In 2012, I built a tiny niche website about corn shellers as an experiment. It ranked quickly, made money, and then got absolutely hammered by a Google update. The whole saga turned into one of the most useful case studies I have ever created about what happens when Google penalizes your site and what you can learn from it.
The Setup: A Quick and Dirty Niche Site
The corn sheller site started as a test. My friend Josh Spaulding had a keyword research tool that identified “corn sheller” as an easy-to-rank, money-generating keyword. I did not even know what a corn sheller was, but I built a site in one night just to demonstrate how the tool worked.
Here is where I made my mistake: instead of using my normal site-building process, I threw a couple hundred blog network backlinks at the site with almost no variation in anchor text. It was a shortcut, and I knew it at the time. I did it specifically to see what would happen.
What happened was predictable. The site ranked beautifully. It climbed to over 100 visitors per day. It was making a few dollars daily with zero ongoing effort. And then Google identified the unnatural link profile and shut it down overnight. Traffic went to zero. Revenue went to zero.
What Google Caught and Why
The site failed on two specific points that the Penguin update was designed to catch:
- Single-source backlinks. All of the links came from blog networks. No social signals, no natural mentions, no diversity whatsoever.
- Over-optimized anchor text. Nearly every backlink used the exact same keyword phrases: “corn shellers” and “antique corn shellers.” At the time, research was showing that sites with more than 60 percent exact-match anchor text were getting flagged and penalized.
A natural link profile has enormous variety. People link to you with all kinds of anchor text: your brand name, generic phrases like “click here” or “this article,” partial keyword matches, and full URLs. When most of your backlinks use your exact target keyword, it is an obvious signal of manipulation.
The Attempted Recovery
After the penalty, I tried an experiment. I built about 500 directory backlinks to the site. Directory links tend to have varied, somewhat random anchor text because of how directory listings work. The idea was to dilute the over-optimized anchor text ratio with more natural-looking links.
It partially worked. The site popped back up in the rankings for about a week or two before settling back down. My theory was that Google was promoting the site into the rankings temporarily, measuring user engagement signals like time on page and bounce rate, and then making a decision about whether to keep it there. This behavior, sometimes called the Google Dance, is common with sites recovering from penalties.
Lessons from the Penalty
The corn sheller experiment taught me several lessons that apply to any site recovery:
- Never use a single source for backlinks. Diversify across social platforms, guest posts, directory listings, natural mentions, and every other legitimate source you can find.
- Vary your anchor text aggressively. Your target keyword should be a minority of your total anchor text. Mix in brand mentions, generic phrases, URLs, and related keyword variations.
- Build sites you would be proud of. The corn sheller site had good content, but its link profile was entirely artificial. If the site had earned natural links through genuinely helpful content, it would have survived the update.
- Do not panic when updates hit. Google updates come and go constantly. Sites get hit and recover. The worst thing you can do is make drastic changes out of panic.
- Correlation does not equal causation. As an engineer, I have to point out that just because the site recovered after I built directory links does not prove the directory links caused the recovery. It is my best guess, but disciplined thinking requires acknowledging uncertainty.
The Bigger Picture
This experience reinforced something Jonathan Leger said that I have never forgotten: “Google does not care about your business.” That is not cynicism. It is just reality. Google's job is to provide the best search results, period. They do not factor in whether their algorithm changes destroy your income.
The only reliable defense against Google updates is to build sites that genuinely deserve to rank. Great content, natural link profiles, real value for visitors. Everything else is gambling, and eventually the house always wins.
Wow what a nose dive. Sucks. Looking forward to your next podcast Mark!
@cloudklein Thanks. Should be tonight (of course I said that last night too. Been pretty busy.
What I’ve noticed more than anything lately is that the latest Google updates are very “anchor text” based. I saw shifts in rankings on aggressively targeted keywords while the same page that was linked to still ranked high for other terms.
Keep in mind the page linked to was the same…..so it has the same backlinks, page authority, etc….it’s just that it dropped for aggressively targeted keywords.
I know this isn’t the only thing going on, though, and different sites are seeing different issues but that’s something consistent I’ve seen.
My suggestion is to try and get some higher quality links with varied anchor text…and figure out ways to get social shares…I know, easier said than done, right? 😉
@ShaneEubanks I agree with you — I saw a post over at MicroSiteMasters that correlates 60% matching anchor text (money keyword anchortext matching) to lost ranking. Sites with less than 60% matching anchors were not impacted. Correlation is not causation, but that is pretty strong anecdotal evidence.
Hard to get real backlinks to a site on corn shellers. LOL
You may not be whining, but I am. Its a crappy update…and penalized many of my most populat and most naturally-linked sites. The evidence is that Google is selling out and preferring the big dogs whether or not the sites are relevant. Not to mention that I received an invalid clicks warning overnight.
I hate to hear that @chazzbro — especially that part about invalid clicks. That was the first thing that happend to me — my account was banned 2 weeks later with no additional warning or communication.
@masonworld the worst part is..i DID click on one of my own ads. But only to get the URL to block an advertiser I didnt like. 9 years in the program…and I get treated like a criminal. *sigh*
@chazzbro I have heard if you report that to Google (if that is really their issue) that reporting helps. However, I am having a hard time believing one click caused them to email you.
I hate to hear that @chazzbro — especially that part about invalid clicks. That was the first thing that happend to me — my account was banned 2 weeks later with no additional warning or communication. I really REALLY hope that does not happen to you.
My cross stitch site has been dropping in traffic recently and it irks me, over the past 3 months I’ve gradually dropped for all of my best keywords. And I have a natural linking profile on that site, it’s nearly 10 years old. Some days I think Google just doesn’t like me.
Hey Mark, that’s rough… I’ve been hurt myself, and my site hasn’t used many “tricks” like blog networks at all. My traffic was at just under 3000 visitors per day and then suddenly dropped to under 1000. My site is buried on the second page for my main keyword and not at all for others.
This whole year things like this have been going on seems like.
Can you post any tips and tricks on how to come back after your site got hit? Because mine was hit too and now my site was buried waay back in the SERPs.
Matt Cutts and SEOMoz have some good advice on recovering from Penguin. It really a matter of cleaning up after bad links and low quality content.