. halo18.com

YUP – Vanished 5 Days
Later

REBUILD

What We Already Know Based
on my tests thus far, if your penalty is just on the page level, you can start over with the same domain. halo18.com

What We Already Know Unless
it torched your home page. Then, you might just be screwed – unless you control a huge chunk of your links like WPMU did, or can get them removed. halo18.com

What We Already Know I
haven’t seen any duplicate content issue from copy/pasting old content to a brand new page. halo18.com

What We Already Know You
can’t, however, keep those links by 301’ing them into your new URL. halo18.com

Rebuild If your home page
is safe, start moving your torched pages to new URLs without any 301 redirect and go back to link building. halo18.com

Rebuild For solid links to
your old (now dead) URLs – you’ll need to do outreach to get them changed to your new URL. halo18.com

Rebuild The alternative to moving
pages would be to find your spam links and get them taken down… and then wait for the next refresh/update. halo18.com

Rebuild I took one look
at how much work that would be, and promptly decided that trying that would be reserved for the crazy and desperate. halo18.com

MORE TESTING

On-Going Testing I’m currently looking
into the impacts of… 302 redirects Canonical Tags Alternate Home Pages Cross-Domain 301’s halo18.com

302 Redirects Would a 302
pass (even some) ranking benefit without passing the penalty? halo18.com

Canonical Tag Can you pass
some ranking benefit without passing the penalty via the Canonical Tag? halo18.com

Alternate Home Pages If my
home page is torched, can I switch my home page to be /index.php or /home/ and use a 302 or canonical from the root of the .com to skirt the penalty? halo18.com

Cross-Domain 301 If these 301’s
are poison (which they seem to be) – will that hold true if I point to a separate domain? halo18.com

Negative SEO? If the other
page is targeting the same keywords that I was, could you use a 301 like this for negative SEO? halo18.com

An “I’m Innocent!” Loophole? If
Google’s protecting against negative SEO – can you move your content to a new domain and rank it with the help of a 301 from your torched domain? halo18.com

I DON’T KNOW YET. BUT,
I’LL LET YOU KNOW. SOON.

Ian Howells
@ianhowells
halo18.com