Who knew Penguins were so scary?
-
I thought they were supposed to be cute and cuddly?
-
We saw no positive or negative impact from Penguin 1.0. interestingly enough.
-
Where you hit by 1.0?
-
Am I the only SEO on the planet who is basking in the afterglow of the most recent Penguin update? The main site for which I do in-house SEO picked up 72 newly ranking terms in one day with this most recent update. Hallelujah! It's about time some hard work started to pay off! The best thing? They aren't just any 72 keywords, they are 72 targeted keywords. Love it!
-
We have all known Penguins were sneaky since at least
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyuQL1k6m2c
But yes, this is scary:
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 would you say is hurting this site, Penguin or Panda?
Would you say this is both Penguin and Panda and no penalty has ever been lifted? What would be your general recommendations for this site? seWnoQm
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Killed by penguin 3
So with the update to penguin 3.0 last week we notice that some clients have been significantly hit by the update. How do we rectify the situation for the poor links that are on the site. We have used open site explorer and Google webmaster to try and identify which are the bad links to try and remove. Now we can spot that some inbound links are from directories that may be perceived as low value/spam, but could not be sure what is affecting the ranking. The vast majority of these links are historical prior to inheriting this client recently and so do not have any logins to remove the links (if there are logins). These appear to be placed by teams outsourced in India. We would suspect that no site owner would spend the time removing links from the site any way. How do we recover from the penguin hit. Is it just a case of trying to identify ones that we suspect could be perceived as spam and ask for these to be disavowed by Google? Do we contact all the sites to ask them to be removed and/or do we just push ahead with more engaging white hat methods of social SEO? Are we likely to recover in the short term or be permanently hit. The site is for a small business with no more than 800 monthly hits so this fall from grace off very good front page positions is going to hit our client very hard even if the sins are from a previous business. Any thoughts and suggestions PLEASE HELP
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | smartcow0 -
Was I hit by Panda/Payday Loan/Penguin?
Good Mozzing, So, as some of you may know based on my previous post, I am working with an odd situation here. I have taken over an account for a company and the Main domain pretty much falls into the category of everything Google hates. I have suggested to the CEO that the practices they did before me were sorta in the Grayhat realm bordering on Blackhat but I need empirical data before I can make any drastic changes. In May and June of 2013 Panda, Penguin, and Payday Loan all had updates. Our company has nothing do to with porn, apartment rentals, finances, or anything like that, but the SEO methods used were, as I said, questionable. In June of 2013 there was a drop from 8,000 sessions to 5,000 sessions from organic traffic. If I switch over to all referring traffic the loss increases to 11,000 to 7,000 sessions. To me that seems pretty substantial. Not only that, but according to the data we have not been able to recover.There was a steady climb for about 5 months before the drop, and then now we are in this middle ground. I have only been here for about 2 weeks, so the things I have been uncovering are pretty amazing. Is that enough to assume that we were indeed hit by the updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler2 -
Link profile heavy with press release syndication links caused drop at Penguin 2.0
I'm wrestling with something that I'm hoping members of the community can provide input on.... I've working with an enterprise level client that is in the business of data capture and distribution. I've diagnosed a clear drop of traffic on May 22nd, i.e a loss of search visibility post Penguin 2.0. Their link profile is big! Discussions with internal stakeholders who have been with the company 10's of years confirm that no "link building" service providers have ever been hired and no over-zealous employee is ever likely to have tried to "do" link building internally. They are just one of those lucky companies that by their nature publish information that people want to link to and share. As a first port of call I've grouped links by anchor text and can see groups of hundreds of matching anchors based on their brand URL and specific page titles. The matching anchors have resulted from big take up of interesting data that they have marketed via press releases. NOT for link purposes. My question is this.... Does the community think or have evidence (or can point me toward any case studies) that show that Press release syndication alone could result in: a) a penguin penalty or...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | QubaSEO
b) a devaluing of press release type links during Penguin 2.0 that could have resulted in a loss of search visibility and give the impression of a penalty Your thoughts are much appreciated!0 -
Penguin Hit, Looking for some advice from Takeshi Young
Hello, Takeshi had the good idea to compare google analytic traffic data to penguin updates. We may have got hit by Penguin 2.0 (#4) on May 22, 2013. There's nothing in GWT indicating it though. Most of our traffic is return customers, by the way. I've attached a Google Analytic Screenshot. It just happens to be the time when we removed a bunch of paid links. Will you look at this screenshot and make sure that it was Penguin, then give me some advice about 20 little blogs with keyword rich anchor text. 2 paid links that look editorial 1 sitewide paid link w/ keyword rich alt tag 1 more paid link that's an image near the footer on a single page, keyword rich anchor text. 1 paid link site with different types of links scattered across the site - 30 links total We have 70 links total - the above 25 are paid. penguin.gif
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Are Links from blogs with person using keyword anchor text a Penguin 2.0 issue?
Hello, I am continuing a complete clean up of a clients link profile and would like to know if Penguin is against links from blogs with the user including keywords as anchor text? So far I have been attempting to get them removed before I go for a disavow. An example would be the work clothing comment at the bottom of: http://www.fashionstyleyou.co.uk/beat-the-caffeine-rush.html/comment-page-1 I am also questioning if we should keep any link directories, so far I have been ruthless, but worry I will be losing a hell of a lot of links. For example I have kept the following: http://www.business-directory-uk.co.uk//clothing.htm Your comments are welcomed!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarzVentures0 -
Preparing for Penguin: Remove, Disavow, or change to branded
For someone that has 80 root domains pointing to their domain and 10 of them are sitewide backlinks from 10 PR4+ sites. All paid for. All with the same main keyword anchor text Should I advise him to remove the links, dissavow the links, dissavow then remove or just change to branded anchor text for the 10 sitewide links. Another option is to just keep one link (preferrably editorial) from each site. The only reason not to pull them off right away is that the client could not sustain his business with a drop in sales. These are by far the strongest 10 root domains. Eventually, when he has enough good backlinks these are all coming off. There was a huge drop in sales for this site last fall, but it recovered almost completely by changing keyword stuffing and adding ecommerce content. Looking to keep his sales and also prepare for this years updates.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Hit hard by Panda 3.3 and Penguin. What to do?
Hi there. I work with a company that was originally all white hat, then began to dabble in some pretty serious black hat activities last year (usually paid linking in private blog networks). At the time we saw tremendous results - many of our most highly competitive keywords shot up 20, 30 positions to the top 10. And they didn't seem to budge so long as we kept those (very expensive) links intact. Alongside all of this, we have had a lot of white hat activity going on (pretty much everything recommended by Google/SEO Moz is ALSO in effect on this domain - lots of consistent/relevant blogging, social media, good content, good on-site SEO, etc), which I attribute to SOME of our success with keyword ranking, but what really made the difference was the paid linking. Let's just say we had two different mindsets behind the SEO strategy of the company, and the "Get rich quick" one worked for a while. Now, it doesn't. (Can you guess if I'm the white hat or the black hat at the company?) So here's my question. I have made the effort to contact all of the webmasters of our egregious links and, as everyone else has described, it is effectively useless. Especially given the amazing post by Ryan Kent on this question (http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-suggestions-on-removing-spammy-links) I have sort of given up on the strategy of contacting these webmasters on a case by case basis and asking for the links to be removed, especially if Google is not going to accept anything less than a perfect backlink portfolio. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to clean up these links. Meanwhile, this company is a big name in a very competitive online market and it really needs to see lead generation from organic SEO. (Please don't give me any told-you-so's here, it was out of my hands.) MY QUESTION IS: WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Should we just keep the domain going and focus on only building quailty links from now on? Most of our keywords fall anywhere from position 40 to position 150 right now, so it's not like ALL hope is lost. But as any SEO knows that is basically as good as not being indexed at all. OTHER OPTION: We have an old domain that is the less-SEO-friendly, but it is the official name of our company . com, and this domain is currently 301'd to our live (SEO-friendly) domain. The companyname.com domain is also older than our SEO friendly domain. Should we manually move our site back over to the old domain since there is no penalty on it? It seems like a lot of sites that are ranking are brand new anyway (except their URL's are loaded with keywords.) Blah, I know that was a lot, but I'm feeling lost and ANY insight would be helpful. Thanks as always SEOMoz!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LilyRay1
