Community Discussion: What changes are you seeing as a result of Penguin 4.0?
-
We've been waiting on the latest Penguin rollout so long it would have been appropriate for Google to launch it with a creepy meme titled "I'm baaack." But now that it's here, what changes are you seeing to the websites you monitor or manage?
We'd very much enjoy hearing you stories, thoughts and proposed courses of action below in the comments.
If you need to get up to speed on Penguin 4.0, Dr. Pete's post, Penguin 4.0: Was it Worth the Wait?, is a great place to start, as is the latest Whiteboard Friday by Rand: Penguin 4.0: How the Real-Time Penguin-in-the-Core-Alg Model Changes SEO.
RS
-
We track 35 sites carefully and we are yet to find any evidence that we can attribute to the penguin update. We have asked around and have not yet come across anyone who has been impacted. We are keen to hear from anyone with a clear and obvious impact.
-
Thanks. I didn't know about MozCast, so it is great to learn of that new tool.
-
Hi Liz,
Sorry to hear about the drop. It seems a new update happened yesterday as it is shown in the MozCast Although it is no possible to say if it was Penguin or other, with so little data. -
Thanks for the reply! Things had been steady until last week when we had a very nice gain out of nowhere and then this week where we are now dropped below where we were 2 months ago, eliminating any incremental gains and of course the big gain from last week. Hoping that things will settle down...
-
I've seen individual keywords leap +50 and then go back down again between September 1 and now. I think things have finally settled out. We also lost some Feature positions that have since recovered during that time. I know in my client's niche most of the competitors are relying on static content and directories. So, I am now assuming that all has settled out, sites have been crawled and we will see more consistency in our results.
In the past 3 weeks, I have seen very rapid responsiveness to targeting new keywords. I tweaked a few older blog articles to add a few words and uploaded new articles during that time. My ranking for the added keywords showed up on the next weekly results. It makes for a nice study, but if any of the competition starts adding content, then all bets are off.
-
I'm just seeing it this morning, so certainly more digging will be necessary. Yeah, the drop isn't super drastic, but enough to make me concerned.
-
Little drop? - you need to dig deeper into what pages are dropping, then action on those. Maybe a couple pages got hit by nasty-penguins, you never know.
-
I may be seeing some Penguin today. We've been seeing slow improvement on the SERPs for about 2 months now, with a nice spike last week. The work for thsi site is on the new side, slowly implementing Moz recommendations, a few quality links have been built and a blog has been added (fresh unique content weekly), so it seemed like this was the natural upward progression.
This morning, all of our improvement is gone and we are actually showing a little worse than where we started. We saw a nice spike last week (10/16) and now today we are seeing the drop (10/24.) Anyone else experience something like this?
-
My site was recovered after years in Google sandbox. I thanks a lot to this new update. I'm on the second page to most keywords of my niche.
-
Hey Ronell
We are over in the UK and work with a bunch of folks who have cleaned up their act and are hoping to improve. We also monitor several sectors where there is competition who are not exactly playing it by the book and we expected to fall.
Recoveries
We are seeing some good movement on the recovery front. Folks who were just decimated by Penguin seeing some solid improvements - not back to where they were on the house of cards they built but certainly feels like they are back in the race again. We are seeing one major UK player we work with who is seeing a recovery but not for the homepage. The major keywords are doing much better (like 50 to 20 sort of region) but it is inner pages. Thinking this could be the granular elements we are seeing.
Penalties
The other side of the coin is the penalties and we are seeing very little on that front yet. Certain sites we monitored and expected to see a big fall for have as of yet seen much of a difference. It's like the recovery side of things has rolled out but true impact of 'real time' crawling of URLs from a devaluation perspective is yet to be revealed. Either that are this is the spammers penguin!
Cheers
Marcus -
Hi Ronnel, in my case, the most important of my url (after the home) is missing in all google search, i tried to crawl in many ways but it´s like is not posible to recover, it´s strange becouse i did not heard this can of penalty, that happened the 12 of this month. (sorry for my english, i´m spanish).
UPDATE: i´ve just recover from my situatio prior 12, :), i don´t know how
-
Auditing all SEO On-Page - Title tags, meta descriptions, content, status, robots... Other SEO audits are Off-Page (Social Media) and Technical.
-
Thanks for your tips, Veronica. My inbound backlinks all have 4 or under spam score. So does my competitor. They have 250 total links whereas I have 75 -- that's how they've always have the #1 rank -- but neither of us show links from the past 60 days. Their DA/PA is 40/40, where mine is 25/35. Possum would not affect me as an ecommerce site only, neither of us have a local presence. Any other suggestions? What would a "full SEO audit" consist of?
-
Hi Taylor,
Maybe, due to Penguin 4 is about inbound links, a first step would be conducting a research/study of your own inbound links - spam score specially, and the same with your competitor website using the Moz Site Explorer, of course. Last month, there were other 2 major updates, Possum update plus the Unnamed one. Therefore if you check the NAP, if apply is another option. A third step is a Full SEO audit of the competitor's website.
Good luck.
-
I run an ecommerce site. My site used to rank #2 (my homepage) and #3 (my product page) for my primary keyword. #1 has always been my competitor's homepage. Now, my competitor's Shop page -- which uses this keyword only 6x within the content of that page -- is #2 bumping me down to #3 and #4
Any advice or guidance would be much appreciated.
-
No news is better than bad news.
RS
-
Sounds like you have some clients with strong content, then.
RS
-
I'm seeing no change at all, unfortunately!
-
I'm seeing a slight rise in results for some of my clients and no change for others.
-
Constant fluctuations of my keyword positions.
-
The key is quality content. I know we hear that a lot, so much that it becomes cliche', but it's true. A simple way of thinking about this is to never create a piece of content you wouldn't feel comfortable asking someone you know and respect to share.
RS
-
My client doesn't have a lot of backlinks and the website is less than a year old. Our focus has been on content. The client is in the service industry so we also benefit from the recent emphasis on reviews.
We've seen several pages move up in rank after September's ups and downs. I won't really know how well our content strategy is working until Penguin 4.0 settles out.
-
I like the wait and see/get more data approach. It's often tough to see a cause and effect relationship when there are so many potential factors at work.
-
It seems so. Although I must confess, I am not absolutely sure if it was a Penguin 4 catch or/and the Unnamed algorithm update occurred last month; as a fellow SEO practitioner, had suggested also.
By the way, due to that is a change not affecting the SERP position; I will not move, till we get more data. -
Sounds like your experience mirrors that of others, which seems to be as a result of Google taking more or a scalpel approach to penalizing content as opposed to the blunt-instrument trauma many faced in the past when entire sites were scorched.
-
Hi Ronell,
I noticed that Penguin 4, by devaluing some inbound links/page - though not the whole website - now shows other pages of the same website to the same query and the most important; with the same SERP position that the devaluated page had.
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
-
Fetch as Google -- Does not result in pages getting indexed
I run a exotic pet website which currently has several types of species of reptiles. It has done well in SERP for the first couple of types of reptiles, but I am continuing to add new species and for each of these comes the task of getting ranked and I need to figure out the best process. We just released our 4th species, "reticulated pythons", about 2 weeks ago, and I made these pages public and in Webmaster tools did a "Fetch as Google" and index page and child pages for this page: http://www.morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons/index While Google immediately indexed the index page, it did not really index the couple of dozen pages linked from this page despite me checking the option to crawl child pages. I know this by two ways: first, in Google Webmaster Tools, if I look at Search Analytics and Pages filtered by "retic", there are only 2 listed. This at least tells me it's not showing these pages to users. More directly though, if I look at Google search for "site:morphmarket.com/c/reptiles/pythons/reticulated-pythons" there are only 7 pages indexed. More details -- I've tested at least one of these URLs with the robot checker and they are not blocked. The canonical values look right. I have not monkeyed really with Crawl URL Parameters. I do NOT have these pages listed in my sitemap, but in my experience Google didn't care a lot about that -- I previously had about 100 pages there and google didn't index some of them for more than 1 year. Google has indexed "105k" pages from my site so it is very happy to do so, apparently just not the ones I want (this large value is due to permutations of search parameters, something I think I've since improved with canonical, robots, etc). I may have some nofollow links to the same URLs but NOT on this page, so assuming nofollow has only local effects, this shouldn't matter. Any advice on what could be going wrong here. I really want Google to index the top couple of links on this page (home, index, stores, calculator) as well as the couple dozen gene/tag links below.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jplehmann0 -
IP Address location v Server Location Penguin 4/Possum
Hi All, Our hosting provider have their IP address range in Melbourne but offers servers in Sydney or Melbourne.. If we were to take a server in Sydney and an IP address from their Melbourne range (only IP range offered) will the new localisation updates to the Penguin/Possum Algorithms serve less up to our clients in Sydney thinking we are located in Melbourne? Sorry if im confusing.. I know I am 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
Do you see any SEO risk here?
Hi, I’m seeking your opinion regarding the issue we are facing during rebranding
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnglishtownSEO0 -
Shall I change duplicated product descriptions if I am top ranking result and was first to publish it?
about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites). The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well. Which of the following options would you opt for? keeping the description and just adding some unique content replacing the complete product description by a new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Penguin & Panda: Geographic Penalities?
Has anyone ever come across information about a website appearing strongly in SERP's in one region, but poorly in another? (ie: great in Europe, not so great in N. America) If so, perhaps it is a Panda or Penguin issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
What can I do to put these pages back in the top results?
Hello here, here is an interesting question for you. The following 2 webpages from our website have been ranking well on Google (usually on the 1st or 2nd page) for the past 12 years. They are among our oldest, highly relevant product pages on our site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Eliza.html And we could always find them with the keyword "moonlight sonata sheet music" or "fur elise sheet music". Now, since the last November these pages don't show up anymore despite they are still present in the index. It is pretty hard to understand why those pages don't show up in the search results for those keywords as they used to, above all if you consider that those are among our best, most popular and unique product pages! But instead to struggle to understand why we lost presence (Panda? Some unknown sort of penalization?), has anyone any suggestions to help us to have those pages back in the top results? What do you suggest to do in such kind of cases? Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
PR dropped from 3 to 0\. Why?
Hi, I have an important question and I hope you'll be able to help me find the answer. My site http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com had a PR of 3 (three). Then, I had it restructured to make it look more appealing in order to increase the conversion rate. The problem is that after it was redesigned, the PR dropped all of a sudden from 3 to 0. This is really bad, as it took me over three years to reach that point. Could you please analyze the site and find out what happened? I used SEOMOZ's research tools to try to understand and noticed the following message" "Accessible to Engines Easy fix Crawl status Status Code: 200 meta-robots: noindex, follow meta-refresh: None X-Robots: None Explanation Pages that can't be crawled or indexed have no opportunity to rank in the results. Before tweaking keyword targeting or leveraging other optimization techniques, it's essential to make sure this page is accessible. Recommendation Ensure the URL returns the HTTP code 200 and is not blocked with robots.txt, meta robots or x-robots protocol (and does not meta refresh to another URL)". Basically, the message said that the search engines cannot access the homepage (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com). May this be the reason why the PR dropped? What do I have to do to solve this problem? Is there a chance I can reach a PR of 3 again? Thank you very much for your help. It'd be great if you could help my site regain its SEO strength.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Changing domain extension to detoxify a domain
Hi there, A linkbuilding company that has been building links for us has not gained any sustained results. They have advised that our domain may be toxic, and that we should consider permanent redirecting from .co.uk to another domain extension in order to remedy this. Is this a recommendation worth considering?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise0