Penguin concerns
-
I recently joined a retail company who have been using an SEO agency for a few years. Having done a bit of link profile analysis i'm more than a little concerned that we're a sitting duck for the dreaded penguin.
My main question is should i focus more on the number of actual links pointing at a page or the number of linking root domains? For example one of our pages has over 18000 links pointing at it but from only 39 root domains (immediate alarm bells!!). Most of the links are exact anchor text fro one particular term.
So far we haven't been hit but i'm not naive to think we're out of the woods yet.
-
The sites have decent DA and PA but most of the links in question are in blogrolls and sidebars rather than relevant bodies of content. You or I would pick them straight away as paid links so I don't think it would take Google long to come to the same conclusion.
-
Thanks for your response.
I've pretty much done exactly what you suggested already. I've managed expectations from the day I joined the company.
I don't particularly blame the SEO agency because i've done the same sort of link building myself during my time in agencies.
-
I recently joined a retail company... So far we haven't been hit but i'm not naive to think we're out of the woods yet.
hmmm..... If I was a new guy and had this situation... I would think about writing a very clear one-page memo to my bosses explaining... "what is penguin".... Show examples of your spammy links... explain what might happen to your rankings... and say what % of your traffic comes from google... and how that might hit revenue.
I would include a couple links to easy-to-understand articles about penguin by well known SEOs.
You don't want to be blamed for a disaster that occurs this summer that was caused by somebody else.
I would not bad-mouth the last SEO or the methods... lots of people did this stuff and continue to do it... just explain the risk and how to reduce it.
-
It depends. If the sites linking to you are strong in their own ranks you might not be hit. If they're weak, it seems a lot more likely that Penguin might devalue them or issue penalties.
It also depends on the links themselves. Are these sitewide links in, say, a sidebar or footer? I am beginning to think that Penguin might be seeing them as paid links but I can't say that for sure yet.
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
-
Google Penguin update
When Google Penguin update will run again. The last time was in October 2013 and I'm still really curious now. Or have they stopped this and this is now continuously just like the panda?
Algorithm Updates | | NECAnGeL0 -
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 -
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 -
Penguin Update and Long Tail Keywords
Since the Penguin update, organic traffic for our site; oxygenconcentratorstore.com
Algorithm Updates | | chuck-layton
has dropped almost 25%. The thing I cannot figure out is that when I compare April 1<sup>st</sup> to May 15<sup>th</sup> (before the update) and June 1<sup>st</sup> to July 15<sup>th</sup> (after); 8 of our top keywords are up. Our 2 main keywords are up 15% and 11%. Where we lost most of our traffic is from our longtail keywords. We have almost 1000 longtail keyword phrases that we got visits from in the April/May period that we did not get in the June/July period. Is there a reason why our top keywords would continue to improve while we most of the longtail keywords?? If Google penalized us, won’t all of our keywords be dropping and just not the longtail. Any help/info would be awesome. Thanks.0 -
Panda / Penguin Behavior ? Recovery?
Our site took a major fall on March 23rd, ie Panda 3.4 and then another smaller one on April 24th, ie Penguin. I have posted a few times in here trying get help on what items to focus on. Been doing this for 13 years, white hat, never chased algos but of course learned as I went. As soon as the fall hit one expert said it was links, which I kinda doubted because we never went after them but we have some but only a handful in comparison to really good authorative links. I concentrated on cleaning up duplicate content due to tags in a blog that only had 7 posts (an add on section to the site) then focuses efforts on just going through and making content better. Had other overlapping content that I would guess would pass inspection but I cleaned it up. After 6 weeks no movement back up, another expert here said yes, he saw some bad links so I should check it out. So back to focusing on links, I actually run a report and discover questionable links, and successfully get about 25 removed. Low numbers but we have only about 50 that were questionable. No contact info on the other directories so I guess we are stuck. Here is where I just go in circles... When our site fell on March 23rd we had 13 of our main pages still ranking at number 1 and 2 on each keyword phrase. Penguin hit and they fell about 10 spots. EXCEPT, one... This one keyword phrase and page stayed on top and ranked at #1 throught he storm. (finally fell to #4 but still remains up there). The whole site is down 90%, we only have 3 fair keyword phrases really ranking out of 250. The mystery is that the keyword phrase that was ranking was the one that supposedly had way over the % of anchor text, 7% of our links go to that page. The other pages that fell on Penguin had no pages linking back. I have been adding blog posts to our site, I post one an in a few days it gets indexed, have one of those ranking at #2 for the keyword, moved up from #4 a week after posting it in the blog. (google searches shows 80K) Just seems like the site should bounce back if new content is able to rank, why not the old? Did other people hit by Panda and Penguin see a sitewide fall or are they still ranking for some terms? I would love to see some discusson on success stories of bouncing back after Panda and Penguin. I see the WP success story but that was pretty sudden after it was brought to Google's attention. Looking for that small business that fixed something and saw improvement. Give me hope here please.
Algorithm Updates | | Force70 -
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 -
How could Penguin kill my top ten rank and promote this garbage page to a #5 spot
Hey, Before penguin, I had a #9 rank for the term "yoga poses". So as many of us are doing, I started looking at my link profile... and yes, there were around 300 links from an old yoga news website (anchor: yoga poses)... that lead to the page on my site optimized for this term. The problem is they took the site down, but not properly... I.E. they generate a "not available" message for browsers, but underneath, I guess the bots can still index all the pages... so I guess they were interpreting these links as coming from a cloaked site. So, I was able to get them to remove the links... webmaster tools reports half of them gone now. What I don't get though... is how Google can give this garbage page a #5 spot for a competitive term like "yoga poses"... Check out http://www.ebmyoga.com/beginyoga.html and compare it to my page... http://www.yogaclassplan.com/yoga-poses/ This page leads to highly quality 100% unique yoga pose articles... in my mind we deliver so much more value than the site with a #5 rank. I don't understand. Any insight? Thanks,
Algorithm Updates | | biomat0 -
Trying to figure out why Penguin has completely buggered us up, and what to do about it
Hola All, This is a update of http://www.seomoz.org/q/gah-unfaorly-hit-by-massive-google-penalty Updated because: Google webmaster has gotten back to us that there have been no manual actions taken against us Results haven't improved one jot We're completely flummoxed as to why this is happenin Quick summary: We run the larest WordPress news site on the web, WPMU.org We're completely legit, a team of 4-5 great writers, amazing original content, massive fanbase on twitter and facebook, a 60k email list etc, established for years and years. We're absolutely not and haven't done anything gray or black, the worst we've done is including links in the footers of some themes we've distributed Since the 24th April our google referrals are down from an 8.5k daily peak to 1.5 - see the attached. Articles which have consistently attracted several hundred referrals per day have disappeared from the rankings to be replaced by republications or just links to the, for example, here's one on the dangers of searching for free WP themes, decimated: http://wpmu.org/why-you-should-never-search-for-free-wordpress-themes-in-google-or-anywhere-else/ Check out how legit we are! http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=wpmu.org And the problem: How to get our google traffic back? We're completely stuck 😕 We can't find issues within the site content, or even particularly within the backlinks (we've removed all links from Edublogs) We haven't been manually whacked, so we can't get that changed. Absolutely nothing within the penguin update should have hit us... in fact by their reckoning we should have had a massive improvement over all the trash that competes with us in the WordPress space. Help / Ideas / Feedback / Criticism / Anything desperately sought. Thanks for your time, James Screen-Shot-2012-05-03-at-10.49.40-AM.png
Algorithm Updates | | WPMUDEV0