Penguin Recovery Strategy

[Jim Froling]

An associate (not in our biz) just sent me an article by @AlisonBanko of Marketing Sherpa regarding a Canadian company that got smacked by the Penguin and the campaign the company employed to overcome it and eventual outcome.

Interesting reading that I hope can serve others in similar post-Penguin circumstances.

E-commerce: Site reverses Google penalty, utilizes guest posting to achieve its highest SEO rankings ever | MarketingSherpa

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for sharing Jim. That looks like a good one!

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Are they sure this was a Penguin penalty? Penguins penalties are filters, they penalize and remove penalties on the filter refresh.

They submitted a manual review and the penalty was removed. That seems to indicate it was a manual penalty?

 

[djbaxter]

From the article referenced in the thread starter:

Electric Fireplaces Canada (EFC) was burning along just fine in the SEO stratosphere with five of its keywords averaging top 10 positions in Google search results. But in the fall of 2012, a certain panda and penguin extinguished the site's success.

Google's Penguin and Panda algorithm updates served EFC with a manual penalty for links the search engine powerhouse deemed unnatural. The punishment sunk the site to an average position of 48, traumatizing its once pristine SEO status. EFC was formerly popping up on page one of search results, it was now lingering closer to page five.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

You cannot have a manual penalty from an automatic filter.

The article is putting forth conflicting details.

Penalties such as Penguin and Panda are not a manual penalty. They are wide sweeping, affecting all sites in Google's index.

A manual penalty is where a Google search quality rep reviews your individual website and slaps a specific, manual penalty on you.

Reconsideration requests are for manual penalties. For Penguin and Panda, you have to wait until they refresh the filter.

It has long been status quo for the SEO community that you cannot get a Penguin or Panda penalty removed via a manual request. It has been tried many times.

I was wondering if these people are actually saying they tried this and succeeded where hundreds of others have failed. If so, that is knowledge I would like to know

However, since they're confusing Penguin and Panda with a manual penalty, I don't know if they truly know what to call it.

It seems it was a manual penalty, which would make it unrelated to Penguin or Panda.

 

[djbaxter]

You cannot have a manual penalty from an automatic filter.

The article is putting forth conflicting details, which is why I asked the question.

Penalties such as Penguin and Panda are not a manual penalty. They are wide sweeping, affecting all sites in Google's index.

A manual penalty is where a Google search quality rep reviews your individual website and slaps a specific, manual penalty on you.

Reconsideration requests are for manual penalties. For Penguin and Panda, you have to wait until they refresh the filter.

Correct. My point was that the original article mentions both and that may well be what happened, i.e., they were hit both by algorithmic drops from Panda and/or Penguin PLUS a manual penalty for buying or selling links.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

If that was the case then when their penalty lifted, they would still have been under a Penguin or Panda penalty as well until the filter refresh.