Penguin 3.0 has rolled within the last hour - who has been affected

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

I am hearing that Penguin 3.0 has rolled out within the last hour or so, can anyone confirm this and secondly has anyone been affected?

My rankings don't seen to have changed, neither has my main competitors but it might just be too early to tell.

Thanks

Andy

[mgane]

Thanks, Marie. That post is really helpful.

Just to clarify one point. I've read that google may take as long as six months to recrawl a website. Does that mean that many of the links on our disavow list uploaded in Sept might not have actually had the (invisible) nofollow tag applied yet, and in which case may still be harming our website as far as penguin is concerned? When I read that google was processing disavow requests with the penguin update, I thought that that meant that the usual wait wouldn't apply, that everything would be recrawled with the penguin refresh, if that makes sense.

I'm trying to convince myself that our work on removing/disavowing links hasn't fully taken effect yet, and that we'll see a bounce in our rankings with the next penguin update, whenever that may be. I'd rather not take the lack of improvement we've seen this time around as a sign that we're never going to make a recovery. I certainly can't see how we can do much more work in terms of removing links. We were pretty thorough.

[MarieHaynes]

Hi mgane.  It's not that Google stopped processing disavow requests, but rather, the data that the Penguin algorithm needed in order to make its calculations was likely collected at that time. (The middle of September).  So, whether or not your site looks trustworthy now in the eyes of Penguin depends on what your link profile looked like at that time.

If you filed a disavow in early September, those links are not considered disavowed until Google revisits them.  Then, once recrawled, they apply the invisible nofollow to links pointing to your site.

Regarding the https switch, I get asked that a lot, so I wrote a post about it: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/switching-https-happens-disavow/. The TLDR version is that if you had a disavow pointing to your non https then it's not like you start over again with the https version.

[mgane]

I thought I'd post this here, rather than start a new thread (let me know if this is the wrong place)

I've read in recent reports about Penguin 3.0 that google had said they had stopped processing new disavow requests around the middle of Sept. I'm worried that this might have prevented our site from escaping Penguin this time (we've seen no changes in our rankings). I submitted a disavow request for our website in early Sept, before the 'deadline', so to speak. However, we moved our website to HTTPS about two weeks following the new google guidelines, and it only occurred to me recently that I needed to add this as a new site to webmaster and re-upload the disavow request, which I did a week ago. Will our disavow request have been ignored for this reason, or would google simply carry over the disavow list from the http to https version of the site automatically?

I sort of hope we have missed the ship this time, as otherwise the fact that our rankings haven't changed in spite of all the work we did cleaning up our backlinks is pretty grim news.

[BruceA]

17th October we have seen dramatic increase in Google Crawl activity, not as strong as the last update, about half the pages were crawled this time than that of the last main update.

Bruce

edit typo

[MarieHaynes]

Thanks EGOL.

I really think that Penguin is continuing to roll out.  I have a number of sites that I am monitoring that should see recovery but have not.  But, I've seen several sites make fantastic recoveries as well which is awesome.

This is just a theory, but it seems to me like the majority of reported recoveries have been outside of the US.

The next few days will tell us more!

[EricaMcGillivray]

If you're wondering when we, at Moz, will be posting something, Dr. Pete will be digging into the data tomorrow and have something up soon. (He tweeted that today he's looking at some actual penguins in the zoo with his family.

[BruceA]

Our GWT Crawl goes wild when it reaches the UK, so nothing yet.

Looking forward to seeing the impact.

All this very hard work that we all put in makes us look forward to Penguin dropping by to those who ride on the crest of others work!

Have a great weekend all

Bruce

[Andy-Halliday]

yeah and most worrying is people are claiming to be affected by Negative SEO - which if true is a whole new SEO strategy to worry about. Protecting yourself as well as trying to improve

[EGOL]

Marie Haynes thinks that there was an update.   https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes

She sent an email out to subscribers...

Hi! I woke up this morning to an inbox full of people asking whether Penguin had updated.  Twitter is ablaze with people talking about Penguin as well.  While we haven't had an official announcement from Google yet, it really does appear that Penguin is in the process of updating.

If you haven't seen any changes in your rankings, don't despair.  It looks like the update has only affected some people. I have seen people in the UK, Australia and the US who have seen changes, but other people in those same regions have not. Some of my clients have seen nice jumps back to page one, but I have other clients who have not budged.  Also, several people on Twitter who do a lot of Penguin work are not yet seeing any changes either.

I have also heard several reports of sites dropping several pages in rankings today. Most were sites owned by people who admittedly built unnatural links.