Google Launches Update Targeting Spam... Again? Penguin Update

[netmeg]

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."

[insidesearch.blogspot.com...]

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]

[HuskyPup]

The problem jmcc is that if it is not a spoof then where does this leave certain businesses:

One US Digital Marketing agency stated:

“90% of our business was outsourced to India, we assumed they had the knowledge to keep Google happy but we were wrong”

I've sent it to my guys in India to find out the truth because don't forget all that medical and legal stuff that's outsourced there amongst many other things.

[jmccormac]

Yep HuskyPup.
It is a terrifying prospect for the outsourcers and those doing the outsourced linkbuilding/spinning if it is a genuine post. The idea of all those people protesting outside Dear Leader Larry's Indian offices seemed a bit strange. It is going to have a financial impact though - many sites hit by Google's updates will no longer be able to afford to outsource work. The twiddlers in Google messing with the algorithms don't see the people affected by their twiddling and have no idea of the fragility of the web economy at the lower end of the scale.

Regards...jmcc

[BaseballGuy]

Has anyone confronted Matt Cutts and asked him why so many white hat small businesses got wiped out with Penguin?

Or does he refuse to even publicly admit there is a problem?

Have they also asked him if he acknowledges or denies the existence of "negative SEO" as well as how easier it has gotten to wipe competitors off the face of the map with a few million links pointing at their site and a couple of other dirty tricks (that I won't disclose).

[edited by: BaseballGuy at 5:37 pm (utc) on May 4, 2012]

[netmeg]

Yes, of course that is a spoof.

Gandhalf - Affiliate marketing is when you sell something that someone else makes, takes payment for, and ships. So yes, Amazon is affiliate marketing.

[diberry]

The article was a spoof, but not the Matt Cutts video we were pulling quotes from. He was dead serious that somehow saying nasty things about people = gaming Google.

ETA: which would suggest that no one ever says nasty things about others EXCEPT when they're link-baiting Google, and therefore Google is responsible for all the hate in the world. Good one, Matt!

[edited by: tedster at 1:58 am (utc) on May 10, 2012]

[heisje]

The people at G have lost all sense of rationality. Spam paranoia is their (dangerous) condition. Here we attempt to rationalize the irrational. Cannot be done, waste of time.

This madness will go on till a competitor with deep pockets and an intelligent team turns up (not probable). Or till regulators break up G in parts (more probable, but not expected to happen any time soon).

.

[fabulousyarn]

They must have really had their feelings hurt a widdle bit when the sunglass guy who had REAMS of bad pr was number one. They took him out. It was all over the news - so I guess maybe they are a little bruised on that one!

[seoskunk]

That article was hilarious really made me laugh. But like all good spoofs contained more than a grain of truth

[tedster]

The article was a spoof, but not the Matt Cutts video we were pulling quotes from. He was dead serious that somehow saying nasty things about people = gaming Google.

Google has been using world-class sentiment analysis for the News section over the past few years. Doesn't take much of a stretch to see them extending that into social and blog comments, too.

[Aoe2913]

NM

[seoskunk]

NM

Whats that stand for?

K got it NM is "Never Mind" or "Nothing Much" or "No Message" or in this instance it could mean "NO Matt"

[diberry]

@tedster: "Google has been using world-class sentiment analysis for the News section over the past few years. Doesn't take much of a stretch to see them extending that into social and blog comments, too."

That's really worrying to me, because it has a potential to squash minority viewpoints almost as effectively as censorship.

[edited by: tedster at 1:58 am (utc) on May 10, 2012]

[HermanMunster]

That's really worrying to me, because it has a potential to squash minority viewpoints almost as effectively as censorship.

As one of the minority viewpoints that has already been squashed by this update, I wholeheartedly concur.

I posted last week about how I believed old blackhat linking campaigns by the company my site criticizes had come back to haunt me with Penguin. Google had removed the penalties from those a few years ago.

But just last night I found new bad backlinks that probably triggered Penguin. Hidden links have been placed in the <head> of obvious spam sites, starting March 13th. I hadn't posted on my blog for over a year, and started posting again at the end of February. Quite a timely response by the blackhats.

So there's your answer folks, just start buying bad links for your competitors, and Google will surely reward your ingenuity.

[Donna]

Now the question is , are they going to run this the same way they do with Panda?

[Jez123]

I wonder why google gave a heads up in WMT to un natural linking webmasters and nothing to the people it was going to devestate with the penguin update. Have we done something even worse that buying links in google's eyes?

[BaseballGuy]

I wonder why google gave a heads up in WMT to un natural linking webmasters and nothing to the people it was going to devestate with the penguin update. Have we done something even worse that buying links in google's eyes?

Same thing happened to me. I never got a single message in my GWMT and yet I got wiped out by Google Penguin.

How many other people did this happen to?

[n00b1]

I didn't technically get a message in WMT related to unnatural linking. I got an email which I was able to reply to. This was for a penalty that was enforced back in December last year related to 'inorganic links'. I am now coming to the conclusion that even if I can somehow get this revoked the evil trigger-happy Penguin will punish the website indefinitely for the remaining cruddy links I simply couldn't clean up. I don't think I am the only person in this position and I think it is ridiculous for Google to place an algorithmic filter for that kind of thing. It can't always be controlled, it might have happened in the past and everyone makes mistakes. Even Google, clearly, as this whole Penguin situation shows.

[Jez123]

I don't think I am the only person in this position and I think it is ridiculous for Google to place an algorithmic filter for that kind of thing.

Looking at my own backlink profile, there are many many scraper type links, spun articles (spun from a legitimate article I wrote in 2007 that have my link at the bottom). 58 links reported by WMT that ARE NOT THERE - not even in cached copy of the site (another scraper I suspect). Too many beyond my control.

The ones in my control, my own sites and an Opera blog that I forgot I had I have edited if the anchor text is too contrived or completely removed. I don't know what more I can do.

And to add insult to injury, google has rewarded my competitor who has unashamedly totally copied my product, marketing and so on has been awarded pretty much ALL of the positions I held (mostly he was on page 2 or lower for everything. It's like coming home and finding another man in bed with your wife that has also adopted your kids and changed all the locks. The only consolation is that his site is horrible, but no doubt if he has any brains is investing into that.

[diberry]

My site that got dinged is very similar to some other sites I run which did not get dinged. I looked at the differences between the dinged and non-dinged sites, and finally decided that the dinged site has a LOT of editorial links, which are genuine and organic, but I've long wondered whether the algo could be trusted to know the difference. So I submitted a reinclusion request stating that Penguin may think those links aren't genuine, but they are.

My practice has always been what I thought Google advised through Cutts: leave genuine links followable, but no-follow affiliate links, so that's what I did. And I only included affiliate links when they were of interest to users. Like, I might have ten articles with no affiliate links, but the eleventh talks about a project you can do that involves buying some supplies, so I give the audience an affiliate link to the supplies somewhere online - many of them will just click to see what the supplies look like, and never even realize it was an affiliate link.

I'll keep you posted on whether Google responds to my request. I can't think of any other black hat thing they might think I'm doing.

This is really ridiculous and a little insulting. When I first bought this domain, they refused to give it any PR for several updates, and I had to send a reinclusion request. It had been somebody's homepage a few years before, then expired completely, so I said in my request "Maybe that owner did something against your rules, but I haven't." Which is a joke, because it was just someone blogging about their life. I doubt they ever had more than 20 people visit.

Google is too focused on protecting their algorithm. They've lost all perspective. In the past few days, I've set up several more social media outlets for getting my site exposed to people who will actually enjoy it. Using that, I'm going to build my traffic back up.

[edited by: tedster at 1:59 am (utc) on May 10, 2012]

[breeks]

My site that got dinged had over 600,000 links coming from one site, which was a branded affiliate site. I did see this a while ago but, decided if it ain't broke don't fix it. One of those things where you think "if only I had."
Anyway links have been removed, the few that do point back are now no follow, and now its waiting game to see if this was the problem. So far holding at 50% of normal traffic, and the same for earnings.

[mike2010]

Could we get an official word from friggin Google regarding how LONG this penalty will be in place ?

And what will help lift it, if anything ? time ?

or are we permanently f'd ?

[fabulousyarn]

I had the same thing happen - I got a warning about inorganic links - went into SEOmoz and saw what they were referring to - found the network that they were originating out of (obvious bad links back in, on garbage blog sites) and requested removal. Removal is definitely happenning, and I've emailed the Google Quality Team to let them know what actions I took and what was going on. Am hoping that helps with my mysterious penalty from bad inlinks. However, I am also seeing something else. Even with my two or three major keywords hosed, my daily sales are ok. Yesterday, I did an experiement with adwords, and bought that traffic (by buying my now page 8 keywords). Sales stunk. Turned it off. Today rocked. Confusing. I have experienced this before - my income is not dependent upon traffic in terms of click through, so I think all the advertising I do on targeted subject sites (forums, websites, etc) is paying off - I have no idea what I would be doing for sales generating traffic if I didn't have all the other advertising placement on other sites. Also, the keywords I lost were big keywords, my keyword phrases still seem ok. That said, I think what google is doing here, as I said, is reverting to a more traditional situation, where the FREE web is INFO only, and if you are selling stuff, you are JUST going to have to PAY for advertising.

[TypicalSurfer]

The definition of spam is "competes with ads".

Total nonsense on the part of webmasters to believe that google is genuinely interested in SERP quality, if they could deliver no SERPS and still put up quarterly sequential earnings growth they would do so.

Larry Page took the reins over from Eric Schmidt and if he wants to be a rock star CEO it's about earnings not "relevance". They'll push that envelope as hard as they can and who really knows how low they can go in terms of quality, keep in mind that most consumers actually think McDonalds is real food so with that as an indicator of how low you can actually set the bar I'm assuming they'll continue on the same trajectory of wiping commercial results from their indexes.

It really doesn't make sense to show results that compete with ads.

[adamxcl]

If anyone wonders about SERP quality, just do a search and play the game. Instead of Finding Waldo, it's Finding a Real Search Result on the page. It's like a cliched used car salesman took over the pages.

I really never thought they would mess with the core search. I figured they would play with and mess up other things but not that. I think they peaked with results that were the best around 2007/2008 and have gone down hill ever since. Replacing relevant content sites with 2004 Yellow Page listings without any content is not a improvement.

[BaseballGuy]

@Surfer

It really doesn't make sense to show results that compete with ads.

Early this week, I put up a free advertisement for Bing and DuckDuckGo on all of my websites. No affiliate links, just free coverage for both of those two search engines.

I then put some text letting my visitors know that if they couldn't find what they were looking for in Google, that Bing was a viable alternative.

Will this cause Google to bleed massive profits? No. But if more and more webmasters give free "air time" to Bing, and any other viable search engine out there, over time I surmise that Google will start to lose market share.

Google may be the butch draconian librarian, but webmasters are still the Wordsworth of the internet. Without us, Google wouldn't be #*$!.

[edited by: BaseballGuy at 2:18 am (utc) on May 6, 2012]

[breeks]

I switched to Bing and encouraging everyone I can to do the same. If I hear someone say "Google It" I remind them the last thing Google needs is free advertising.

[CainIV]

My personal feeling was the string of GWT notices over the last 5-6 months in total were to gain data. The mass send over the last month was to gain last minute data to tweak this release.

Many - if not most - who received that message seen no change in traffic at all, even through Penguin.

While the severity of the filter might be loosened or tightened as can be expected with any update, my sense of this update would be that it would not decay, fade or reduce itself in severity unless the website over-optimization was reduced.

This feels like the parallel update to Panda in terms of assessing a site as a whole, internal links as a whole, inbound links and assessing limitations and thresholds.

[BaseballGuy]

My personal feeling was the string of GWT notices over the last 5-6 months in total were to gain data. The mass send over the last month was to gain last minute data to tweak this release.
Many - if not most - who received that message seen no change in traffic at all, even through Penguin.

I'm not following.....I did not get any message whatsoever, yet for my best keyword, was wiped down to page 8 with Penguin. This from being in position #1, then #2 for 4 years.

[aleksl]

It's like a cliched used car salesman took over the SERPs.

ha-ha, funny. google IS that used car salesman.

bump for research.

ecommerce site, EMD, with 7-digit revenue and a ground breaking products (some unique in the industry), lost 65% of free Google traffic.

We are still on page 1 (#10) for our main KW and #1 for the KW that is our EMD. But long tail is shot, we lost many first pages.

I am thinking maybe it is one affiliate who liked our product so much she placed our banner on all of her "articles" site's 15K pages. Trust me, it wasn't us who blasted our banner across that site. There's also 3K+ links from a single placement in an industry Blue Book -type site. If google can't figure out that was essentially 2 links, they need someone with a fresher head to look at algos before they go live.


P.S. Google, stop calling me with trying to sell more Adwords. We are not going to spend a single additional dime and are pursuing other options until this mess is resolved.

[Whitey]

yet for my best keyword, was wiped down to page 8 with Penguin

@BaseballGuy - sounds like this particular keyword received special treatment for specific over use of links on a specific page. All other page URL's escaped, i assume. Y/N?

I wouldn't expect all sites to receive notifications. Very often they are not to be relied upon anyway and act like a FUD warning drop, that get's relayed in a viral FUD across the web.

Anyone that escaped this must be living on the edge if they know that what they are relying on is exact match anchor text / EMD's etc. and diminishing relative Panda quality compared to the competition.

The challege is to build exceptional sites that build upon brand reputation. But i can't see the level of investment going in for the majority of sites, especially with much reduced earnings, which means to me reduced participation in the web and a polarization of visible websites - most of whom are brand. I'm sure Google has thought of this, but i can't figure out out how reducing the size of the web economy can be a good thing in the long run.

But i'm relying on a common sense and not as informed as Google , and this concerns me.