Google pushed out the first refresh of their infamous Penguin update,
bringing many webmasters to stumble towards their analytics, SERPs and
the like in hopes of signs of a recovery from previous ranking drops,
and/or to hope that they had not seen a precipitous drop in rankings.
For most, the algo refresh seemed to do little, and for good reason -
Cutts informed us that it apparently only impacted .01% of search results. Not many SERPs changed, and most of the voices heard over the weekend only seemed to be coming from people that were newly crushed by Google's pet Penguin.
Soon after the algorithm hit, we learned that Penguin refreshes, as it
did last weekend. This makes it unique and similar to Panda in
formation. For most, there was a lull period where these
Penguin-impacted webmasters would sit around, gather the facts about the update,
and then take action towards recovery where there were negative impacts
in a week or two after the event. Many removed and/or edited links -
others simply moved completely away from their manipulative linking
strategies. However, because of this time lull between implementation
and action, it's possible that moves towards recovery were not rapid
enough to see full changes, as links take time to crawl, new actions
take much time to implement, and the new refresh took only a month to
once again take effect.
In that respect, it may leave some to think "is a Penguin recovery even
possible?", or "should I just start over with a new domain?". These are
real questions that will come with edits to links and strategy, a
refresh and no changes to our rankings. To that end, I don't have
absolute answers, nobody does - just strong suggestions about the data
points we know about what survived, what didn't, and how Google has
treated penalties in the past. What I do now know, though, is that a
Penguin recovery is possible, and possible in a short amount of time -
because I've seen a big, seemingly complete recovery from the update at
the first refresh. This recovery came for a website that felt a
previous, critical impact from Penguin at the first iteration - that
website being popular Wordpress portal, WPMU.org.
The WPMU Story
On April 24th, 2012, WPMU.org was hit by the Penguin Update. Traffic
from Google dropped over 81% week over week, causing a real, massive hit
in revenue for the business over night. This was not the "three or four
spots" Google Penguin drop, this was the "almost disappear completely"
type Penguin hit that was among the worst kind of impact most websites
felt - and for the owner, James Farmer, this came as a real, completely unexpected shock.
WPMU is a Wordpress information hub with resources, plugins and more -
but the most important of its resource portfolio is its themes. WPMU's
themes function like many Wordpress installs usually do - they create
citation footer links to declare the theme type being used, so when its
popular theme packs get installed, they generate a "Powered by X" link
in the footer of the site back to the theme page.
Although it made sense in the context of these blogs, and for these types of themes, it also generated a high volume of sitewide links on low quality sites. It also, in its majority iteration,
used the anchor "Wordpress Mu" - which is a somewhat valid iteration of
"WPMU" - but to Google, it was likely seen as an attempt to get
commercial anchor text pointing at the site.
To WPMU founder James Farmer (as well as others), this was extremely
frustrating. Wordpress and web design installs are a unique use case
that might have been caught in the crossfire of this update. It simply
makes sense for these sites to have a link in the footer back to the
theme and/or designer - this is definitely what users expect, and is
good from a usability perspective overall. However, when looked at
purely from what we normally consider "clean" link profile
characteristics, its raw numbers fell outside those "good" ratios - and
surely, the nature of Wordpress themes and the majority of people who
select them mean that a good amount will be low quality and/or spam.
However, WPMU clearly had many other things going for it. 10,700+ Facebook likes, 15,600+ Twitter followers,
more than 2,500 +1s, and over 4,250 people subscribed to Feedburner in
total. Its backlink profile includes links from Technorati, Ars
Technica, Wired, Huffington Post, SEOBook, Business Insider, Boing Boing
and more. Surely, this isn't a site that deserves to get penalized,
right? Well, apparently Google thought differently.
Post penalty, Farmer reached out to the Sydney Morning Herald, the
biggest news site in Australia, in hopes to get coverage of the events.
He got what he asked for, and the Herald, according to Farmer, got his
site in front of Cutts to ask why a domain like WPMU would get hit by
Penguin. Cutts replied, pointing out links that in particular lead to
the penalty - for example, the below pages. Copy and paste to view.
- http://baydownloads.info/11580-Wordpress-Membership-Plugin-Wordpress-PayPal-R-Plugin-show-5starserve.htm - A site pirating WPMU software.
- http://computerofficechair.blogdetik.com/category/tak-berkategori/ - A splog using an old theme pack with a link to WPMU in the footer - with said potentially "commercial" anchor (my words, not Matt's).
- http://computerchairs.blogdetik.com/ - Same splog.
Cutts said, according to Farmer, "that we should consider the fact that
we were possibly damaged by the removal of credit from links such as
these". Sure, based on what we now know or assume about the update, this
makes sense. Low quality links, and also spammy, rarely-clicked footer
links with over-optimized anchor text. Right.
Although this information was helpful to Farmer, what also came from it
was Google awareness of a site that potentially might not have really
"fit" within what they were hoping to accomplish with this update. On
top of Cutts now knowing about the changes, Farmer then went on to blog the details of the penalty on WPMU, leading to more coverage and links, tweets from Rand, and also, according to Farmer, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land putting the site in front of Google once again.
With the burst of awareness this created in the SEO community, many people, such as myself,
ended up commenting on Farmer's post on WPMU. The community was
gracious in offering advice, suggestions, and other reasons why the site
may have been penalized - and from there, what Farmer might do to
recover. Based on my comments and tweets at WPMU about the subject,
Farmer reached out to me about taking next steps in undoing the impacts
of Penguin. I obliged, and work began.
We had two choices for WPMU - get the nofollow attribute added to the
links, or simply remove them completely. The first goal was to cut down
on as many of the sitewide, "Wordpress MU" anchor text links as
possible. I initially thought nofollowing would be the best solution
because of the potential for these links to drive leads for Farmer and
WPMU, but Farmer thought, to make it easy to change and correct for
bloggers, the best solution was to simply ask for removal.
The EDUBlogs.org Removal
The most perilous piece of WPMU's link profile came from one site - EDUblogs.org.
EDU Blogs is a blogging service for people in the education space,
allowing them to easily set up a subdomain blog on EDUblogs for their
school-focused site - in a similar fashion to Blogspot, Typepad, or
Tumblr, meaning that each subdomain is treated as a unique site in Google's eyes. Coincidentally, this site is owned by WPMU and Farmer, and every blog on the service leverages WPMU theme packs. Each of these blogs had the "Wordpress MU" anchor text in the footer, which meant a high volume of subdomains considered unique by Google all had sitewide "Wordpress MU" anchor text. In what might have been a lucky moment for WPMU, this portion of their external link profile was still completely in their control because of WPMU ownership.
In what I believe is the most critical reason why WPMU made a large recovery and also did it faster than almost everyone else, Farmer
instantly shut off almost 15,000 'iffy' sitewide, footer LRDs to their
profile, dramatically improving their anchor text ratios, sitewide link
volume, and more. They were also able to do this early on in
the month, quickly after the original update rolled out. A big
difference between many people trying to "clean up their profile" and
WPMU is time - getting everything down and adjusted properly meant that
many people simply did not see recoveries at refresh 1.1 - but that
doesn't mean it won't happen at all if the effort persists.
Additional Cleanup
Once .EDUBlogs got cleaned up, the majority of the link profile had
been fixed. However, much of the junk still remained from independent
bloggers who put up WPMU themes. Because of time constraints, I was
really unable to move at all on the link cleanup outside EDUblogs as we
attempted to get an effective strategy in place for people to remove
footer links, and also avoid Memorial Day weekend for e-mailing. Despite
this, we still may move forward with cleaning up the remainder "junk"
links to prevent Penguin hitting again on a second iteration.
Although Penguin seems to be a link penalty, I would be remiss to only
mention the large link-based changes that were made to the site in the
month between updates. Farmer and the WPMU team also made the following
changes during that time, any, all, or none of which may have made an
impact on recovery. I want to clarify, here, that these cleanups were
all done by Farmer as overall quality value-adds, and were not
Penguin-specific improvement suggestions made by me, although some,
many, all, or none of them may have contributed to the recovery.
- Pinged blogs that were originally highlighted by Matt Cutts in a conversation with the Syndey Harold - only one removed links, but they did come from a significant volume of splogs on the Blogdetik.com domain
- Submitted WPMU to the Penguin review form, twice, specifically referencing this article that was being beaten out by the links that referenced it
- Used SEOmoz campaign data to implement some canonical URLs to clean up crawl errors and also kill some unnecessary links across the site
- Did a bit of "SEO cleanup" that revealed WPMU.org sitemaps did not exist and/or were broken. Implemented sitemaps and submitted the feeds to Webmaster Tools, which was not happening previously
- Cleaned up numerous duplicate title tag issues as reported by Webmaster tools
- Continued to build natural links to the site and promote other positive signals such as referring traffic and social shares
- Very notably and importantly, got this specific use case in front of Google and also the greater SEO community that highlighted it
These aren't the only changes that occurred, certainly, but were the
most notable in reference to the Penguin update, and may help in your
own decision making in order to better recover your own website rankings
in the future.
Just as I was about to start manually e-mailing the remaining blogs to
remove WPMU links, a great thing happened - recovery. On Friday, May
25th, a clear return from the 1.1 refresh of Penguin occurred, bringing
ranking and traffic levels to what look like the same spot they were
previously. Given that it's a holiday weekend, traffic is considerably
down, so it's hard to tell for certain - but considering what we know
about traditional impacts from the holidays, it looks like WPMU has made
a full recovery from its original hit from the Penguin update.
This Penguin recovery is a great sign not just for WPMU, but also other
Penguin impacted webmasters as well. WPMU had a lot of things going for
it that allowed for immediate and quick recovery - such as getting in
front of Google (which may have caused an algorithmic adjustment for
this use case), being a site that DESERVES to rank with tons of other
great signals already, and also the ability to pull down tons of
manipulative linking root domains instantly. However, these "quick fix"
solutions that allowed WPMU to quickly come back also means that the
long term fixes that you're working on for your domain should also work -
that is, if you implement them properly and move towards a longer term,
higher quality site as you should be.
It should also be noted and taken very seriously that
this post should not be considered a "blueprint" for recovery for your
site. Read it and make your own educated decisions based on what you
know about your link profile, your business, your vertical, and the
Penguin Update in general.
Best of luck - and happy Penguin hunting!
Although Farmer and his team at WPMU did most of the heavy lifting
in this recovery, I'll do my best to answer any questions you might have
in the comments. Feel free to also ping me on Twitter for a quicker response. Many thanks to Melissa Kowalchuk as well for her image design work on this post.
