Many webmasters hit by the Google Penguin update are still at a loss in the recovery process. In cases where they built the links themselves, they might have some success in removing the links. Not all webmasters respond and, in some cases, sites where the links reside might not even provide contact information. Sometimes no matter how much you remove, it’s still not enough. There are webmasters who have bought new domains and moved the content, completely starting over from scratch. To some extent, you can do some moving around of content within a website and see improvements.
Onsite Content Movement
Obviously, you only have one home page, so you can’t change the url. The home page will likely require the most effort to remove the bad links. You can do something about other pages on your website. Let’s say you have a 3 tier page with a lot of poor quality links pointing to it. You can delete that page, making It a 404 and alleviating the website of those back links. Take the same content and create a new url on the website and then the page is free of bad links.
Process
Use a tool like Seomoz’s Open Site Explorer to pull up the back link list for the page in question before you delete it. Identify which links you do want to keep and create a list of those.
First, delete the page you want to move, and then create the new page. Update all internal site links to go to the new page. Now, you can use the list of good quality links you created to either update the links yourself or to request the owners of those websites to update the link to the correct page.
If you can achieve recovery without moving the page, I suggest you try to do that first. This is an option to try when you have been unsucessful in doing so.
Home Page
You can’t move your home page content. You can combine your efforts to remove poor quality links with an effort to build high quality links. While you are waiting for updates to come along and recognize your poor link quality removal effort, dilute them with links containing natural anchor text, brand name anchor text, and straight html links of the home page url.
Changing Domains
Some webmasters give up and move all their content to new domains. If you’re building a business and not a fly-by-night disposable website, that’s not the smartest thing to do. Your existing domain is older and, even though hit by Penguin, will have more domain authority and trust with the search engines than one that starts from scratch.
Theresa Happe works with BuyDomains.com where you can find available domain names for sale.
