Penguin 2.1 – Aftermath, Recovery and More!

Penguin 2.1, which was released by Google on the 4th of this month, has impacted around 1% of the queries. It’s worth mentioning that the extent of impact in this case has been a bit less than some of the previous updates. If you look at disruptions caused by Penguin 1.0 and 2.0, apparently, they affected 3.1% and 2.3% of the queries respectively. However, the latest update can’t and more importantly, shouldn’t be underestimated either, to say the least.

Click here for more info: A Layman’s Guide to Understanding the Google Hummingbird Algorithm

Aftermath

First things first; if your website has also come under fire, chances are that your traffic is heading south and there has been a dramatic change. Not sure if that’s actually happening? Keep tabs on your organic search engine traffic and that should get you a clear picture. Don’t forget to do this for at least a week or two. Secondly, there’s a possibility that the Google may have applied some manual penalties to your site. Again, how to figure out if that has happened? Well, you need to look at the Google Webmaster Tools notifications. That should give you your answer.

Recovery

If you didn’t take the update seriously while it was still in the nascent stage, it may be hard for you to recover, but the following steps might be of great help:

• Ask an expert to take a closer look at your inbound link profile. If they tag some of the backlinks as offending, wait no more and remove them at the earliest.

• Consider Google’s disavow tool to be your knight in shining armour here. Use it to your advantage and disavow the remaining links (the offending ones of course!).

More insights

It’s unlikely for Google to stop at Penguin 2.1. You may have been penalised this time, but at least you can play safe in the future. Simply make sure that you have the right kind of inbound links. That should suffice.