Google Releases Penguin Update 1.1

[breeks]

Via Matt McGee at SEL [searchengineland.com...]

Google’s Matt Cutts announced the news a short time ago on Twitter, calling it a “data refresh” that impacts less than one-tenth of a percent of English-language searches.

https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/206232437427154944

Minor weather report: We pushed 1st Penguin algo data refresh an hour ago. Affects <0.1% of English searches.

May 26, 2012 at 12:48am ET

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:30 pm (utc) on May 26, 2012]
[edit reason] added links and attribution [/edit]

[bikedorkseattle]

Having a bit of time to digest what has happened here I find it incredibly sad that smaller sites that are legitimate in terms of what they provide their users are being hit so hard. I might not be able to continue to build out tools for my users without this income. I think Google's effort to reduce webspam is important but it is taking so many innocent bystanders along with it. I mean, how much of the world economy revolves around google searches?

[joeventura]

What I don't get is the randomness of it all.

Folks are saying they are focusing more on brands.
I say bunk.

I own two domains (BRANDNAME).net and (BRANDNAME).info
both created with the same methods, .net has dropped like a stone in the SERPs and .info has not lost a single position since February.

They each have had no changes since Feb. and (BRANDNAME).com is eager for all the promotion they can get (lest I be DMCA'd out the window)

Can hardly get a handle on this stupidity!

[Interent Yogi]

it looks like they just finely tuned Penguin to Penalize yet more sites. "

We for one on one of our main white hat sites we have been de - penguined by the look although webmaster tools is 2 days behind so we can't see impressions.

The other one hit still hammered.

[nethead]

I manage one site where it was number 1 in google for over two years. When penguin hit it got pushed to 16 page and within days it was lingering between page 4 and 7. I started getting quality links and doing lot's of manual quality directory submissions. The keyword came back to page one about 10 days ago. Number 7 to be exact and 3 days ago it got pushed back to the 4th page. This really sux. Invested so much time and $$ into this but nothing positive as of right now.

btw, the sites that are dominating the top 5 spots in that niche are one of the weakest sites within that niche. The articles are pretty crappy and so is their link profiles. I can't figure out this one and I've been in the game since 99.

I will keep everyone posted.

[nethead]

One more thing. When Panda hit that site always benefited big time. The Penguin update pretty much ended up killing around 60% of our Google traffic. We were under the impression that our site was invincible since we gained so much traffic from almost every major update. Our site was the biggest and most detailed one in our niche. We have a premium (very generic) domain name and pretty good link profile.

Very upsetting to see our hard work melt over night. Worst of all is seeing the top spots in Google being dominated by crappy sites and the good ones are now nowhere to be found.

[Web_speed]

<0.1% of English searches.

0.1% My Ar...

The web went dead yet again across the many sectors i monitor. Conversions are down the toilet and zombie traffic galore... since this update was announced.

It just goes on and on.

[edited by: tedster at 12:30 pm (utc) on May 31, 2012]

[varun21]

Penguin comes just after the time when G wasn't happy about G+ and had just finished renovatting it. Has penguine got anything to do with the +1 data collected so far? My site has excellent likes/pins/tweets but I never used +1 and I got hit. Could it be that they are rating the +1 signal higher and as a sign of relevancy/authority.

(Pls don't mind, first time poster here.)

[backdraft7]

Never in a million years did I think that ezinearticles (and the 'thin' like) would outrank us on nearly all our bread & butter search terms. Way to go Google, you've put us out of business overnite.

[zeus]

crobb305 - I did one reinclusion in my life it was in march, be cause I got a notice of unnatural links, never asked or did anything to get links to that site, still got the notice. After I asked for a reinclusion I got bad rankings, not before, still dont rank for my main term, so I will NEVER again reply google with such notice, I would make a new site.

[leadout]

Never in a million years did I think that ezinearticles (and the 'thin' like) would outrank us on nearly all our bread & butter search terms. Way to go Google, you've put us out of business overnite.

And that is really the terrible part in this is that legitimate websites where income is really important are getting torched. I've spent 12 years on our community and I was just making enough to be able to dedicate a half time effort to it. I'm now looking at the prospect of having to go back to work full time and layoff the contract works I've got doing stuff.

Why can't Google give warning to people registered in GWT? Like "hey, you are about to get smacked because of these reasons?". Large companies can absorb things like this, plus they usually have a handful of SEO expert and content experts. I know the war is on splogs etc, but the real victims are small middle class sites. Where is the incentive to work so hard on a business where search is such a major component and just be destroyed in one day.

I'm pissed. Why the F*%$ would I continue to promote my G+ account and use Adsense (webmaster welfare) if this is how my business gets treated. We've made you a lot of money Google!

[bordering]

Varun21 suggested G plus one 'likes' might be more valuable than others from inferior sites which have a 'like' feature, something that crossed my mind too. No-one has done that on this page yet. Wonder why?

Also, on a slightly related note, if one's content is used in Knowledge Graph, how's that going to be evaluated? Surely should be as good as a followable link above the fold on the index page of a pr10 .gov site, based on the authoritativeness of the placement.

[Interent Yogi]

I had a couple of internal pages on a site of mine 3500 links that I tested once upon a time on a small business site many years ago in the grey hat days, Fourm signatures. Which did not work improving SERPS. So lucky after these 2 pages showed no improvement I canned the company that organised and advised it smartly. ( there legacy is hitting now ) I Got a WMT link warning which I think is related.

Questions


A: Shall I delete the 2 internal pages? 404 them ? and Put those couple of pages up on a new URL change the nav start a fresh

Or

B: Shall I 301 redirect them to:

1/ To the 2 new pages on the site does the penalty pass through a 301 ?

2/ to a competiors site ? Does the penalty pass through a 301 ?

3/ google.com

This is Its opening a can of worms, if the penalty pass through 301 redirects whats to stop mass attacks of bad links via 301's ( not sure if you can do them to off domain pages )

[WilliamT]

One thing I have notice with these changes is that contrary to what Google seems to want to do, garbage sites are now often right at the top of search results. As one example, this morning I searched for an article written by Dr. Dale Archer on organic food snobs. I had a quote from the article so I searched with that thinking I would get the original article. Right at the top of the results was what seemed to be the right thing but when clicking through it was obviously a scrapper plagiarizer site. The original article was not in the search results. I searched a few more times and eventually found the original article on the Fox News site. Now of course I could have read the text of the article on the scrapper site, but I wanted to link to the original. If this can happen to an article on Fox News, what hope is there for the rest of us?