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
-
SEO Impacts if changing from https to http (or viceversa)
Hi there, I want to take the benefits (both Google's SEO rewards and increased site speed) from putting on-line my site (it's not yet live) with a SSL certificate and make it use the new HTTP/2 protocol. Now the question is: if in the future I won't renew the SSL certificate (because too expensive, maybe), so the site will run through normal HTTP, do I risk to see changes of my pages on the SERPs? Will I lose all positions that I got? Thanks in advance for your tips!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | valeron0 -
How to recover google rank after changing the domain name?
I just started doing SEO for a new client. The case is a bit unique as they build a new website and for some reason lunched in under another domain name. Old name is foodstepsinasia.com and new one is foodstepsinasiatravel.com OLD one is a respected webites with 35 in MOZ page authority and with +15000 incomming link (104 root domains) NEW one is curently on 0 The programmer has just that build the new website has set it up so that when people write or find the old domain name it redirect to the front page of the new website with the new domain name. this caused that my friends lost a lot of their rankings was so I believ it was a very bad solution. But I also think I can get most of the old rankings back, but my question is what to do now to get as much back of the rankings as fast as possible?? A) I believe I must change the domain name back to foodstepsinasia.com on the new website ? O B) Should I on the old website try finding the url of the pages with most page authority and recreate these urls on the new website or should i redict them to a page with related content? Looking forward to feedback from someone who have experience with similar cases. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nm19770 -
Content Transfer for Penguin Induced Domain Switch
One of my customers has a mature site that performs very well in ranking and traffic for major keywords, prosun.com. A few years ago we started welproma.com because they were changing their name and branding. We built up welproma.com as an eventual replacement and ramped up to 30% of the Prosun.com traffic. Penguin hit a bit in 2012 but very bad May 24, 2013 and it keeps getting worse. Now they are backing out of the name change, reverting back to prosun.com as the main website. Unfortunately the Welproma.com content is far better in quantity and quality so we would prefer not to waste it. Does anyone think it is a problem to take essentially the exact content from the newer, penalized site and move it to the older well performing site. We will use no links whatsoever between the two sites and take down the new one once we switch.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan0 -
Product Colours change on ecommerce store... similar descriptions.
Hi, In the case of a RED/GREEN/YELLOW coffeemaker for example, I have say 6 pages that are indexed in google. Now, I can write very unique content for each and that gives me 6 pages in SERPS. Or make it a configurable product? What is best, and how different would the description need to be - my feeling that just changing the word colour in the text would NOT be enough. Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Omitted results
Google used to display all my pages now most are under repeat the search with the omitted results included."_ what dose that mean? Dose this predict something bad?_ All pages are unique.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Penguin Penalty On A Duplicate url
Hi I have noticed a distinct drop in traffic to a page on my web site which occurred around April of last year. Doing some analysis of links pointing to this page, I found that most were sitewide and exact match commercial anchor text. I think the obvious conclusion from this is I got slapped by Penguin although I didn't receive a warning in Webmaster Tools. The page in question was ranking highly for our targeted terms and the url was structured like this: companyname.com/category/index.php The same page is still ranking for some of those terms, but it is the duplicate url: companyname.com/category/ The sitewide problem is associated with links going to the index.php page. There aren't too many links pointing to the non index.php page. My question is this - if we were to 301 redirect index.php to the non php page, would this be detrimental to the rankings we are getting today? ie would we simply redirect the penguin effect to the non php page? If anybody has come across a similar problem or has any advice, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sicseo0 -
Changing Wordpress Permalinks Bad For SEO?
Hi, I have various pages set up such as http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is there any benefit in SEO terms to changing it to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer? I would presume that a keyword would be better for SEO than 'home' which is irrelevant? Also if I were to change it would all the links external I have on other sites pointing to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer be lost as the url no longer exists? I suppose I could set up a manual redirect from http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer or would wordpress automatically redirect from the old to new? By redirecting I understand that some 'link juice' is lost along the way so is including the keyword in the url of enough benefit to warrant losing some link juice? Finally if I do change the url to include the keyword how do I do it in wordpress? I can only see how to change the page title using the 'edit' button when editing a page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK1 -
Google Penguin Winners and Losers?
Hi All, Just wondering out of the SEOmoz community who has come out on top after Penguin and who has been hit and why. Personally my site has come out on top. I started workig on the site back in December and NOTHING had been done, no link development, no onpage, nothing, a virginal website. The site was chock-a-block with issues both technically and in content. After 4 months of hard work, we have climbed from 100+ to top ten on most of our phrases and post Penguin we have climbed even higher as some of our competitors were dragged down into the murky depths. So I think thats a win (for now). My focus has been on Guest posting, social outreach, reviews and getting my on page right (still a ways to go, but our CMS is clunky to say the least). A little humour attached 😉 (Why has no one yet stuck Matt Cutts head on a Penguin?) Are you a Penguin Winner or have you experienced the wrath of the penguin. keep-calm-and-deoptimise.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aran_Smithson0