An international portfolio of web sites has been suffering from Panda and Penguin over the last months. Essentially many of the international sites completely disappeared from the top 50 when before we had many Top 5 positions for competitive key words.
Today we noticed that it appears that for all this time rankings for local keywords have not been affected for domains outside of the most relevant Google CCTLD for the page.
To give an example:
Domain.it / Keyword 1 (IT) = Italian Competitive Keyword
Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 4
Google.it: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position ---
Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 1
Google.com: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 1
Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) April 2012 Position 3
Google.de: Keyword 1 (IT) December 2012 Position 4
Have other people observed such behavior? Does this give any pointers towards how the recovery strategies should be drafted?
We have experienced that the more search volume a keywords has received the harder the Panda/Penguin impact. So one hypothesis could be that because the international Google domains do not receive overly significant traffic for the localized keywords Panda/Penguin protection algorithms are not being applied with the same force.
Any thoughts are welcome. /Thomas
