Hey guys, I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been hard at work outside of SEO, trying other online money making methods. iPhone apps stuff, local business websites, forex and a bit of PPC. I’ve been talking a break on SEO to see if my sites would recover and try a few recovery methods over the past months. Since Penguin hit on April and the refresh in May my main websites have probably lost 70% of their traffic. Most of my traffic on these sites comes from Bing now. Bing is surprisingly decent traffic, I’m trying to see how I could better rank on Bing over time because I’m getting good traffic considering I barely have any #1 rankings on it, mostly #2-5. As far as I can tell age and having an EMD helps a lot for Bing traffic. Blog networks/article directories also work “well” but not as well as in Google (pre Penguin/2012). Like I said I can get a lot of page 1 rankings but the top #1-3 spot seem to be much harder for me to get on Bing consistently…
301 Redirects to Avoid the Penguin Slap
I tried copying my wordpress installations to a new domain, do a 301 redirect from the old one to the new one and hopefully get my rankings back. Did not work on the 2 domains I tried it. On another website, I then tried a 301 redirect from one inner page to another inner page and it did not really affect anything in terms of Google rankings. Interestingly, Bing still ranks my old inner pages even after a month+ of these inner page redirects and the link just redirects to my new URL. I would have imagined that URL in the search results would have updated faster.
Either way, the net results is at least for my websites a 301 redirect was completely useless. Some people report seeing an increase in rankings for a few days/weeks and then lose it but I basically did not get any recovery, even if temporary.
Diluting the anchor text
Something else I tried was diluting my anchor text. Luckily on some websites I was mostly using ezarticlelink and it’s very easy to remove your links if you so choose (just delete the syndicated article from the database and eventually all syndicated articles are removed). So I tried removing a few articles, and adding a bit more anchor text variation using BMD. No “Major” recovery yet but now that I removed a lot of the links that were overly optimizing their backlink portfolio (and giving most of their ranking power before penguin), I will start re-doing backlinks to these sites as per my new plan which will be outlined below.
How I’m rebuilding my niche sites
I had a few 5 page sites and 50-150 page sites. I’m going to rebuilt my main sites/niches that were giving me 60-80% of my income. While I had 30+ websites, a lot of them never gave me more than $30-100/month and I was often using them as backlink experiments when I found out the niche they were in was not performing as well as I expected it to. I’m definitely not going to rebuild these saving me a lot of time. For the websites that have been in great niches, I’m going to do 1-2 “big” websites and many supporting small 5 page websites around the same content. I’ll be using different backlink strategies to these and they are hosted on different IP’s. If some do not end up ranking well I will use them for backlinks towards the ones that are doing better. Actually, since 301 redirects have not helped me I will also be using some of my old websites to link to my new ones. They obviously have a few years of age and a pr of 1-4 so that might be helpful. I also want to spread out my sites… I’ve noticed that some seem to have manually been penalized by Google over time for poor content or something. It’s too bad because a lot of these are small sites I did not touch in years and I really should have sold them instead of leaving them to rot. Either way, by diving my sites in a niche up I will also be reducing my chances of losing all my traffic in a niche if one site gets a bad manual review. Though I will be working really hard on the “big ones” to keep them updated, like updating the content regularly, answering more comments, building social signals etc.
Tiered linking structure. I’m definitely going to be much more careful about how I do my backlinks now. Most of you are probably familiar with tiered link structures but if not it’s basically “Tier 1” links to your main website, “Tier 2” links to the Tier 1 and if you want you go go ahead and do a Tier 3 linking to Tier 2 etc.
Tier 1 links vary (different sites will use different stuff to experiment) between press releases, aged high PR domain links (non spun articles, they will be unique with 1-2 links towards my site) and guestposts. I also have many aged web 2.0 accounts/blogs that I will use for this. I’m also probably going to be using postrunner again from TKA for “cheaper”/less time intensive guestposts on my smaller sites. Of course, the anchor text for all sites will be much more varied than before because of Penguin. I’m currently going for:
Exact Matches: 33.53% (5-10 keywords I want to rank for)
Partial Matches: 12.89% (exact keyword + x words)
Generic : 20.25% (click here, buy here, find out more here, “no anchor text” (image links))
URL Matches : 33.31% (domain.com, www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com)
Tier 2 will be using stuff like AMR, blog comments, BMD and maybe some networks like EZA once more.
Tier 3 for me will really just be using indexing tools like backlink indexer.
That’s about it. I tried fake facebook likes/twitter retweets and Google +1’s but they have not directly helped my website rankings (and in some cases it was temporary boosts in the top 50). Though I’ll probably do a few of my new big sites to get the ball rolling for people wanting to share the content. On at least one of my new sites I’m definitely going to be putting my Google page authorship information on it (basically so people can see my picture near my search results). I already did it for the Link back a long time ago so I might share this niche site with you guys later on since they will be linked under my name anyway.
So that’s it for now, I’m trying a few services too that I might review in the near future. I’ll of course keep you guys updated on these websites and what has worked/not worked. If you guys have any comments on what survived Penguin for you or linking systems that have worked since then I would love to hear your feedback so I can test it out myself on some of the new niche site portfolio :). I’ve been going back 100% into SEO during August and I will probably keep at it another 1-2 months until all these websites are built. Then it will be maintenance while I try other things I have some interest in!
Hey Alex,
Thanks for the update. I am in the same position, however I have not removed any links or gone for 301 redirects. I think it would be wise to do link and anchor text dilution. Keep changing anchor text on the old links and try building some new links (strong/quality/relevant) to offset the bad ones.
One more thing, how would you know if your sites have recovered or not? I know Panda updates are happening on a consistent basis almost every month. But if you were hit by Penguin, there has only been one update (back in May). So if changes were made after May, then we must wait until the next penguin update to actually confirm if the site has recovered or not.
Everyone has given their 2 cent on penguin but no one has concretely or directly proven a case study that shows recovery. They just advice everyone to remove links but I have my doubts on this theory. We are an industry with a lot of smart people, so I definitely believe that someone will figure out a way to deal with both these updates very soon. They just need more data to confirm their findings….. patience is the key
Best Wishes,
Chetan
That’s a good point and something I forgot to talk about, Penguin is apparently a refresh (like panda) so it also happens on a almost monthly basis. But from what I can tell I do agree that you need to wait for the refresh to see changes and I see people recovering from Panda but from Penguin the actual case studies of recovery are much fewer… I’ve seen a few but a lot of them do not last… I think my sites are too old and with too many backlinsk at this point to be able to recover. It’s faster to just redo the ones I really care about now.
Great post Alex, just Plused it. Sorry to see the redirects didn’t work. Looks like they are a hail-mary that only works occasionally.
I’ve found I have sites that are old and not really making $$ that I just run random experiments on as well (bad habit lol). Hope the new big sites you create turn out well. Keep us updated
I think a big mistake I made with old sites that I was using for experiments is many of them were actually making “some” income but instead of flipping them over for a good chunk of $$ ($100to $1,000) I just kept them around thinking they would get better without effort… I think a few of these sites could be recoverable but I just don’t want to bother personally. Someone that had interest in those niches could definitely do it but now that the traffic plummeted they are worthless to sell 🙁
Hey Alex,
Definitely looking forward to this one since i’m looking to do a few tiered experiments.
When you get the time, it would be awesome if you could check out ultimate demon and GSA SE ranker and/or share your thoughts on those.
Thx!
I’m about to try ultimate demon (mostly for wiki links). What’s GSA SE?
Random question. What plugin are you using to display images when you scroll down the page? is it BJ Lazy Load? Does it work with caching? Thanks pal and GL
jQuery lazy load plugin 🙂
Hey Alex –
Nice post. Curious about your linking strategy.
So your Tier 3 are your blog comments/forum comments, the foundational links?
From there you link these to article directories, networks, and those get link to tier 1, Sites with high PR, guest posts, then those higher value links go straight to your site?
Just curious, barely go into all this SEO stuff and trying to make sense of it. Guess there’s been a huge shift with Google so don’t know what information is still relevant..
thanks!
Yes, but I don’t really plan on doing much of a tier 3 yet, but if I did it I would use spammy blog comments for those and doing manual high PR blog comments as a tier 1. Though, hi pr blog comments also transfer a lot of PR on do follow blogs, so they are useful in raising the power of your tier 2 sites (mainly web 2.0s or your own private network).
I’m familiar with SEO techniques, but this Tier system was new for me. Thanks for informative posts.