diberry - 4:45 pm on Oct 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

Atlrus, this is what I've been trying to say all along. I had a site lose 80+% of its Google traffic on April 24. There's plenty wrong with the site, and I say this as someone who runs several much better sites - I KNOW this one has issues. But I had never manipulated links, never done any real SEO on it - I don't even understand how one selects keyphrases for targeting. Whatever Penguin saw wrong with my site wasn't not any of the "aggressive spam" or "unnatural links" we've been told was Penguin's target.

I hope this time people will actually read this thread and NOT just assume we're all whining because our sites got hit. My site DESERVED to lose rankings, okay? Because the content is mediocre, etc. It's just that my site's shortcomings have nothing to do with anything we're told Penguin is about.

I think it's very clear at the very least there's more to Penguin than unnatural links. I think there's more to it than "aggressive SEO", because I'm not capable of aggressive SEO due to my ignorance and still got hit.

And I too have seem some really spammy sites stay right on top since Penguin. In one query I track - for which my site has been removed from the entire index, as far as I can tell - there is still a "exactkeyphrase.blogspot.com" full of pages that have titles followed by bodies that say "coming soon!" It's like the site's not even been built, but there it sits, ranking. Penguin cannot be that stupid, can it?