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
-
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 -
Penguin Hops
Has anyone else noticed that sites that seem to have gone through a positive penguin recovery after 3.0 had results jumping around? It seems to be happening with the biggest keywords that were damaged by Penguin 2.1 but we are seeing jumps from Page 2 in the morning to Page 12 in the afternoon. It seems very unstable at the moment and I was wondering if anyone else is seeing something similar?
Algorithm Updates | | MarkGadala-Maria0 -
Google traffic drops (October 24th 2014) - Penguin 3.0?
Hi All My client's site http://www.carismaautodesign.com took a bit of a knock around 24th October 2014. Google organic traffic down by ~32%. I am trying to understand if site has been hit by a Penguin refresh (3.0) - and if so why?
Algorithm Updates | | seowoody
If it was, it would appear to be a false negative as the site and backlink profile is clean. The content is perhaps the only area in question... as it's more of a brochure site, therefore content is relatively thin and promotional rather than in-depth/editorial. For example, the gallery pages are very similar in structure, with the images and specification text being the only variation, click on any of the vehicle interiors to see what I mean - http://www.carismaautodesign.com/gallery/mercedes/viano/ You will see the specification text is unique per vehicle interior, but not hugely; Then how could it be? The interiors all contain the same elements just a variation in seating, leather colour, stiching, wood finish etc. Question: Do you think... a.) This IS NOT a Penguin issue but something else (please ellaborate)
b.) This IS a Penguin issue but a false-negative, so do nothing, this will bounce back with next Penguin refresh
c.) This IS a Penguin issue related to content. Merge all gallery pages into one page per vehicle (i.e. one Mercedes Viano Interior page, with all 19 interior galleries as part of the page - thus building one stronger page with more intro text and simple bulleted specification per gallery)
d.) This IS a Penguin issue related to something else (please ellaborate) Thanks,0 -
Penguin 3.0 Site Dropped after Update
Hi We was hit by the Penguin update a long time ago and we lost a lot of traffic/positions because of this. For a long time we worked really hard to identify all off our links that may have caused us to recieve this penalty. After Months of work we submitted the disavow file and reconsideration request and in June 2014 we recieved confirmation from google in webmaster tools that the manual spam action had been revoked. over time we then started to recieve more traffic and better positions in the serps, however since penguin 3.0 we have dropped again for a range of keywords. many going from page 1 to 2 or page 2 to 3/4 Any ideas what we should do here , any help will be really appriciated as I'm totally confused We havent done any link building at all since the penalty / recovery
Algorithm Updates | | AMG1000 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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