That Penguin
-
Without trying to rub salt into the wounds of anyone hit hard, on the flip-side did anyone get some good news.
We have one particular client that was effected in an immense positive way today, for the last four months we found it difficult to outrank one of their competitors ... but they have vanished of the face of the earth today, well Google's earth .. which meant our client moved up the SERP for a number of their key-phrases, which gave me a sense of immense delight.
I could see exactly what they where doing, not so natural link building, creating a lot of sub-directories, naming each index file by the key phrase and linking all their internal links, while disturbing all their backlinks form the same source to each index page ... I wondered of they stayed under the radar cause each term was a sub-directory almost.
No doubt they will be back, but not after a clean up and a restructure to their website
Anyway I digress, anyone else seen any major improvements
-
I lost one, but gained one. It was awesome to see that traffic spike back up after almost a year
-
Just to add my 2 cents. I have seen the same thing as a number of people reported. No major hit - unlike with Penguin 1.0 - but on my primary site I have seem a drop in 1-4 spots for my keywords across the board.
Luckily, this is massive hit we saw last year in Penguin 1.0. The odd thing is however (and I don't know if anybody else has seen this) is that my sites that were hit by Penguin 1.0 seem to have recovered a lot. Many are back on the first page. I had not touched them in over a year.
My primary site I have has most of its links from very high quality sites in education since it is our niche. Top universities like Stanford, Harvard, etc but we have also paid for some ads - no follow - on some related forums. The links are no-follow, but they seemed to be showing up as links in Google Webmaster tools. My guess is that Google did not punish my site per-se, it simply stopped counting those links which should not have been counted in the first place.
If this is the extent of Penguin 2.0 it was not too bad for me. Nothing that can't be recovered from in a month of 2 of good SEO, and these kinds of fluctuations are to be expected. Of course if the roll out is still going on and the SERP shifts drastically again I may change my tune.
Good luck to everybody as we wait for the algo to finish its work.
-
haha It was about 9 am when I replied! I hope not too many people are headed to the bar at that hour.
(But tonight? Yes, tonight I'm going to party like a rockstar, party like a rockstar!)
-
Most happy people are heading out for beers.
They will not be posting here.
-
I agree that it's active SEOers that appear to be hit, I have a few drops in a couple of rankings on client websites but nothing major. There seems to be some really odd results too which I wouldn't rate as good quality but local results but not in Google+ Local. My own personal site which I do very little work on has done well but I think this is also due to other sites losing rankings rather than my excellent strategy!!
-
Thank you! I know most people who have posted so far are the ones who aren't happy but I think it's important we know that for every site that moves down, someone moved up and is pleased with the change. We try to do everything "by the book" but since the book doesn't exist, just do what we think is best - and it seems to work, though a bit slowly sometimes.
-
Wow, that's great news ....Congrats
-
Yes, THANKFULLY I got good news. I had a client come to me after losing 98% of their traffic in a 2 day period after Penguin 1. We have been fighting a losing battle since including disavowing old spam links, removing links, adding new and relevant links and citations, redoing some of the on-page work, etc. NOTHING has moved the needle.
Finally, yesterday, nearly all of their main keywords jumped from what Analytics said was "Average Position 400" to a few on page 1, 2, 3, lots on 5 and 6 and a lot in the top 100. Most of their keywords have recovered including ALL their most important ones. Now we have work to do but at least we know where we're at and we're not flailing in dark.
This was the client I've had the single most trouble ranking in my business' history so I'm having a really good day.
-
I have taken a slight hit position 1 to position 2 or 5 on keywords I was strong on... It seems that some of my competitors sites which are crap seem to have gained. It seems the active SEO ers have had a hit... However I think I will bounce back...
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
-
SEO Audit after Penguin 2.1 what are you guys seeing? this is my thougts
We have looked at around 2000 sites since Penguin 2.1 launched a few weeks back. These include our customers and their own competitors site. We are going through all the data which is obviously going to take some time. Hopefully we will publish a report on our findings as we are happy to share. What I currently see in my early analysis is Roughly 70% of sites tested have 0% exact match Anchor Text for their money keywords. The other 30% have less than 5% exact match Anchor Text. The quality of the links is often still poor to the sites ranking on page 1. The content surrounding the links is only about 10-15% of the time related to the money keywords. The loading time of the sites ranking seems to not matter, we encountered a lot of slow sites. Design and usability of the site was not important. We are not seeing much impact via Social media, a lot of these sites are small business Less than 10% of sites on page 1 had a Google+ account More than 40% of page 1 sites had Facebook profiles. More than 80% of the sites ranking on page 1 had less than 100 links to the landing page that ranked What are your opinions of helping to recover if hit by the above??? Q) If you have too high an anchor text percentage and have been hit or may get hit in the future would you. a) create some more high quality links with more varied anchor text, ie Click here, brand name etc b) not create any more links just remove the links you have to dilute the anchor text c) change the anchor text on links you are able to These figures are a work in progress so data will change just wanting to share our early findings and try to get a good conversation going. What are you guys seeing?
Algorithm Updates | | tempowebdesign0 -
Recent Rank drop after Penguin 2.1?
Recently, a lot of pages from our website have moved from page one or ranking number one, to page ten or something. We got a manual penalty message from Google Team, we removed a lot of unnatural links pointing to our pages and disavowed the rest. This got the penalty removed and we got a message from Google confirming the same. Before the manual penalty we were getting about 140,000 visits per day, after the penalty about 80,000. However, after Hummingbird or Penguin 2.1 all our ranks have vanished. We are nowhere in Google for our primary keywords and we getting like 40,000 visits per day. Most are direct or from sources other than Google. We had another look at the links we disavowed, a list of about 11000 domains, we found about 3000 domains to be good. We fixed the disavow file about one week back, but no changes in traffic since. We checking the domains again to see if we have missed more good domains in there; yes, we have. There are still a very few good domains in there. But we are not touching the disavow list; waiting to see the change for the last submitted. We have a dedicated user base, good liking on Facebook, all the stats in Analytics speak good, about 40% repeat visits about 30% direct. About 3000 people search for the site using our brand name as reported in Analytics. I doubt the on-page optimization, the pages could be over-optimized. But the on-page factors for other pages ranking for the keywords are similar. The keyword density is similar, so are the usage of headings and stuff. We have not made any recent changes to these on-page patterns. Our team is not able to figure out what could have gone wrong.
Algorithm Updates | | Develop410 -
Have I been Hit by a Penguin? No Warning in Webmaster / Some Pages still Rank
Hi all, I have recently signed up to MOZ as I have seen a large drop in the turnover of a site I work with as well as a slump in visitors. I know part of this slump is the transition from google product search from being free to paid and chewing through our adwords budget quicker. The other part though seems a little more tricky, I have always been under the impression from reading online that an algorithm update would see a site destroyed for most terms and a notification generated in webmaster tools, however the site still seems to still rank for some terms, others however it has fallen off the face of the earth for. As you can see in the attachment webmaster tools is showing much decreased visibility, and MOZ agrees with this. Key terms that have lost rank have done so by around 4-10 positions. The content on the site has all been hand written by myself, however some of the pages are a little "stale" so I am currently running through re-writing every product page on the site (1000 products or so) all my product pages grade a minimum B with 99% A on the Moz page grader. I am keeping my fingers crossed that fresh content should assist in getting google interested again? However my real questions is, Is this Penguin? or is this just stale content? dmDdMr5.jpg pYkzck0.jpg 9f4mgM9.jpg
Algorithm Updates | | speedingorange1 -
After penguin 2.0, 20-25% drop sitewide, no google unatural links message, What could be causing it?
Hi,Since Penguin 2.0 we've taken a 20-25% knock but not recieved an unatural link message from Google. After sending a bunch of removal requests, I decided to submit a disavow file anyway two weeks ago and tried to make sure I rooted out some links that were built way back when our site started and link building best practice was a bit shadier. Analysis of our backlink profile points to about 40-50% links coming from general directories, wondering if perhaps their weight has been adjusted and this is why the drop occured? Having said that we have some high quality links from government sources and highly trusted sites so not too spammy. Can anyone shed some light or offer suggestions? Thanx
Algorithm Updates | | Mulith0 -
Penguin 2.0 - Any signs yet?
I'm waiting, probing and analyzing and haven't seen any signs of a Penguin change. I am seeing some of my head terms bounce around the last couple of days. Mostly bouncing up and then back down again. I'm not sure if these are signs of an algo change starting, and working through Google's servers. Has anyone seen anything yet?
Algorithm Updates | | tdawson090 -
What Does Penguin Look Like Long Term in Analytics?
Happy New Year Moz'ers! Our agency has recently had a number of new clients who were hit by the Penguin updates. These sites came to us over the last two months so they've been dealing with Penguin for months. Looking at Google Analytics for each client, I'm seeing a lot of the same patterns - mostly a large first drop in traffic after the update and then a long, steady decline in organic traffic over the months that follow. I have seasonal factors for traffic dips for each client but I'm curious as to what other Moz'ers are finding long term. Do you see a large traffic drop followed by a sustained plateau? Do you see a large traffic drop followed by a long, slow decrease over the weeks or months that follow? Do you see something else? Thanks! <jason @sonray=""></jason>
Algorithm Updates | | DragonSearch0 -
How does Google treat anchor tags on badges after penguin update?
We have a website builder that creates sites in sub-domains (i.e. yoursite.breezi.com) on every site we have included a badge that has anchor text and an image. My question is given the fact that we will include this on many if not most of the sites created inside our builder how will google treat backlinks with the same anchor tag/text from non relevant sites after the penguin update? I am concerned about the backlinks from non-theme related sites and it's SEO implications. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | breezi0 -
How to Link a Network of Sites w/o Penguin Penalties (header links)
I work for a network of sites that offer up country exclusive content. The content for the US will be different than Canada, Australia, Uk, etc.… but with the same subjects. Now to make navigation easy we have included in the header of every page a drop down that has links to the other countries, like what most of you do with facebook/twitter buttons. Now every page on every site has the same link, with the same anchor text. Example: Penguins in Canada Penguins in Australia Penguins in the USA Because every page of every site has the same links (it's in the header) the "links containing this anchor text" ratio is through the roof in Open Site Explorer. Do you think this would be a reason for penguin penalization? If you think this would hurt you, what would you suggest? no follow links? Remove the links entirely and create a single page of links? other suggestions?
Algorithm Updates | | BeTheBoss0