Community Discussion: What changes are you seeing as a result of Penguin 4.0?

[ronell-smith]

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

[ClaytonJ]

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.

[lizzyr]

Thanks.  I didn't know about MozCast, so it is great to learn of that new tool.

[VeroBrain]

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.

[lizzyr]

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...

[Parker_Content]

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.

[lizzyr]

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.

[Brett-S]

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.

[lizzyr]

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?

[CompraBit]

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.

[Marcus_Miller]

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

[webtematica]

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

[VeroBrain]

Auditing all SEO On-Page - Title tags, meta descriptions, content, status, robots... Other SEO audits are Off-Page (Social Media) and Technical.

[Taylorw]

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?

[VeroBrain]

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.

[Taylorw]

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.

[ronell-smith]

No news is better than bad news.

RS

[ronell-smith]

Sounds like you have some clients with strong content, then.

RS

[Brett-S]

I'm seeing no change at all, unfortunately!

[solvid]

I'm seeing a slight rise in results for some of my clients and no change for others.

[PrajjwalGeek1]

Constant fluctuations of my keyword positions.

[ronell-smith]

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

[Parker_Content]

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.

[ronell-smith]

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.

[VeroBrain]

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.

[ronell-smith]

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.

[VeroBrain]

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.