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Penguin 3.0 started rolling out late Friday night, October 17th, and will continue to do so for next few weeks on a worldwide basis. It impacts less than 1% of English queries but may have a greater impact in other languages, but it is only a refresh, no new signals have been added.

It helps sites recover from previous Penguin updates that fixed their link profile, and demotes sites that have a bad link profile. Pierre Far from Google confirmed the update's roll-out a couple of weeks ago:

I never forget the day, April 24^th 2012, Google rolls out the Penguin update which became to be known as the new age in SEO; a dark age for black-hat SEO’s around the globe, but which also made the lives of the unlucky few ethical SEO’s who had to clean up the mess of clients who had already been penalized by their previous black-hat SEO agencies work.

Google understood this and on the 16^th of October 2012 they officially announced the release of their Disavow Tool. The instructions were simple, “If you’ve been notified of a manual spam action based on “unnatural links” pointing to your site, this tool can help you address the issue. If you haven’t gotten this notification, this tool generally isn’t something you need to worry about.” The words to pay attention to here are “If you haven’t gotten this notification, this tool generally isn’t something you need to worry about.” This made things tricky, because Penguin penalized your website in two very different ways:

·  Manual Penalty – This was when you got the notification and was like a yellow card. If you got this notification you could upload a disavow request and with some good behavior you would still be in the game.

·  Algorithmic Penalty – This was when you didn’t get the notification and was like a red card. This was where you had no way of knowing you were penalized other than seeing a sharp drop in rankings and organic traffic; you were out of the game.

If you had the latter, you have my sympathy. I personally have taken on multiple clients who had come to me as a result of being algorithmically penalized and I know the recovery process can be a daunting procedure with a high fail rate, without any way of getting back into previous rankings even if you did everything Google had told you to do. But don’t panic, because due to my experience in solving these issues for my clients, I have some great methods that I can share with you to speed up and ‘maneuver’ your way out of an algorithmic penalty. If you suspect you have an algorithmic penalty what you need to do is:

Step 1 – Backlink Audit, because although you might have dropped in rankings and your organic traffic has plummeted, you need to identify the cause and be 100% sure you have been algorithmically penalized. To do this audit you will need access to reliable tools, such as Majestic SEO or Moz’s Open Site Explorer, as well as have access to Google Webmaster Tools for the website you are working on. Once you have access to one of these two tools and GWMT the things you will need to be reviewing are:

·  Link sources and identifying what kind of websites are linking back to your website. Things to look out for here are directory links, article links, large amounts of unrelated links, links from malicious websites, site-wide links and links from link-farms (which can be identified by reviewing inbound ip addresses). If there are a disproportionate amount of these links and you plummeted following a Penguin release without any sort of notification, there is a good chance your website has been algorithmically penalized. 

· Review and identify over-optimized anchor text links, because the odds are if you had a shady SEO building spammy links, they would have most certainly over-used or over-targeted specific terms. By sorting and listing inbound links by anchor text you can quickly look for similar keywords and when you spot a large number of links which contain a specific (usually competitive) anchor text, there is a good chance the source of these links have somewhat participated in your algorithmic penalty.

·  Geographical locations of your links, as in most cases if your business is based in Dubai, you are likely to see a large number of inbound links from UAE and potentially the US, because most websites globally are still hosted from the United States. If you start seeing large amounts of links from places like, Pakistan, Russia or India (which are countries known for link farming) I would start worrying and looking further into these links.

Step 2 – Once you are absolutely sure that you have a penalty, do what is recommended and upload a disavow request. However, as mentioned earlier, disavowing alone does not fix the problem. What you also need to do is look for opportunities to establish a new path and start over again. But beware as this may not always be feasible.

The method I have used in the past which has always worked, and it really helps if you have a local business with a generic top level domain (gTLD) is to switch to a local top level domain. Most of the timeclients choose to have .COM or .ORG domain even if their business is targeting users in UAE or any other specific country, and these scenarios present an amazing opportunity to start from fresh, as all you have to do is switch from a gTLD to a ccTLD (country code top level domain) or even switch between gTLD’s, i.e. from a .COM to a .ORG. However, one must remember that you are essentially starting from scratch, but it does mean you can keep your business name and start ranking again.

NOTE: this will also work vice versa, so if you have a ccTLD you could switch to a gTLD, but one thing you have to remember is that you have to ‘kill off’ any association between the top level domains.

Step 3 – Once the switch is complete you now need to direct old traffic, as the odds are you still have a large number of users who have bookmarked or continue to enter your old URL directly into their browsers. But how do you direct users from one URL to another without passing a 301 or 302 redirect (which both are known to pass a penalty)? This is where JavaScript becomes one of my favorite coding technologies, because of its ability to redirect users without passing bots through. However this technique is considered to be black-hat, therefore you need to ensure you block bots by placing the <meta > code within the head of your old page where you are placing the JavaScript redirect.

The method above is not a recovery, but more a maneuver around a Penguin penalty and may not be the most ideal solution for all campaigns, so if you are one of the unlucky SEO’s who had to deal with a penalized website and then was lucky enough to recover in a way other than what’s mentioned above, please share your experience with us in the comments section.

Written by Ozal Ergen, SEO Manager at iProspect MENA