Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Matt Cutts "In the next few days, we’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. While we can't divulge specific signals because we don't want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics."
Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:31 pm (utc) on Apr 25, 2012]
[edit reason] added quotes - updated link [/edit]
[edited by: tedster at 1:41 am (utc) on May 10, 2012]
They never look into the human aspect...
I would like to add that if you DO go to the Google Doc and complete the feedback form, don't focus on yourself and how badly the ranking change hurt you. Focus on the reasons your site is useful to their customers. Imagine if you will that you are emailing a webmaster of another website, asking them to share your site with their visitors... you are.
Don't say: I used to rank for "this money making term" for 10 years, and now its gone. My family is going to starve and we'll be firing staff.
Instead, Say: Our family run site offers your customers the ability to "solve this problem" or "buy this product" and we have a fully staffed warehouse in "this location", with experts in the field for "this many years" waiting to answer their questions.
Planet13, well said.
Is Penguin world wide already?
It's ironic the petition is about penguin and not panda since one is about quality and the other about gaming the system. I think quality is much harder for a machine to judge than link building.
Donna wrote: "Less is More ! Follow this advice and you will recover eventually or at least a little bit."
"Penguined", "Pandalized" - a totally moronic and unprofessional environment created by Google, devoid of transparent rules, or by any kind of rule for this purpose, within which we are called to operate, unlike fields like industry and trade where logic, common sense, rules and open competition are prevalent.
How low has our webmaster lot fallen because of the total dominance of an unchallenged corporation fueled purely by extreme greed.
It always boils down to this eventually.
Search is a zero-sum game. It isn't costing "business" in general. It's just redistributing cashflow to different businesses.
In other words another artical, just as biased, could be written about how this is GREAT for business.
EMDs are tricky, I have a few winners and a few loosers, the ones that have come out on top for myself, I have not linked the keyword for the EMD more than a couple of times, the EMDs I have that have been hit I have linked the keyword associated with the EMD more frequent.
Age of sites are similiar and the sites are built in a similiar fashion, so this has been the only diference.
On a further note about links, sites I that have got low quality blog links for have been pushed down, same penality EMD or other, it has not made a diference.
Sites I have with links from ordinary non blog type sites seem not to have dropped.
On a diferent note, the sites I still have that were either promoted or not dropped produced the best sales yesterday that I have had in almost 2 years. Traffic was increased slightly, but users must have been unable to find any other sites to compare in the results. A bonus for myself, but I would be the first to admit if I was a purchaser I would not like the results.
Bigest losers: exact-match domains.
Business is NOT a zero sum game, and neither, then is anything attached to it, including the impact on commerce of Google twiddling.
Anybody noticing any difference between sites you have in GWT vs those that are not managed there?
Have to disagree - I have 8 EMDs all are number 1
I would have to disagree with EMDs comment
Social media is SUCH a powerful influencing tool.
Content is King? Oh, come on!
