Just about everyone with a link or two, or two hundred, on their site has felt some impact from last spring’s Google Penguin update.
In the months since then SEOs have been scrambling to clean up their links and get their traffic back. But once you’ve done all that work, how long should you expect to wait before seeing your page rankings improve?
We posed that question to Dave Snyder, Bastian Grimm and Kay Schaefer on our recent SEO Roundtable: How iGaming Affiliates Can Recover from Google Penguin. Here’s what they had to say.
Wait it Out
Here’s something no one in this situation want; sit back and wait. Here’s Schaefer’s take on the subject:
Yes it’s possible (to recover from Penguin) but you have to wait until the next update. When will the next update be? We don’t know.
Dave Snyder’s prognosis is even worse. He recommends site masters prepare themselves for as much as a year’s worth of waiting:
If you’re on a rev share and you can ride out 12 months…just fix it, and let it sit. It will come back. All sites come back eventually.
If you’re on a CPA or just can’t hang that long, he recommends finding alternative revenue streams.
Keep Your Links to Yourself
For anyone considering filing a reconsideration request with Google, our panelists suggest keeping your links to yourselves. All three of them said that Google would use those requests against you in the future.
Schaefer said:
That’s the kind of thing they will use against you to tweak their algorithms. It’s kind of like gathering intelligence about links that aren’t so good, that they wouldn’t have found in the first place
Keep Calm
Another point our panelists agreed on was that keeping calm is essential. There’s really no reason to rush out and get rid of all your existing links. Snyder points out:
Shaving down links and and hoping it comes back is probably not the best strategy. Go out and find someone who can give you an educated view of your link portfolio. They can tell you what you should take down and what you should leave up.
Finally
Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to Penguin problems. The best SEOs can do is put on their white hats, make the fixes, and wait the next update.