That Penguin
-
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
-
I lost one, but gained one. It was awesome to see that traffic spike back up after almost a year
-
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.
-
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!)
-
Most happy people are heading out for beers.
They will not be posting here.
-
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!!
-
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.
-
Wow, that's great news ....Congrats
-
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.
-
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...
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
-
How is your site holding up post Penguin 4.0 roll out?
Hi team I was reading an article this morning from Barry Schwartz at SERoundtable about the impact of Penguin 4.0 and how webmasters are reporting minimal effects since launch. There was another article posted this morning about how the roll out may have began before the launch date, which would make sense as MozCast was reporting high temperatures leading up to Friday, specifically 9/12 to 9/15. I was wondering how everyone's traffic / rankings are performing after news broke on Friday, 9/23? Were you see fluctuations before that? What are you focusing on most now that Penguin 4.0 has launched? I understand we are a few days in and this is a real time / ongoing rollout, but I would be interested to hear what everyone has been seeing so far, if anything! Hope you all are doing well and I'm looking forward to hearing from you! Good luck!
Algorithm Updates | | PatrickDelehanty
P0 -
Penguin hit | Immediate?
Last year we fell off google rankings fairly quickly (mid-2013), out of the blue. We thought it was Penguin; but after looking at Analytic data of organic google visits; there seems to be no drastic loss of traffic at any time. Our site's loss of traffic is a gradual decline, not immediately noticeable, as in this video (~33:00 minutes in ). If there is no drop in organic google traffic that's noticeable, can I safely assume our drop in rankings wasn't due to an algorithm update?
Algorithm Updates | | godreamvacations0 -
Decline in ranking for a particular theme of keywords after Penguin 2.0
Hi everyone Last month we found on of our clients rankings were seeing significant declines in ranking (like from 3 to 28). This occurred around the time of the Penguin 2.0 update. After further investigation we found that only a collection of keywords were affected. If we were hit by the algorithm update we would expect to find all keywords declining. We have not been manually penalized and other keyword themes are seeing moderate day to day ranking improvements. I know that rankings jump from day to day but a sudden decline of around 20 places for a theme of keywords isn't what we would expect. Thanks all.
Algorithm Updates | | PeteW0 -
What our next step after hitting by Penguin 2.0
Hi Everyone, Any idea about what the next step after hitting by Penguin 2.0 We go for more link building or content optimization or some thing else..?
Algorithm Updates | | lucidsoftech0 -
Recovered from penguin/panda but which one?
So the good news is that for the first time since April 24th, one of our websites is back in the search results as of around December 12 but I am still unsure as whether it was panda or penguin (or both) that was impacting the site?? Note this was not a manual penalty. I diagnosed it as a penguin issue (drop on April 24th, aggressive on-page optimisation, around 10% of links from spammy directories like addyourfreelinks.com with anchor text built by a questionable agency), but on further advice it was thought that panda was also an issue because it is a hotel microsite so there was duplication with our own brand site and across third party travel sites and there were a number of pages with bare content. I figured it was a good time to clean everything up to address both. Here is a summary of actions taken: submitted disavow file on October 24th with all questionable links including actions taken and comments. Since then I have cleaned up some content so it is less aggressively targeting certain keywords. Amended several third party listings with duplicate content No follow,indexed pages that were directly duplicated with our brand site and over the last month have built a few good quality links. Cleaned up 404's in webmaster tools over the last week I have searched to see if there were any algorithm updates around December 12 but cannot find any mentions. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | jay.raman0 -
Did Google just give away how Penguin works?
At SMX during the You&A with Matt Cutts, Danny asked why the algo update was called Penguin. Matt said: "We thought the codename actually might give too much info about how it works so the lead engineer got to choose." Last night Google released their 39 updates for the month of May. Among them was this: "Improvements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm." Whoa, codename twref2 for Penguin improvement? Is this giving us an insight about how it works? I would guess the ref2 means second refresh perhaps. But tw I am not sure about. What do you think? Is there a hidden insight here?
Algorithm Updates | | DanDeceuster1 -
Are creative widgets still a good strategy in the Penguin world?
Im planning on building a small utility widget that my site will distribute to related sites. I plan on implementing this with JS and including a small anchor link back to my site. In the new penguin world, will the possibly be destructive to my SEO efforts? Any do's or don'ts when developing a widget/badge for distribution to lets say a dozen sites?
Algorithm Updates | | DotCar1 -
Penguin concerns
I recently joined a retail company who have been using an SEO agency for a few years. Having done a bit of link profile analysis i'm more than a little concerned that we're a sitting duck for the dreaded penguin. My main question is should i focus more on the number of actual links pointing at a page or the number of linking root domains? For example one of our pages has over 18000 links pointing at it but from only 39 root domains (immediate alarm bells!!). Most of the links are exact anchor text fro one particular term. So far we haven't been hit but i'm not naive to think we're out of the woods yet.
Algorithm Updates | | holmesy0