That Penguin

[Johnny4B]

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

[cbielich]

I lost one, but gained one. It was awesome to see that traffic spike back up after almost a year

[rayvensoft]

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.

[MattAntonino]

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!)

[EGOL]

Most happy people are heading out for beers. 

They will not be posting here.

[Karen_Dauncey]

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!!

[MattAntonino]

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.

[Johnny4B]

Wow, that's great news ....Congrats

[MattAntonino]

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.

[Cocoonfxmedia]

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...