GaryTheScubaGuy

[QUOTE=GaryTheScubaGuy;736618]I've read a lot of posts on Penguin 2.1 and if it did or didn't hurt you, but haven't found much on what to do it you are one of the 6 out of 10 people reporting negative results, so I'll tell you my two cents and what my team is doing and you can take it for what it's worth. I'll return in a few weeks with results as usual.

Suffice to say we have no existing clients that were penalised, but man do we have a lot of new inquiries since the Oct 6th! I cannot guarantee this is the right strategy, but I'll walk you through our thinking and tell you why we do what we are doing.

1.The first thing you need to do is get the free trial of Link Research Tools. (LinkResearchTools.com) You will be using their DeTox tool. Depending on the number of back links you have (use majestic SEO to determine a close number - Free) and subscribe tot he most appropriate plan. (If you are an Affiliate drop me a line and I'll run one for you provided you don't have over 5000 links)

2.Manually go through each link. LRT will consider a link toxic if it isn't indexed. THIS DOESN'T MEAN IT'S BAD. Check the PR and the site and be sure it's not a directory or other negative site, or a link farm or even in a bad neighbourhood (LRT has a tool for this in their arsenal as well). If none of these are the case, YOU need to get it indexed. Use XIndexer, Pingomatic or even a manual submission through WMC

3.LRT has another tool that will strip the contact details from the sites linking to you but I haven't had much success with it yet. There are several tools out there for this, or you can go to Netsol and get the webmasters contact details. Have a cookie-cutter email ready requesting that the link be removed or the anchor text changed. (You are doing this to get rid of bad links but since you are already doing, or paying someone to do this technique, you may as well add the good links that you would like to change anchor text on and request that from the other good sites and do them as well)

[QUOTE][COLOR=#000000][FONT=Arial][I]If you believe your site's ranking is being harmed by low-quality links you do not control, you can ask Google not to take them into account when assessing your site. You should still make every effort to clean up unnatural links pointing to your site. Simply disavowing them isn't enough.[/I][/FONT][/COLOR]
[/QUOTE]

The problem I have found with these types of comments is that Google does not provide a facility to upload any documents proving your efforts to contact the Webmasters, so how are they going to use this as a factor?
[CENTER][IMG]http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NrWpsIFBFWw/UmMd2KXSj_I/AAAAAAAABiA/i6uBWBGaBnY/s1600/google_disavow.png[/IMG][/CENTER]
I guess they just look at the number of links that have been recently removed. This opens the door to a lot of questions such as; can I use landing page manipulation to send bad links to a 404? Can I use a robots.txt exclusion? Can I request deindexation/exclusion of a bad URL? Will any of these count as making an effort?

4.Create a Disavow file in LRT. Manually go through the disavow file that this creates. I usually strip out the header information in the text file that it creates. Submit.

I can verify the Disavow file processing time as of last week was about ten days but they say 2-3 weeks. Recently we had a client with a Detox score of 1200. You can't get higher than that. Within 2 months we had them down to 604 and are still working.

This is NOT a one-off task. You will need to do this every single month. Our team already has in in their bi-weekly To-Do list.

So that takes care of the nasty back links for now. In the interim, here are several other things that we are doing, and the reasons we are doing them;

- PROBLEM - On the Wordpress themes we have (we build 1500-2000 website networks for back link strategies using primarily WP) in place are mostly ZAlive or Customizer which take up 2/3 of the "above the fold" area.
- FIX - It was stated a while by Google that as much content as possible needs to go above the fold. No biggie, just change to a compatible theme

- PROBLEM - We run the Link Juice Recovery tool (LRT) and broken links tool and fine lots of both, especially 302's and 301's. The 302's are temporary redirects which Google frowns on. 302 in the past were loopholes for hackers, especially in the Affiliate atmosphere. 301's on the other hand are fine to replace them, but on all existing and 302 conversions we are pointing them at internal pages or consolidation with htaccess files, depending on the site's needs. The theory that we have, based on various forums and comments from Google, is that 301's pointing at your homepage lose all value. They have said to point them at internal related pages.
The other opinion swirling is that websites that redirect their homepage to a different page (I.e. yoursite.com redirected to yoursite.com/cart) is not recommended as you lose a fraction (10-15%) of your PR, or trust and authority, but doing this.
FIX - Take redirects off root url. Change 302's to 301's. Point 301's to related internal pages or posts.

- PROBLEM - Too many sitewide links[CENTER][IMG]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fVruWQDlgeE/UmMl9aLvulI/AAAAAAAABiM/Vbfem5JwvAU/s1600/site-wide-matches.png[/IMG][/CENTER]
- FIX - Reduce front page and template links to under 100. Nofollow non-relevant navigational links in the template that do not benefit keyword search

We are also taking existing posts and adding outbound links to trusted sites where we didn't already, but take the last network we built; 1850 websites optimised on wordpress and 70% unique content. All of these posts had links either to the moneysite (very few though), or they had links to social media or press releases, and an additional link out to a trusted or high ranking non-competitor. The sites are under 6 months old. NOT ONE RECEIVED A PENALTY whether stated or not from Google.

I have an army of ODesk writers that I trained up on Wordpress and basic SEO and they populate the top 10 of the 1850 [I]NETWORK [/I]sites with professionally written content. We also bought bulk (100,000) unique and 100% readable content/articles and have written a few custom wordpress programs that auto-populate and do various other tasks.

The last task we are doing is to submit press releases through ABNewswire and PRWeb. These have two links each max. One to the moneysite and one to a high-ranking or trusted site (or even an edu or gov if applicable). This can get expensive but these will create quite a few great links. But be vigilant; many of the sites these services submit to are also high risk sites so use your disavow tool regularly or get the article indexed if this is the reason for the risk. I install the Onlywire toolbar button and take two seconds to submit it through 40 or so social bookmarking sites after it is published.

You can also look at your competitors link profile and make adjustments there. Plenty of information and tools available out there for this.

Again I do not know if these methods will be successful, but common sense says this is what Google is looking for when they

April 24th, 2012; [COLOR=#333333][FONT=Arial][QUOTE]The goal of many of our ranking changes is to help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfil their information needs[/QUOTE]. [/FONT]

[SIZE=3][FONT=times new roman]This differs in statement I recall in the past...the old "Content is King" has always been around, but I think Google is looking for other triggers now such as outbound, followed links to reputable, trustworthy and high-ranking websites.[/FONT]

[FONT=times new roman]We're actioning all of the above and in different formulas so we can see what is and isn't working, and what combinations work the best. We'll be sure to post the results asap.[/FONT]

[FONT=times new roman]GaryTheScubaGuy[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/QUOTE]