What You Need to Understand about Google Penguin Recovery

Anyone who runs an SEO agency has experienced the following scenario.

A client comes to you and explains they ranked number one for a keyword(s) before Penguin. They got hit, having fallen into near invisibility in the Google SERPs and are desperate to get their Google traffic back and recover from Penguin.

Manual vs. Algorithmic Link Penalties

Post Penguin we most commonly see two types of Penguin related penalties. Manual and algorithmic. Manual penalties usually happen to those that have received the “unnatural link warning” email from Google.

In the case of a manual penalty, someone at Google has decided your backlink profile is actively attempting to manipulate the algorithm. This is the hardest of the two to overcome. Why?

Because it means that your link profile will undergo much more scrutiny than it would trying to recover from an algorithmic penalty. There’s an actual person making a judgement call on your links (and their intent) vs. a mathematical formula.

In an algorithmic penalty, it’s merely Google’s algorithm that has detected some type of irregularity that seems like manipulation in your link profile and you get caught up in its filter.

While not “easy” to overcome, it’s easier to recover from than a manual penalty, because your link profile is being reviewed by an algorithm vs. a human. Identify the issue and remove links, disavow links and/or build links to rectify the balance of your link profile and the signals your site is giving off to the algorithm.

Penguin Recovery Doesn’t Mean “Getting Your Rankings Back”

The common misunderstanding is that Penguin recovery means you recover your original rankings. This is almost never the case. Penguin recovery merely means you’re no longer being “punished” by Google. It means that Google has decided your site is no longer “guilty” of link manipulation. It means you’ve escaped the filter or had the manual penalty lifted.

So why don’t you “get your rankings back” in regards to where they originally were?

You’ve lost links that were actually helping

The whole reason that Google “dinged” you in Penguin was because it felt you were ranking with manipulative links. When you remove (some of) the manipulative links, you also remove some of the links that were indeed helping you rank before you were hit by Penguin.

Typically Penguin recovery returns you from oblivion to somewhere within the first three pages of the search results for your former “number one ranked” keywords. If you’re lucky, your recovery will return you to the first page – but almost never back in your original number one slot. In short, the recovery won’t be as stark a climb as it was a drop off.

This is especially true in recovery from manual link penalties, which usually require a lot more helpful (but deemed manipulative by human eyes) links to be removed.

What Penguin Recovery gives you is the ability to earn top rankings again.

Reinclusion Requests Won’t Help With Algorithmic Penguin Penalties

If you did not receive the feared “link warning” email, but suffered a “hit” corresponding with a Penguin update, then you’re caught up in the Penguin filter and reinclusion requests will not help. Why not?

“Google” didn’t give you the penalty in this case – their algorithm did

If you didn’t get the link email, then there was no manual decision made to hit your site. The decision was made by the algorithm. And as such, the algorithm has to be the one to decide to release you from the filter.

Again, the good news is that (in my experience) the algorithmic Penguin penalty is easier to recover from (though still not easy per se) than a manual link penalty.

The bad news is that because the penalty was algorithmic you have to do what needs to be done and then wait for the next Penguin update to occur to see if your escape efforts were successful.

Not only will reinclusion requests not help remove an algorithmic Penguin penalty, but they merely stand to potentially draw attention to your link profile from Google – which in my experience isn’t something you want to do.

(Edited to add: My buddy Paul emailed me to tell me that Google recently removed the ability to even submit a reconsideration request UNLESS a manual spam action has been found for the site… I’m guessing that might be due to all the reinclusion requests they were likely getting for algorithmic penalties that didn’t require them – haha.)

The Penguin Algorithm isn’t fair (or about hard numbers)

Understand that the Penguin algorithm isn’t fair. Just because your competition has managed not to trip the filter with the same link building techniques you used doesn’t mean that you’ll be as lucky. Lamenting about what the competition is getting away with won’t fix your rankings.

Additionally, IMHO, being hit by Penguin’s algorithm is all about your overall backlink profile. Not specific links or link types as individual entities. So looking at what your competition is doing may give you deceiving results.

For example – Site A could have 100 directory listings. Site B could have 60. If Site A has a 40,000 overall links and Site B has 400 overall links, then that means that less than 1% (.25% to be exact) of Site A’s backlink profile is made up of directories, while 15% of Site B’s is.

Site A may do “more” directory link building, but it is a much smaller, less glaring percentage of their backlink profile. It’s not about “hard numbers” so to speak. It’s the overall profile.

In the case of a manual penalty, the situation is even more unfair. You’ll often have to remove more links then you would need to in an algorithmic penalty – with many of those links being the same kind of links your competition is benefiting from.

What Penguin Recovery Really Looks Like

• This client came to us having been hit by Penguin and had not received a link warning email. (Unfortunately, they didn’t have analytics on the site at the time, but their sales numbers allowed us to pinpoint the date they were hit to confirm Penguin).


• We found some technical glitches causing what appeared to look like a link network from a sister site and cleaned them up (pink line).


• We also found that a link building service they had formerly used appeared to have accidentally (we assume) developed links for another client, but had used our (now) client’s URL causing them to have a slew of 100% unrelated anchors. We disavowed those. (purple line)


• We disavowed a few other very low quality links (also purple line).


• No reinclusion requests were submitted.


• Penguin 2.1 came into play (green line) and the client bounced back to the first page (except at number five whereas they used to be number one).

Organic search traffic is way up since their recovery, but not back to their old traffic levels before they were hit by Penguin. Getting that done will take some renewed and better executed marketing efforts.

Born again SEO

Essentially, recovering from Penguin gives you a chance to “start over” so to speak. Unlike a brand new site, you at least have some good backlinks and a few decent rankings to start with. But getting back your top ranks means you’ll have to build new, defensible links – the right way – forever swearing off your former link manipulation sins.

The post What You Need to Understand about Google Penguin Recovery appeared first on Sugarrae.

Sugarrae aka Rae Hoffman

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How to Conduct Niche Research for an Affiliate Site

How do you an evaluate a potential affiliate niche? It’s a question I’m asked several times a week. Half of the niches I’ve created affiliate sites in were ones I stumbled across totally by chance. The rest are in niches I directly set out to target.

But regardless of how you find a niche, there’s a bit of research you need to conduct if you want to find out the revenue potential of a niche before you spend a lot of time and effort targeting it.

Show me the money

The first thing I want to know is if there’s money in the industry, because if there isn’t then the rest of these steps would be a waste of time. I’ll do a quick check to be expanded on later if it passes the litmus test.

Check for the presence of PPC advertising

The first thing I’ll do is head over to Google and run searches for some of the core terms in the niche. I’m looking to see how many PPC advertisers the terms bring up. If I don’t see any PPC ads for the terms (or only a handful of them) it might be a warning flag.

Typically, if a term has monetary value, then you can count on advertisers to bid on it. The exceptions to this rule would be regarding terms that are 1. trademarked or 2. disallowed for advertising on via Google’s Terms of Service.

Check for the presence of multiple affiliate programs

The last thing you want to do is build up traffic around a niche where products or services are only offered by one merchant.

A long time ago I built up an affiliate site centered around a specific service. About six months after I took top rankings in the niche, the merchant shut down its affiliate program. Since there were no other affiliate programs for it, the site became absolutely useless from a revenue standpoint.

Of course, this was pre AdSense existing, but still, lesson learned. I won’t enter a niche as an affiliate unless there are multiple options within it for generating revenue.

Assuming the niche passes the general money test, we’ll move on to…

Show me the traffic

Next up is ensuring the niche actually gets enough traffic to generate any significant revenue in correlation to the effort required to enter it.

Get your keyword research on

I’ll conduct niche keyword research to find every term in the industry with any traffic volume that I can. You can do that utilizing free tools like Bing’s keyword tool or Wordstream or using a paid tool like Raven Tools or SEMRush.

There’s not really a “hard number” in regards to keyword volume for a niche to be worth your while. A niche with 40,000 total searches a month could beat out one with 1,000,000 searches a month from a revenue perspective. It all comes down to the potential revenue you can generate from visitors (more on that below) AKA your return on investment (ROI).

Checking out the search trends

Is interest in the niche going up, steady or going down? Google trends is pretty decent for gaining insight in that respect. For example – below is a chart showing the interest in the term “BlackBerry” over the last nine years.

2007 would have been a great year to get into this niche (which I did). Had I come across this niche in 2012, I wouldn’t have gotten into it, regardless of the static traffic numbers because it was on a steady decline.

You want to get involved with niches with an upward or steady trend – and avoid those that are showing a steady or significant decline.

Also be aware that any niche that surrounds a fad is at risk of later decline. An example would be Acai Berry which was a short lived weight loss fad in 2008 and 2009.

Checking out the competitor trends

Sometimes a niche might be too small to get proper intel from Google trends. And even if I can, I always want to cross check that information. So I’ll plug the top five competitors on the main term in the niche into a tool that checks their traffic trends. You can either use a free tool like Alexa or SEMRush (which is free for this type of research).

Again, I’m looking for gaining traffic or steady traffic. Declines would make me question the desire to enter the niche, especially considering the competitor ranks well on the core terms for the niche.

So now I know there is general money to be made and the traffic volume and trends for the niche look good.

Show me the competition

I market my sites via SEO, so my next research step is to identify who my primary competitors would be in the niche so I can get some kind of insight into what “competing” in that industry in the organic search results is going to entail.

Check out WHO is ranking for the top keywords

All competitors are not created equal. Who ranks for the top ten for a search term can give you some insight into how hard it will be to crack.

If the entire top ten for the top 10 search terms for the niche are all big brands without an affiliate site or non mainstream media blog to be seen, you may want to rethink the niche if you wouldn’t consider your comprehension and execution of SEO to be “advanced level” in nature.

I’m not saying it’s not possible to beat out big brands and mainstream media. I’m just saying it’s a large mountain to climb. I like to see at least a few results that aren’t a large brand or publication.

Check out WHAT is ranking for the top keywords

While you’re checking out “who” is ranking, you should also be checking out “what” is ranking. Are all of the top ten results root level domains (meaning www.competitor-site.com) or are there some pages ranking within them (meaning www.competitor-site.com/individual-page/)?

If the top ten results for multiple terms are owned by root domains, that indicates to me that there is a higher level of competition for these terms. If I see a lot of pages ranking, then that indicates to me that the competition bar might not be as high.

Researching the backlinks of the competition

Providing the niche isn’t owned by the root domains or big brands, then I’ll take the top competition (the ones I continually see showing in the top ten for the various niche terms) and research their backlinks to see how much strength those results actually have.

Personally I run the domains through multiple research tools to do this. All the tools I use are paid (Raven Tools, Open Site Explorer and Link Research Tools).

However, Open Site Explorer will spit back basic overview information on competitor link profiles for free under the “compare link metrics” tab allowing you to compare up to five root domains or individual pages at once.

I just prefer to also be able to look through those links to see anchors, authority, etc via the paid version (and the other paid tools above).

Evaluating all of the above

I’m looking to cross reference the above to get a level of the competition. If the top searches are owned by big brands, ranking with their root domains for the term and a 100,000 backlinks a piece, I’ll probably pass on the niche.

If the top searches are a mix of big brands, niche sites and blogs, root domains, pages and the top results have a few hundred backlinks a piece, then I’m now super interested in the niche.

Show me the angle

In order to have long term success in the niche, you’re going to have to be able to define a point of difference (POD) between you and every other site currently succeeding in the niche. If you enter this niche, how will you differentiate yourself?

In doing the research for the “show me the competition” section, you should have seen a lot of your would be competitors. What’s going to be your angle?

• What content are your potential competitors lacking? Can you fulfill that void?


• What features are your potential competitors missing? Can you create them?


• What is your potential competition doing well that you feel you could do better?


• Is there a missed demographic your potential competitors are failing to specifically target? (For example, there are a ton of recipe sites – but are any of the formidable competitors targeting working moms?)


• Are there any promotional avenues your competitors are ignoring that you could rock? (For example, are they ignoring Google+ in an industry where the demographic is active on Google+?)


• What voice is your competition using? Can you contribute a unique one?

Unless I can clearly define what my POD would be then it’s going to be a tough road in regards to standing out from the niche. If I can find a clear POD and execute it, then my odds of success are a lot better.

Show me the potential

Now that I know general money exists within the niche, that the traffic volume and opportunity is there, that the SERPs are achievable and that I have an angle I can attack the niche from, my last question is “what is the ROI potential of being successful in this niche?”

Unfortunately that question can’t be answered definitively before entering said niche. But, you can make some educated guesses.

Estimating potential ranking values

In my last post, I discussed finding the money keywords for your affiliate marketing and SEO efforts. Whether you use that method of finding out the estimated CPC of the search terms within the potential niche or another method, you’re going to need to compile that information to do this step.

Once I have the CPC of say the top 20 money keywords with the most traffic volume in the niche, I’ll run a search on Spyfu to estimate the potential value of ranking on those terms (you can also get the CPC information via SpyFu, I just find SEMRush is much more user friendly). I have a paid membership to SpyFu which allows me to run all the keywords at once via their “groupie” tool, but you can do it for free providing you enter it in keyword by keyword.

In the bulk export the column that matters to me is “Exact_Cost_Per_Day”. This is the amount that Google estimates you would spend, on average, to advertise on this keyword each day. I’ll then add a function to give me a daily tally for those top 20 terms and a function to multiply that daily total by 30 to give me a monthly total value for those 20 niche keywords.

In the above case, the “estimated cost” of those terms – and thus the potential value of those terms to advertisers – is $ 2,259 per month.

In the free keyword by keyword search at SpyFu, you’d be looking for the “Monthly Cost” listed under the “Exact” column. Which in the example below is $ 518.

Then you’ll need to tally the monthly cost (for exact) for all 20 keywords combined to get to that same tally of $ 2,259.

Keep in mind the above is 1. only the tally for 20 money terms, 2. is based on top rankings for these keywords and 2. not “what you’ll make”. Monetizing effectively is a whole different animal.

This is merely some educated insight into what the potential monetary value of ranking for the top money terms within the niche may be. Sometimes I run the top 30, 50 or 100 keywords as well (for example – running the top 50 keywords for the same niche above brought me back a monthly total of $ 8606.70).

But in this example I kept it to 20 assuming many would choose the free option of doing it keyword by keyword.

You have to make the call

Once you’ve done all of the above, you should have a pretty complete picture of the niche as one can from the outside looking in. It will be up to you to make the call as to whether or not the niche is “doable” and worth your time, effort and money to enter it and truly compete.

Edited to add: Need some tips on how to find a niche to research? Check out this post on finding profitable affiliate niches.

Got any questions or tips to add? Drop em in the comments below.

The post How to Conduct Niche Research for an Affiliate Site appeared first on Sugarrae.

Sugarrae aka Rae Hoffman

from WordPress http://www.reparacalculator.com/how-to-conduct-niche-research-for-an-affiliate-site/

via IFTTT

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