Learn how to recover from link penalties. This presentation outlines the steps required, and the philosophy you need to use to be successful.

1. Penguin & Unnatural Links Recovery

2. First Off... Who Am I?
 Co-author: The Art of SEO
 President: Stone Temple Consulting,
25+ person SEO and PPC firm
 Trainer: Instant E-Training
 Founder: Web Site Publishing
Companies
 Publish > Grow > $ell
 Two significant sites exit thus far
@stonetemple / + Eric Enge

3. Penguin Drove Traffic Drops
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4. Beware of Unnatural Links
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5. Beware of Unnatural Links
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6. Panda/Penguin Algorithm Structure
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7. Article Directories
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8. Directories, forum posts, bookmarks, …
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9. Guest Post Spam
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10. Does Your Anchor Text Look Like This?
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11. Or, Like This?
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12. Sample Link Profile
 Links: 1,273,452
 Linking Domains: 11,897
How do I get started?
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13. Start by Categorizing
 For example:
 Blogs
 Pages with multiple links
 Sites with more than one linking page
 Rich anchor text links
 Links from comments
 Links from the same “C” block
 NoFollow’ed Links
 Speeds analysis and clean up
 Example: 1M links vs. 10,000 linking domains
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14. Criteria
“Would you have invested time to get this link if Google
did not exist?”
“Would you proudly show this to a prospective
customer pre-sale?”
“Would you show it to your children?”
“Did the person giving you the link mean it as a genuine
endorsement?”
“If argue it that it’s a good link, It’s NOT.”
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15. And, Now the Big One
You must look at every single linking domain!
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16. @stonetemple / + Eric Enge

17. Reconsideration Guidelines
 Be very thorough in your cleanup first!
 Don’t waste their time
 Be respectful!
 Don’t whine or talk about what you lost
 Be short and to the point
 Nature of problem (stats are good)
 What you did to clean it up
 Clearly state that you intend to abide by Webmaster
Guidelines going forward
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18. Unnatural Links Messages (V1)
 Worth filing a request here too
 Same general guidelines
 If you can’t get totally cleaned up quickly:
 Consider sending a reconsideration request in to
buy time
 Show significant progress
 Show commitment to totally clean it up
 May give you more time before they act
 YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY
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19.  How STC Can Help
 SpamLink Detective automates categorization
 Experienced resources to lead the effort
 We can do 100% of the work …
 … or coordinate your internal resources
 Extensive link clean up experience
 4 recent projects with sites with over 1M links
 3 had actual penalties
 1 had the unnatural links (V1) message
 Dozens of other clean up projects
 100% recovery success rate
@stonetemple / + Eric Enge

20. Thank You!
Eric Enge
eenge@stonetemple.com
@stonetemple
+ Eric Enge
(508) 485-7751
www.stonetemple.com
@stonetemple / + Eric Enge