Robert_Charlton - 2:49 am on Jul 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

diberry - I'm glad you started this thread, which, I should mention, is in part a continuation of some points you were making in the Exit Rate discussion....

Is Panda all about Exit Rate?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4469114.htm [webmasterworld.com]

On that thread, you had posted, among other things...

I had sidestepped Panda by making improvements for users, but Penguin mistook all those changes for SEO attempts. At least, I guess that's what it was.

I responded....

Without taking this excellent thread off topic... what types of improvements "to please visitors" do you think might have sent false Penguin signals to Google? ....I'm not seeing how steps to increase user engagement within a site are likely to create signals that would have triggered Penguin.

Your subsequent description of what you'd done contained a comment that jumped out at me, but I was forced to leave it go at the time, both because of time pressures and because I really did not want to turn the Exit Rate discussion into an examination of your methodology. I feel though that such an examination would be appropriate here. Your comment (in msg#4470250) was...

--I combined some high exit rate pages into single awesome pages. This typically mirrored the common post-Panda SEO practice of combining "thin content" pages into longer pages and 301 redirected them, b/c as it happened, most of my high exit rate pages (back then) were rather weak.

What particularly struck me was your comment about using 301s. Inadvertent misuse of these can indeed send signals that look like spam to Google. Couple 301s with your goal of using them to create "single awesome pages", and I think you've highlighted an area that's worth further examination.

If the problem is Penguin (and I'm not sure if you've confirmed that), then possible over-enthusiastic application of 301s, even when redirecting pages within a domain, could well be the source of your trouble.

As for Google's fallibility... it's very possible that there were a fair number of false positives on Panda (though I myself haven't seen any), but I don't think I've heard of any false positives on Penguin. Not to say it isn't possible, or that you haven't been the unlucky one, but I don't think it happened very often.