Monitor Backlinks' great step-by-step description of the best practices to use in case of sudden drop in traffic because of a Google Penguin Penalty.

1. Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty
– Best Practices –
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2. • If you suddenly lost most of your organic traffic, you are not alone!
Hundreds of thousands other websites are penalized by Google each
month, according to Matt Cutts.
• The most important part in recovering from any type of Google penalties or
filters (Panda, Penguin, EMD, PMD, Emmanuel, Top Heavy etc.) is to
determine what caused your rankings drop.
• When analyzing a website’s SEO performance, you have to conduct a link
audit and do forensic SEO, just as a doctor would first check the x-rays
before giving a diagnosis.
How to do a correct link audit?
How to identify the backlinks that caused your penalty?
Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
monitorbacklinks

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
Identifying why your rankings dropped
There are several reasons why your website can lose traffic from Google. Some of
the most common ones are:
• Manual action – If this is the case on your website, you should see a message in
your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you have no messages, it means that
you haven’t received a manual penalty from Google’s spam team.
• Algorithmic filter – Google updates its ranking algorithm a few times each year.
The most popular updates are Penguin and Panda. Unlike a manual action, if your
traffic dropped after an algorithm update occurred, no messages will be displayed
in your Google Webmaster Tools account. To determine from what algorithm
penalty your website suffered, you have to analyze your website’s backlinks and
also correlate the day when you lost traffic with the day Google updated its
ranking algorithm. For this, you can check Google’s algorithm changes history.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
Identifying why your rankings dropped
There are several reasons why your website can lose traffic from Google. Some of
the most common ones are:
• Website performance problems – Google favors websites with fast loading times
and those that don’t have critical errors, broken pages, malware and server errors.
If you have such errors, you can find them in your Google Webmaster Tools
account.
• Outranked by your competitors – If you lost traffic, it doesn’t always mean that
you were filtered or penalized. Sometimes your competitors will outrank you
because they earned better backlinks or clicked more checkboxes, and Google
thinks they should rank them higher. Always monitor your website’s rankings
along with your main competitors, and keep an eye on the new backlinks they
build.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
How to perform a forensic backlinks audit
• Your website’s backlinks are very important. They can help you achieve better
rankings in Google, but they can also cause an unwanted drop of rankings and
traffic. Bad backlinks cause more than 90% of Google’s penalties. To determine
the reason for your drop, you have to conduct a forensic SEO analysis.
• No matter what tool you plan to use for your link audit, always start by exporting
the links from your Google Webmaster Tools account, and import them to your
favorite SEO tool. These are the backlinks crawled and recognized by Google, and
they can give you a snippet of your link profile. In case of a manual action, if you
identify and clean up the offensive links found in Google Webmaster Tools you can
recover. For filters such as Penguin, you must dig deeper than using Google
Webmaster Tools.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
How to perform a forensic backlinks audit
• You can use any of the numerous SEO tools available to analyze your backlinks,
such as Ahrefs, Moz and Majestic SEO, but the one I am going to use for this case
study is called Monitor Backlinks. Why do I prefer this tool? Because it gives me
more flexibility to filter my backlinks, and it’s my watchtower and firewall against
Negative SEO.
• I’ll show you a step by step guide on how to identify the links that are of low
quality and are a threat to your rankings.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
How to perform a forensic backlinks audit
• With the list of backlinks downloaded from Google Webmaster Tools, I will first
have to import them to my Monitor Backlinks account.
• Most websites have hundreds of backlinks, and checking them one by one would
be a very time consuming process. This is the reason why you have to use an SEO
tool to sort your links by different filters and easily determine their value.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
1. Check only for backlinks that are dofollow
• Google ignores backlinks that have a nofollow attribute, and it would
make not as much sense to waste your time analyzing links that are
not passing any PageRank.
• There are cases where the owner removes the nofollow attribute and
you will be left with a bad dofollow link, but the priority is to check
the links that flow PageRank.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
2. Check your backlinks by their index status
• One of the worst links you can have are backlinks coming from
websites that have been penalized and deindexed from Google. If
such websites are linking to your website, you must try to request a
link removal and disavow them immediately.
• If the domain is not indexed, it may be a signal that something is
wrong, but maybe not. If the site is brand new, or did not get any
incoming links is certainly not a negative factor.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
2. Check your backlinks by their index status
• However, if the domain is indexed, but the
page that links to you it’s not indexed, it
either means that Google hasn’t crawled it
yet, or it’s blocked from crawling by
robots.txt.
• Analyze all your backlinks with such
problems by using the filter called “Google
indexed”.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
3. Sort your backlinks by MozRank
• First to look for are the backlinks coming from websites with a domain
PageRank of zero, with lower MozRank, Majestic AC rank, Citation and
Trust Flow. Even if the Google PageRank toolbar it’s not regularly
updated, this is the only metric we currently have from Google. When
the Google toolbar is updated is usually up to 3 months old. The
closest to accuracy tool I know is Moz from OpenExplorer.
• But we still cannot tell how Google values websites, because the
toolbar and tools like Moz OpenExplorer or Majestic, do not provide
the option to upload a disavow file and get the true metrics and
values. The good news is that I get full support from Monitor Backlinks
to get more insights about my links.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
3. Sort your backlinks by MozRank
• If a website has a domain MozRank or AC
Rank of zero it means that it either doesn’t
have much value, or it’s brand new
website.
• From your Monitor Backlinks dashboard,
click on filters, then select Moz and choose
to show the links with MozRank.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
4. Sort your backlinks by Domain
and by Page Authority
• Domain and Page Authority are
metrics given by Moz, and is
updated more often than
Google’s PageRank toolbar.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
5. Check for links coming from pages with
high external backlinks
• Most of the time, pages with hundreds
external links are of very low quality.
You can use Monitor Backlinks filter
called “EXT” to view all your links with
over 100 external links.
• A page with more than 100 links could
be a signal of bad usability. The more
external links, the less PageRank you will
receive.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
6. Filter your backlinks by their domain
extensions
• Use this filter to find backlinks that are
unrelated to your website.
• For instance, if you have an brick store
baby store in France, it would make no
sense to have links coming from
websites registered in India, Russia,
Korea or others.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
7. Check backlinks statuses
• If you are familiar with the technical part of SEO, you can also check your
backlinks by their link statuses and redirects.
• Look for backlinks with a 404, 403 or 410 status. If your backlinks have
been removed or moved to a different location, you can disavow those
links.
• In addition you can go an extra mile requesting Google to remove pages no
more existing or not accessible using the Google Outdated Removal tool.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
7. Check backlinks statuses
• You probably might want to double
check the 301s, where they are
pointing too, but also the 302
redirects. First because Google
preserves the right to treat those
redirects as 301s and second
because hackers and spammers use
those to redirect to spammy or
hacked sites (which have malware).

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
8. Sort your backlinks by anchor texts
• If your website has been penalized by the Google Penguin algorithm
update, you have to analyze your backlinks anchor texts distribution.
• Try to remove physically if possible and disavow the links that are of low
quality and are using your over optimized anchor texts.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
What to do with the bad backlinks
• Once identified the backlinks that are of low quality, you must try to
remove them, and then create a disavow report.
• In most cases it is recommended to disavow the entire domain which
has sent a bad link to your website, no matter if you managed to remove
it or not.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
What to do with the bad backlinks
• To easily create a disavow report
using Monitor Backlinks, click on
the settings button from the
right, and select “Disavow
domain”. Do the same for all the
backlinks you find to be of low
quality, and you want to disavow.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
What to do with the bad backlinks
• After you added the disavow tag to
all the bad links, go to your disavow
page and click on the button
“Export”. Monitor Backlinks will
create a report that you can submit
to Google Webmaster Tools. But
make sure to double check your
disavow file before submitting, to
make sure you did not include a
non-offensive domain.

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Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices
Conclusion
• If your website has suffered from any type of Google penalties, I
recommend to always perform a link audit and determine what backlinks
are of low quality and are a threat to your rankings in Google.
• Download the backlinks crawled by Google and import them to your
favorite tool (I used Monitor Backlinks in this article), to get more SEO
metrics and easily determine their value. To recover from most Google
penalties you have to try to remove and disavow the bad backlinks of
your website.

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About the Authors:
John Britsios is Forensic SEO expert at SEO Workers.
Razvan Girmacea is the founder and the CEO of Monitor Backlinks.
He has over 10 years of web development experience,
30 personal projects and 1 successful company sold.
Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices

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Find here the original article:
http://monitorbacklinks.com/blog/seo/recovering-from-google-penguin-penalty/
Have a Sunny Enjoyable Optimistic Day!
Recovering from Google Penguin Penalty – Best Practices