smithaa02 - 1:24 pm on Oct 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

Some idle musings...

We know google is terrified about people reverse engineering their algo. Penguin is one of their prized animals, so what if they scramble or slow down recoveries for that will recover. So google doesn't like to see sites jump from page 30 to page 1 in a day, right? So if they determine your new norm is page 1...they might put a slow releasing lock on your new rankings, just so you don't get instant feedback. Cross my fingers this is true.

Too much of a coincidence that two Pandas, EMD and now a Penguin data refresh come out. By combining algo updates over a short period of time, you make it difficult to reverse engineer. And if you have a really important update coming up...you put out a lot of noise/updates all at once. I think a Penguin algo (not data) update is around the corner.

That so many of us did not recover despite removing bad links (in fact I haven't read a single recovery story) could be an important clue as to how Penguin works. We know they haven't run a algo update...so it's the same algo just with new data.

Yet, if the data is good now...that means that they aren't looking at things 'now'. My hypothesis is that Penguin is all about time. Was your link building velocity over the past X months within standard deviation? In a recursive manner, was the link velocity to the sites that link to you within standard deviation? Did your and your backlinkers get too many backlinks after being hatched? Are backlink profiles (especially to certain keywords) looking like ski hills or are somewhat flat?

If my theory is correct, then your current backlink profile is irrelevant because google has your backlink profile in history and to them that is more important.