Google Penguin Recovery Case Study - What Type of Mistake A SEO Worker Can Do

As we continued our analysis, we discovered that the majority of the links pointing to CBAC were spam. A common problem.

• The whole website was being run on HTTPS instead of HTTP. HTTPS doesn’t inherently damage SEO, but the encryption process does put extra load on the servers. This is an increasingly common problem as more people use mobile devices, which have slower connections. However, it’s not mission critical by any means.

• We found a large number of nofollow links from blog comments. This wouldn’t be bad, except that the comments had sloppy text, and the links contained exact match anchor text.A huge number of links with exact match anchor text signals creates an obvious footprint, nofollow or not. This taints the entire link profile and makes it more likely to be flagged.

• The majority of their followed links contained exact match anchor text. It didn’t matter where the links were coming from. The sheer quantity of links containing exact match anchor text is a dead giveaway that the links were created artificially. Since the anchor text wasn’t branded, it was also clear that these links were created by their previous SEO only to influence search results.

• We identified several paid listings in directories.

• We found several links from free directories. Directories themselves aren’t necessarily a bad place to get links, but when they make up a large portion of your link profile, and they aren’t the kind of directories that people actually use to find things, they start to become risky. Around the time that Penguin hit the landscape, Google had banned and penalized multiple directory websites that contained spam or junk links. These were undoubtedly playing a part.

• A large portion of the links were coming from article directories. Using article directories alone isn’t enough to get you penalized, but we’ve never found them to be a source of useful SEO value. The links that they had obtained from these directories were almost entirely exact match. The sheer quantity of links from article directories combined with this fact was undoubtedly sending a red flag to Google.

• While CBAC had put in quite a bit of effort to remove low quality links, there were still quite a few links left behind that we felt should have been removed.In particular, a massive proportion of the links were coming from blog comments. Again, the links were exact match. The comments were clearly, automated. We saw links coming from Japanese blogs, and containing English content. The data trail was overwhelming.

• Finally, we found several links coming from pages and sites that weren’t even tangentially related to the subject of their website. This isn’t always bad, but it’s only justifiable if the audience is huge. In this case, it was quite clear that these irrelevant links were coming from sites that were not sending traffic at all, let alone relevant traffic. This sends a surefire signal to Google, and places your site at great risk.