Penguin Update Seems To Benefit Wikipedia Etc
-
I was updating product info on my site which was apparently hammered by Penguin. As I was updating I was "Googling" the products. I noticed that every single product I carry, Wikipedia held the #1 position in search results.
Anyone else noticing this? I previously held the number 1 position on 2 of my products but I was knocked down to 60+...
-
Yeah no kidding! I just noticed that on a search term where I previously ranked #1 that yourdomain.com now ranks above me for a term that has NOTHING to do with yourdomain.com which is a parking like page. Why that would show up on page one of google and my site gets kicked to #62 I have no idea!
-
Pretty much the same here! Now we know to which company all the wikipedia donations are going to...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Subtle line of asking links for money/service/benefits
Hello here, I am putting down a link building strategy according to the latest "good practices" and Google recommendations, but I find myself often confused. For example, I'd like to implement the technique suggested by Rand on his article below: https://moz.com/blog/headsmacking-tip-1-link-requests-in-order-confirmation-emails But if you look at the comments, a user suggests to "ask for links in exchange of discounts", and everyone there applaud him for the idea (Rand included). But, wait a second... am I the only one realizing that now days Google discourage to ask for links for "money, services, or any other kind of 'offered' benefit"? So.. where to draw the line here? Here are other examples that I am not sure are "safe" in link building: 1. Ask for links in exchange of a free Membership on a site (where usually a Membership is sold for a price) 2. Ask for links in exchange of exposure (isn't this a sort of "link exchange"?) 3. Ask for link in exchange of "anything else you can think of", even if necessarily doesn't involve money (i.e. for a "certified site badge", for a free e-book, or anything else) I'd really like to know your thoughts on this very sensitive issue. Thank you in advance to anyone for helping me to understand.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | fablau1 -
Killed by penguin 3
So with the update to penguin 3.0 last week we notice that some clients have been significantly hit by the update. How do we rectify the situation for the poor links that are on the site. We have used open site explorer and Google webmaster to try and identify which are the bad links to try and remove. Now we can spot that some inbound links are from directories that may be perceived as low value/spam, but could not be sure what is affecting the ranking. The vast majority of these links are historical prior to inheriting this client recently and so do not have any logins to remove the links (if there are logins). These appear to be placed by teams outsourced in India. We would suspect that no site owner would spend the time removing links from the site any way. How do we recover from the penguin hit. Is it just a case of trying to identify ones that we suspect could be perceived as spam and ask for these to be disavowed by Google? Do we contact all the sites to ask them to be removed and/or do we just push ahead with more engaging white hat methods of social SEO? Are we likely to recover in the short term or be permanently hit. The site is for a small business with no more than 800 monthly hits so this fall from grace off very good front page positions is going to hit our client very hard even if the sins are from a previous business. Any thoughts and suggestions PLEASE HELP
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smartcow0 -
11 000 links from 2 blogs + Many bad links = Penguin 2.0\. What is the real cause?
Hello, A website has : 1/ 8000 inbound links from 1 blog and 3000 from another one. They are clean and good blogs, all links are NOT marked as no-follow. 2/ Many bad links from directories that have been unindexed or penalized by Google On the 22nd of May, the website got hurt by Penguin 2.0. The link profile contains many directories and articles. The priority we had so far was unindexing the bad links, however shall we no-follow the blog links as well? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | antoine.brunel0 -
The purpose of these Algo updates: To more harshly push eCommerce sites toward PPC and enable normal blogs/forums toward reclaiming organic search positions?
Hi everyone, This is my first post here, and absolutely loving the site and the services. Just a quick background, I have dabbled in SEO in the past, and have been reading up over the last few months and am amazed at the speed at which things are changing. I currently have a few clients that I am doing some SEO work for 2 of them, and have had an ecommerce site enquire about SEO services. They are a medium sized oak furniture ecommerce site. From all the major changes..the devaluing of spam links, link networks, penalization of overuse of exact match anchor text and the overall encouraging of earned links (often via content marketing) over built links, adding to this the (not provided) section in Google Analytics, and the increasing screen real estate that PPC is getting over organic search...all points to me thinking on major thing..... That the search engine is trying to push eCommerce sites and sites that sell stuff harder toward using PPC and paid advertising and allowing the blogs/forums and informational sites to more easily reclaim the organic part of the search results again. The above is elaborated on a bit more below.. POINT 1 Firstly as built links (article submission, press releases, info graphic submission, web 2.0 link building ect) rapidly lose their effectiveness, and as Google starts to place more emphasis on sites earning links instead - by producing amazing interesting and unique content that people want to link to. The fact remains that surely Google is aware that it is much harder for eCommerce sites to produce a constant stream of interesting link worthy content around their niche (especially if its a niche that not an awful lot could be written about). Although earning links is not impossible for eCommerce sites, for a lot of them it is more difficult because creating link worthy content is not what eCommerce sites were originally intended for. Whereas standard blogs and forums were built for that exact purpose. Therefore the search engines must know that it is a lot easier for normal blogs/forums to "earn" links through content, therefore leading to them reclaiming more of the organic search ranking for transaction and non transaction terms, and therefore forcing the eCommerce sites to adopt PPC more heavily. POINT 2 If we add to the mix the fact that for the terms most relevant to eCommerce sites, the search engine results page has a larger allocation of PPC ads than organic results (above the fold), and that Google has limited the amount of data that sites can see in terms of which keywords people are using to arrive on their sites, which effects eCommerce sites more - as it makes it harder for them to see which keywords are resulting in sales. Then this provides further evidence that Google is trying to back eCommerce sites into a corner by making it more difficult for them to make sense of and track sales from organic results in comparison to with PPC, where data is still plentiful. Conclusion Are the above just over exaggerations? Can most eCommerce sites still keep achieving a good percentage of sales from organic search despite the above? if so, what do the more niche eCommerce sites do to "earn" links when content topics are thin and unique outreach destinations can be exhausted quickly. Do they accept the fact that the are in the business of selling things, so should be paying for their traffic as opposed to normal blogs/forums which are not. Or is there still a place for them to get even more creative with content and acquire earned links..? And finally, is the concentration on earned links more overplayed than it actually is? Id really appreciate your thoughts on this..
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Vetting Link Opportunties that are Penguin Safe
I am looking to go after sites that are, and will never be, affected by Penguin/Panda updates. Is there a tool or a general rule of thumb on how to avoid such sites? Is there a method anyone is currently using to get good natural links post Penguin 2.0?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dsinger0 -
Are Links from blogs with person using keyword anchor text a Penguin 2.0 issue?
Hello, I am continuing a complete clean up of a clients link profile and would like to know if Penguin is against links from blogs with the user including keywords as anchor text? So far I have been attempting to get them removed before I go for a disavow. An example would be the work clothing comment at the bottom of: http://www.fashionstyleyou.co.uk/beat-the-caffeine-rush.html/comment-page-1 I am also questioning if we should keep any link directories, so far I have been ruthless, but worry I will be losing a hell of a lot of links. For example I have kept the following: http://www.business-directory-uk.co.uk//clothing.htm Your comments are welcomed!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
What's the right way to gain the benefits of an EMD but avoid cramming the title?
Hi Guys, Say I'm (completely hypothetically) building weddingvenuesnewyork.com and right now I'm organizing the tags for each page. What's the best layout so that I can optimize for "wedding venues new york" as much as possible without it becoming spammy. Right now I'm looking at something like "Wedding Venues New York: Wedding Receptions and Ceremony Venues" for the title.. To get other strong keywords in there too. Is there a better layout/structure?.. And is having the first words of the title on the homepage the same as the domain name going to strengthen the ranking for that term, or look spammy to Google and be a bad move? This is a new site being built
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
EMD with 3.3million broad match searches got hit hard by Panda/Penguin
k, so I run an ecommerce website with a kick ass domain name. 1 keyword (plural)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SwissNinja
3.3 million broad match searches (local monthly)
3.2 million phrase match
100k exact match beginning of march I got a warning in GWT about unnatural links. I feel pretty certain its a result of an ex-employee using an ALN listing service to drip spun article links on splogs. This was done also for another site of mine, which received the same warning, except bounced back much sooner (from #3 for EMD w/ 100k broad, 60k phrase and 12k exact, singular keyword phrase) I did file reinclusion on the 2nd (smaller) domain. Received unnatural warning on 4/13 and sent reconsideration on 5/1 (tune of letter is "I have no clue what is up, I paid someone $50 and now Im banned) As of this morning, I am not ranking for any of my terms (had boucned back on main keyword to spot #30 after being pushed down from #4) now back to the interesting site....
this other domain was bouncing between 8-12 for main keyword (EMD) before we used ALN.
Once we got warning, we did nothing. Once rankings started to fall,we filed reinclusion request...rankings fell more, and filed another more robustly written request (got denials within 1 week after each request)until about 20 days ago when we fell off of the face of the earth. 1- should I take this as some sort of sandbox? We are still indexed, and are #1 for a search on our domain name. Also still #1 in bing (big deal) 2- I've done a detailed analysis of every link they provide in GWT. reached out to whatever splog people I could get in touch with asking them to remove articles. I was going to file another request if I didn't reappear after 31 days after I fell off completely. Am I wasting my time? there is no doubt that sabatoge could be committed by competition by blasting them with spam links (previously I believed these would just be ignored by google to prevent sabatoge from becoming part of the job for most SEOs) Laugh at me, gasp in horror with me, or offer some advice... I'm open to chat and would love someone to tell me about a legit solution to this prob if they got one thanks!0