Penguin 3.0
-
I saw slight drop yesterday after the penguin rollout, about 3 - 4 spots lower on targeted KW's. However, I'm still on first page for those KW, just near the bottom as opposed to near the top.
I'm wondering if anyone else experienced, or has experienced with past Penguin updates, a "slight" dip in rankings.
What actions did you take, if any? I'm inclined to simply focus on building better links rather than disavow given the lack of severity.
With that said, I would love some feedback or suggestions from anyone who experienced what I would consider a "less severe" penalty (3 - 4 spots, still on first page).
-
Thanks for the feedback. I'm happy to see that my site benefitted from Google refining P3 or that a Panda refresh potentially helped rankings.
Either way, it was a great learning experience that resulted in me improving the back link profile while improving the onsite user experience.
Thank you again for all your feedback.
-
Interesting. Thanks for the update.
Something doesn't make sense though. If Penguin 3.0 affected you, then cleaning up the links would not make a difference until Google reran the algorithm. The way that Penguin works is that Google gathers data about your link profile and then takes some time to process that data and then when they run Penguin you see the results of whether or not they trust your links. So, your recent bounce up is probably not because of your link cleanup because they are still working on the data that was gathered in mid September.
I have seen a number of sites that have been bouncing up and down over the last few weeks. It's like Google is testing and refining Penguin. As such, you may see things drop again...or perhaps you may not.
To confuse matters, there appears to have been a big unannounced Panda refresh in the last few days too and many sites saw a big jump (or drop) with this.
Things are definitely very volatile right now. Let us know if things change but hopefully you continue to do well!
-
UPDATE - Cleaned up links and now see rankings restored to their pre-P3 numbers.
Thanks again to everyone who responded.
If anyone has any questions about what/how I did it, feel free to PM me.
-
I've responded to the OP in private, but felt it was important to update this question in case it will help others who read this question.
The backlink profile of this site had a lot of unnatural links - low quality directory links, low quality guest posting/articles, and profiles set up for the purpose of getting a link - all anchored with a keyword for which they wanted to rank. A natural link is one that is not a self made link (with a few exceptions). If you're trying to figure out whether a link is unnatural, I wrote an article on Moz that may help: http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines
Is this a Penguin hit? Probably. It is exactly the kind of backlink profile that Penguin goes after. Why was it only a few spots and not a few pages? That's hard to say. I only spent a few minutes and focused on the unnatural links, so it's possible that there were natural links there that I didn't see. It's also possible that Google really does want to show this site as the best answer to users' queries and didn't demote it completely. It's also possible that some of the unnatural links weren't picked up by Penguin as many of the low quality articles weren't on my blacklist. They may be on a private blog network perhaps. Actually, that's another good point...if you have private blog network links then it's possible that they were affected by Penguin and you have lost link equity from them and perhaps this is not a direct Penguin hit after all. At this point, we are in early days with Penguin 3.0 so it's hard to say what is happening. But, what I can say is that a link cleanup needs to be done for sure.
-
Hi,
Can you PM me your PM name? I tried both your actual name and name listed above, but neither worked.
NVM - I figured it out. PM sent.
-
Hi,
Thanks so much. PM sent. I really appreciate it.
-
If you've truly been earning links and not making your own then likely you need to just keep doing what you're doing. I'm happy to take a quick look if you'd like to pm me your site, just to be sure. It may not be right away though. I wish Google didn't update Penguin on the weekend!
-
Thank you.
Most of what I have read online regarding Penguin penalties involves a substantial hit. However, I have seen some folks discussing slight drops. As Andy said above, that could be due to competitors cleaning their profiles and moving up. It's so hard to say with a 3 - 4 spot drop, especially when you're still on the same page.
What actions, if any, do you recommend?
By building, I meant earning.
-
Excellent point! I didn't even think of that. So you think such a slight drop is not likely any sort of Penguin penalty, but rather that my competitors received a boost from cleaning up their profiles Hadn't even considered that.
Thank you for your response and for your original post alerting us that Penguin had rolled out.
-
The majority of people in the SEO world believe that if Penguin hits you, it hits you HARD. But, I don't agree with this. John Mueller from Google has said that it can affect a site incrementally. I've seen sites that took a dip with a Penguin update of only a few positions, or perhaps from page 1 to page 2. With this update so far I'm seeing some sites that improved from page 2 to page 1.
However, it's also possible that your drop is because you've got competitors who are recovering after doing a thorough link cleanup and now appearing above you.
"I'm inclined to simply focus on building better links rather than disavow given the lack of severity. "
Are you building links or earning links? If you're building links what kind are you building? These could be the problem. A lot of what people used to call "natural" is no longer considered natural. If you've been making your own links then it's possible a disavow is in order.
-
Depends on the SERP page, some of our keywords move around like that on a daily basic as they are a active SERP results.
It doesn't sound like you have been penalised with such a small drop. Probably more likely others have benefited by having old penalties lifted. I would just carry on with what you are doing and building better links
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
-
I'm Pulling Hairs! - Duplicate Content Issue on 3 Sites
Hi, I'm an SEO intern trying to solve a duplicate content issue on three wine retailer sites. I have read up on the Moz Blog Posts and other helpful articles that were flooded with information on how to fix duplicate content. However, I have tried using canonical tags for duplicates and redirects for expiring pages on these sites and it hasn't fixed the duplicate content problem. My Moz report indicated that we have 1000s of duplicates content pages. I understand that it's a common problem among other e-commerce sites and the way we create landing pages and apply dynamic search results pages kind of conflicts with our SEO progress. Sometimes we'll create landing pages with the same URLs as an older landing page that expired. Unfortunately, I can't go around this problem since this is how customer marketing and recruitment manage their offers and landing pages. Would it be best to nofollow these expired pages or redirect them? Also I tried to use self-referencing canonical tags and canonical tags that point to the higher authority on search results pages and even though it worked for some pages on the site, it didn't work for a lot of the other search result pages. Is there something that we can do to these search result pages that will let google understand that these search results pages on our site are original pages? There are a lot of factors that I can't change and I'm kind of concerned that the three sites won't rank as well and also drive traffic that won't convert on the site. I understand that Google won't penalize your sites with duplicate content unless it's spammy. So If I can't fix these errors -- since the company I work conducts business where we won't ever run out of duplicate content -- Is it worth going on to other priorities in SEO like Keyword research, On/Off page optimization? Or should we really concentrate on fixing these technical issues before doing anything else? I'm curious to know what you think. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | drewstorys0 -
What is your hypothesis why Panda/Penguin recoveries happen over months after an algorithm update rather than over night?
We have experienced many scenarios were ranking recoveries from clear Panda and Penguin penalties on our sites don't necessarily happen with the launch of a Panda/Penguin update but instead trickle back in over weeks and months after a confirmed algo update. A good example is shown in the image which shows a panda recovery for a high volume keyword. What is your theory why these ranking recoveries happen over weeks vs instantly? qCWliLF
Algorithm Updates | | italiansoc0 -
Panda, Negative SEO and now Penguin - help needed
Hi,
Algorithm Updates | | mlm12
We are small business owners who've been running a website for 5 years that provides our income. We've done very little backlinking ourselves, and never did paid directories or anything like that - usually just occasional forum or blog responses. A few articles here and there with some of our keyword phrases for internal pages. Of course I admit we've done some kwp backlinks on some blogs, but our anchor text profile is largely brand names and our domain name and non keywords (excepting for some "bad" backlinks). Our DA is 34, PA 45 for our home page. We were doing great until last Sept 27 when we got hit by Panda and have been working on deoptimizing our site for keywords, we made a new site in Wordpress for good architecture and ease of use for our customers, and we're deleting/repurposing low quality pages and making our content more robust. We haven't yet recovered from this and now it appears we got hit May 22 for Penguin...ARGH! I recently discovered (hard to have time to devote to everything with just two of us) that others can "negative seo" a site now and I feel this has happened based upon results below... I signed up for linkdetox.com yesterday and it gives a grim picture of our backlinks (says we are in "deadly risk" territory). We have 83 "toxic" links and 600 some "suspicious" links (many are in malware/malicious listed sites, many are .pl domains from Poland, others are I believe foreign domains, or domains that are a bunch or letters that make no sense, or spammy sounding emd domains), - this makes up 80% of our links. As this is our only business, our income is now 1/3 of what it has been, even with PPC ads going as we've been hit hard by all of this and are wondering if we can survive fixing this. We do have an SEO firm minimally helping us along with guidance on recovering, but with income so low, we are doing the work ourselves and can't afford much. Needless to say, we are quite distressed and from reading around, not sure if we'll be able to recover and that is deeply saddening, especially from Negative SEO. We want to make sure we are on the right path for recovery if possible, hence my questions. We haven't been in contact with Google for reconsideration, again, no penalty messages from them. First of all, if we don't have a manual penalty, would you still contact all the toxic/malicious/possible porn looking sites and ask for a link removal, wait, ask for link removal, wait then disavow? Or just go straight to Google disavow? For backlinks coming from sites that are "gone" (like a message saying the account has been suspended), or there is no website there anymore, do I try and contact them too? Or go direct to disavow? Or do nothing? For the sites flagged as malicious (by linkdetox, my browser, or by Google), I don't want to try and open them on my browser to see if this site is legitimate. If linkdetox doesn't have the contact info for these - what are we supposed to do? For "suspicious" foreign sites that I can't read the webpage -would you still disavow them (I've seen many here say links from foreign sites should be disavowed). How do you keep up with all this is someone is negative SEOing you? We're really frustrated that Google's change has made it possible for competitors to tank your business (arguably though, if we had a stronger backlink profile this may not have hurt, or not as much - not sure). When you are small biz owners and can't hire a group to constantly monitor backlinks, get quality backlinks, content, site optimization, etc - it seems an almost impossible task to do. Are wordpress left nav and footer link anchor text an issue for Penguin? I would think Google would realize these internal links will be repetitive for the same anchor text on Wordpress (I know Matt Cutts said to not use the same anchor text more than once for internal linking -but obviously nav and footer menus will do this). What would you do if this was you? Try and fix it all? Start over with a new domain and 301 it (some say this has been working)? Just start over with a new domain and don't redirect? Thanks for your input and advice. We appreciate it.0 -
What our next step after hitting by Penguin 2.0
Hi Everyone, Any idea about what the next step after hitting by Penguin 2.0 We go for more link building or content optimization or some thing else..?
Algorithm Updates | | lucidsoftech0 -
Did we just have a rolling Penguin update?
I just had a page/keyword that had an algorithmic penalty jump in rank significantly. Once was ranked 3, ranked 80+ since October 2012, overnight it jumped to 31.
Algorithm Updates | | EugeneF0 -
Google Dropped 3,000+ Pages due to 301 Moved !! Freaking Out !!
We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
Algorithm Updates | | David_C
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Length: 250
Content-Type: text/html
Location: http://www.mystie.com/
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!0 -
Lost and confused after Penguin!
I own an EMD which was hit by google penguin. I lost my #1 position to Google US SERP and went to #5 for the keyword which applies to the EMD. What I have tried so far is deleting the exact anchor text links from the footers of my c-block sites. That did not seem to help because i did not gain any position from that change. I also altered my meta title, description and keywords because they were spamming a bit. Things did not improved. My Links w/ Exact Anchor Text is at 5%, Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text at 3% The web pages that are above me are to 0% to both categories because they are not showing up with their main page. What is going on? The thing that confuses me the most is that i am also targeting for two other markets, Australia and Canada. In Canada I have maintained my #1 and to Australia I lost my first position falling to #2. I did not receive any message to my webmaster tools account and never made any black hat link building. Is the EMD fact the problem, but why not for other markets except US? Penguin has run to other markets(CA, AU) as well becuase i have seen a drop to other keywords and also to my traffic. Really what do you think?
Algorithm Updates | | Tz_Seo0 -
Food for thought: The Penguin Catch-22
I've been reading about and helping a lot of people who were hit by the Penguin update over the last couple of days, and the update seems to be accomplishing what Google intended it to accomplish... it's scaring people straight. I've picked up two new clients this week who now only want to practice "Good SEO" and "Do it the right way." This is a good thing for me and for the quality of the net, don't get me wrong. It does make me a little nervous though that the SEO industry is going to be tarnished a bit. Google is making a pretty clear statement with Penguin, which I think boils down to "Don't do anything other than create good content, provide accurate descriptions, and establish good connections to SEO your site... or beware ." (other than technical stuff - 301/ canonical / crawler management / etc). So riddle me this Batman... As a proud Journeyman, how is the followed backlink on my SEOMoz profile page going to appear to Google? This is an SEO site with SEO content and SEO tools and SEO in the URL. The site listed below the first followed URL on my profile is an SEO site that's in development. So there's a link to my site and every bit of context around it screams SEO. But... it is a very nice link indeed, I really do like it, and this is a white-hat kind of place. Do you think Google will start penalizing sites with inbound links from pages that are related to SEO, even if the page promotes respectable tactics? If so, I'll be having nightmares about a very round Danny DeVito with a pointy nose and creepy hands chasing me through the sewers for weeks to come...
Algorithm Updates | | Anthony_NorthSEO1