Case of website recovery after penguine

[convergent]

So what is Penguin first?

From SeoMoz:
On April 24, 2012, Google announced "Another Step to Reward High Quality Sites", an algorithm change aimed at fighting against webspam. The algorithm change was first called "The Webspam Algorithm" but eventually began to go by the name of "Penguin". This algorithm severely affected sites that had widespread keyword stuffing and participation in link schemes.

Client came to me with "Domain" which was obviously penalized by Penguine. And that was the problem i was to solve

To understand it was Penguin i looked the ranking history of several high frequently asked keywords, on which domain was ever in top. 2 of them were seriously penalized.

At the time I was looking for 3 possible problems:

1. Duplicated content made by competitors
I checked the SERP for whole phrases and nothing was found - no duplicated content
2. Google changes whole algorithm for the niche
Competitors were still in top and keyword density with other off-page params were almost the same 
3. Penguin
Penalty was near the date of Penguin update when keywords went out from 100. Its clear that if only part of website was penalized than we can't say the problem is about the whole "Domain". It was definitely Penguin

How to recover from it? Penguin is algorithm and it counts the appropriate outbound params for making decision. I Looked ahrefs.com stats for the pages with penalized keywords. Too many unnatural links with the same anchor list detected. There are 2 ways to escape from it: build more links with other anchors or to disavow links in webmaster tool.
I chose the both.

Anchor list was mixed with brandname to make 50% of the whole number, used pointless words like "company", "website", "here" and so on. It was about 70% of the whole. Some good relevant press-releases written with theese anchors and were published in relevant resourses. All links were enforced by bot clicking.
At the same time i disavowed several not valuable links and stopped paying for temporary links a bit later.
Also I used to write some relevant posts in social media and got alive transfers from it to the penalized pages.

All the works were made in 2 months period. After next Penguine update problem was fixed.

Conclusion:
The solution is not cheap really but it was worth the business. The best way to be more accurate in getting anchor list and promote the website with very slow and proven tactics. Recovering is highload and expensive thing!

[amardeep]

That's great you helped your client to being recovered from Penguin. I have a question here, why you didn't try to remove bad links manually before going to submit a links disavow request. Yes, Google has given us a tool to disavow our links but what if there would be no Google. My point is that Google is not only the search engine we should look upon for our SEO efforts. I think you had to made every efforts to clean-up their link profile and select only those link you had no control over them for links disavowing request. Search engines want us to make full efforts to clean-up your link profile to get rid of future updates rather than just rely upon a disavow tool.

[convergent]

That's great you helped your client to being recovered from Penguin. I have a question here, why you didn't try to remove bad links manually before going to submit a links disavow request. Yes, Google has given us a tool to disavow our links but what if there would be no Google. My point is that Google is not only the search engine we should look upon for our SEO efforts. I think you had to made every efforts to clean-up their link profile and select only those link you had no control over them for links disavowing request. Search engines want us to make full efforts to clean-up your link profile to get rid of future updates rather than just rely upon a disavow tool.

donors were not so bad really. Better use them with other backlinks that will give nice result. Now anchor list is quite natural and wide.
more problem is that links were added before me. Some of them by silly directory submission, forum spam etc. So it was impossible to delete them all. Correcting this was the best solution

[Roger Dave]

Firstly congratulations for the recovery and thanks a lot for sharing your own experience on Penguin recovery. Penguin recovery is really very hard and it may takes year long to do so.

[justinguru]

well! what should said seem to make sound to me. However, that's just what you are doing. How about the result? you got back ranking ton top? or do you have see any good effect after you do all that things? Peguin 2.0 just update on May 22. So, that's not enough 2 months for you to check out the real result.
any way, thanks for nice share !

[convergent]

well! what should said seem to make sound to me. However, that's just what you are doing. How about the result? you got back ranking ton top? or do you have see any good effect after you do all that things? Peguin 2.0 just update on May 22. So, that's not enough 2 months for you to check out the real result.
any way, thanks for nice share !

It wasn't about Penguine 2.0