Penguin 2.0 Recovery Overview: What Links Don't Work Anymore?

Penguin 2.0 was rolled out on May 22nd, leading to countless websites losing traffic, visibility, and rankings. However, if you read the tea leaves, you knew that Penguin 2.0 was an inevitability.
The main stump speech Matt Cutts had been trumpeting lately has been about the need for quality links, and the potential need to remove bad backlinks.
In fact, Cutts has thrown out his own hyperbole when discussing it, stating that disavows and link removals need to be done with a “machete”, and not with a “fine-toothed comb” or “scalpel.”
Cutts’ full statement:
“Hmm. One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the “domain:” operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.”
It’s all or nothing here, Google does not give you points for effort. If you’ve been affected by this, in a lot of ways it’s like you’ve been bitten by a zombie. Cutting off a finger won’t help curb the infection, you gotta lose the arm, and hope it doesn’t spread. That’s zombie-movie, and disavow, 101.
Now, before you go all Danny Trejo on your back-link catalog for your Penguin 2.0 recovery, bare in mind these 4 tips to help you determine what is good and bad for your site.
1. Break Out the Big Knife
If your website got smacked by Penguin, it was not because of a small issue. Like Cutts said, you shouldn’t be performing surgery, anything that looks suspicious needs to be removed ASAP.
2. Guarantees Aren’t Guaranteed
Nothing in SEO is a bona fide certainty, especially with Google. There are no guarantees that you’ll have a full Penguin 2.0 recovery when it comes to link removal. It’s not all doom and gloom though. At Boomtown, we’ve done countless successful link removal campaigns, and pulled clients out of algorithmic penalties numerous times. So, yes, provided enough energy, time and industry knowledge, recovery is almost always possible. It’s just never a guarantee.
3. The Dawning of a Daunting Task
Link removal is neither easy or quick. In fact, it can be downright grueling. To do this, you need to follow Google’s standards, that boil down to 4 sub-steps:
A. Full Backlink Catalog Analysis
B. Contact is Key
C. The Follow-up
D. Disavow Time
E. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat
4. New Links are Vital
Link building is sometimes bypassed, paused, or simply overlooked, due to link removal tunnel vision. It shouldn’t be. If you’re interested in learning about What Links Still Work Post-Penguin 2.0 and What will Work Going Forward? Click the link to continue to part 2 of our discussion on Penguin 2.0 recovery.