Part 2 – Diagnosing Penguin 2.0 Problems for Small Biz Owners Reversing the SEO effects of Penguin 2.0 can be simple or very, very difficult. If you outsource it, you might be looking at some big fees, as it’s a long, complicated, time consuming process. If you have the time and some basic SEO expertise, you may be able to do some of the reversals yourself.
SEO Companies: they got you into it; they might not get you out of it.
If you’ve bought month-to-month backlinking services in the past, there’s a VERY, VERY good chance that they did something to cause your fall in rankings. That’s not to say it’s their fault (probably) – it’s impossible to know what Google will do in the future so they can only do the very best for you at the time. Google clearly states that any form of link buying (SEO services included) is against their rules. You can contact your SEO Company and ask them to fix it, but chances are they won’t quite know yet and when they do, you’ll be hit up with some big fees!
Looking at the list of reasons you may be in this SEO mess will help you get yourself out.
- First, you’ll need to go into your Webmaster Tools account and click the search queries tab.
Penguin 2.0 unfolded on 23.5.13 – so if you’ve made it in within three months, you can click the “show difference” button to see how your keywords have changed. If not, you may be able to use a web tool such as SEMRush, or Google AdWords to look at historical traffic numbers. If you can’t access this information, your own website may have built in metrics – or, you can guess based on enquiries coming to your site.
- Make up a spreadsheet of all the keywords that have fallen in rank and note the URLs that were ranking before Penguin.
Note where they are every few days and note any work you do to undo them. You can also track changes with annotations in Google Analytics by clicking the little down arrow under the graph.
- Consider what is the most likely cause of your drop in Google traffic and then start, slowly to experiment with fixing it.
Each change will take a few days to register in search results so this is a long, slow process. You should do just a few small changes each time and then look to search results to see if it has impacted your ranking. Don’t do anything dramatic because you could make the whole thing worse!
It’s vital to remember that this is NOT the last Penguin change. There’ll be more and those will be more sophisticated. It’s worthwhile changing tack now.
Create a new online marketing strategy for yourself that includes:
- Start working on authentic forms of online marketing.
- A good rule of thumb is ‘don’t acquire a link that you wouldn’t expect click through traffic from’.
- Use higher end link-building tactics like guest blogging, real world press coverage, networking and social media success.
- If you’re buying SEO services, go for quality over quantity.
- Update your website regularly to include quality content that is informative and accurately answers the search query.
- Start regularly “deep linking”; that is, building links to plenty of pages across your website, not just home.
- Register for Google Plus and begin using Google Authorship mark up tags.
What your web designer can do to help you with your SEO:
- If you take advertising on your site, make sure that all links to advertisers are “no followed”.
- 301 redirect any very old content that may have duplicate content to a single page.
- If you don’t have one already, establish a blog on your site so you can upload high quality content regularly.
- Upload rich content types, like videos and the like.
- Check that your meta tags aren’t keyword stuffed and that you have a Penguin friendly internal linking system in place.
- Check for any duplicate content and add rel_canonical tags.
Once you have a list of potential problems, you can then look to potential solutions. Part 3 of this article series looks at the most common Penguin 2.0 problems and what you can do to DIY a solution. Part 1 covered the facts of Diagnosing Penguin 2.0 Problems for Small Biz Owners. Part 4 looks at quality related and user experience issues that are impacted by Penguin updates.
