diberry - 4:13 pm on Aug 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

Leosghost, you've got the wrong picture (and btw, here's an entire thread on what happened to my site so you won't have to go hunting again: [webmasterworld.com...]

What I created were blog posts containing, say, lots of links to various DIY car repairs (not a real example). Each link got some helpful, original commentary from me. Readers constantly share these pages socially, which indicates to me they like them, and that's why I built them.

The SEO was mystified because, in his words, it was obvious to a reader that these posts were useful and not spammy, and he found it surprising if the algo had failed to detect the difference (I agree with that). After all, many blogs do this, and not all were Penguinized. I'm still not convinced this is the answer.

Another theory was that I did nothing wrong, but some of my inbounds were affected directly or indirectly by Penguin, and that caused me to be affected indirectly.

Anyway, the relevant point is, I haven't got much to lose, so bring that update on. My site's doing just fine with social - people love those "resource" posts, and they're promoting them fine, so if I lose all my Google traffic, I'll still be okay. But maybe just maybe an update will fix some of these problems. Either way, I covered myself by not relying on Google.