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]

[jemois]

< moved from another location >

Should this data refresh reanalyze the already penalized sites and remove the penalties for updated sites, or is it just a change of algorithm to include more types of Penguin penalties ?
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:49 pm (utc) on May 26, 2012]

[Robert Charlton]

Continuing discussion from...

Is a new iteration of Penguin rolling out?
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4457605.htm [webmasterworld.com]

(PS: the announcement of a "data refresh" by Matt Cutts was made yesterday on twitter, and tranquilito caught it and we discussed it on the previous thread. We didn't call it an "update". The designation of "Update 1.1" is apparently not official... that came from Matt McGee on SEL... but in the interest of keeping things in sync, we've split off our discussion.)

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:27 pm (utc) on May 26, 2012]

[lwraul]

One of my site , went for a keyword from #3 to #22 and another keyword form #5 to..maybe i shouldn't say...on place #100+ . It's an high quallity with this ranks for almost one year and the interesting thing is...now on the first page in is just low quallity sites and more interesting , there are four very low qualitty " free domains " ( subdomains ) . This what i call an "good " update , i don't know what to say or do anymore , to laugh or cry ?

[aristotle]

lwraul
Have you recently made any big changes on your website, or acquired a lot of new backlinks?

[tranquilito]

A little off topic but funny :)
[youtube.com ] Hitler's Reaction to the recent Google Penguin update (04-24-2012) - YouTube

[lwraul]

Thanks for asking aristotle , no i didn't make any changes or build any backlinks . I just get hit by this " wonderfull " and " high quallity " Google's Update today . In this situation is 80% of the sites what was on first page in my niche . Now almost all ten sites from first page are not low but very low quallity ( 3 subdomains with almost no text on it , 2 domains with 2 pages with almost any text , not even metas' and full of links to another sites , 3 web directories )...this is ridiculos , serriuosly...

[Robert Charlton]

lwraul - Sorry to hear that you got hit. Is there anything in common with the top sites in your niche... like they may have all had links from certain niche directories... that might have caused them all to lose link juice?

Re the bad results showing up... after each "update" or data refresh, I think it's inevitable that you will get junk surfacing, so that Google can test the algo and zero in on what's good. Otherwise, you end up getting either too much collateral damage, or too much bad stuff staying under the radar.

[outland88]

I got walloped in the past 24 hours more than I’ve been hit in 10 years and I have some excellent content. The only thing I’m seeing is they’re emphasizing brands more than ever and most of my pages seem to be dropping to 20-22, others worse. I’m really seeing some pretty big shake-outs in my areas. Actually seeing many info sites dead in the water for years that weren’t even ranking now reborn with 10-15 year old information. I’m not going to attempt to figure it out heavily because I tire of Google.

[ascensions]

I used to be an animal lover. Now I have to explain to my children why I hurl soda bottles at the penguins and pandas at the zoo.

[anteck]

I'm not seeing any reports of improvements anywhere, it looks like they just finely tuned Penguin to Penalize yet more sites. I sometimes wonder if google flag a site for good - ie, once you're seen to be 'over optimising' then you're dropped for good, without recourse...

[brinked]

From what I am seeing, google has caught on to some link schemes. I have a client that had all link wheels to his site, I caught them easily and all of those sites are now de indexed. He lost a few pages of rankings which tells me most of his links were simply devalued.

I can guess a lot of people were hit this way. A lot of people have not recovered from this iteration because you will need to build back up your back links since many lost all/most of their back links from the penguin update, especially if you were only backlink building using 1 method such as spammy blog networks, link wheels etc.

many who were hit by this will not recover right away because they are in shock. They were just hit by a penalty that focuses on spammy back links so they are hesitant to go after new links. These sites need new non spammy links to make up for their lost ones.

[outland88]

Just throwing this out to kick around.

On the other hand though I am clearly seeing many sites resurface on May 26 that I filed DMCA links against long ago. That is against the law. If Google is not enforcing the removal requests by keeping the data and resurfacing it at later dates what would make me think any domain isn’t ultimately doomed by link profiles from long ago. Bottom line if Google is applying that approach some domains may be forever condemned as people have mentioned. Google may indeed keep quiet knowing the data can resurface to penalize a site. In other words it would take day by day monitoring of a link profile from a company that specializes in keeping old data that gets resurfaced as I mentioned.

Personally I haven’t built links in years and for the most part never. Anything I linked to was strictly for traffic(money) not rankings. Google likely sees it as the same thing, when it’s not.

[tedster]

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

According to what Matt Cutts wrote, this is just a data refresh and not an actual change in the Penguin algorithm.

[outland88]

Not to quiblle but a "data refresh" and "1st Penguin algo data refresh" as stated in SEL article might be two different things IMO. The latter seems like what we missed first time we're coming back for. I'm not jumping to conclusions because some data refreshing only lasts 3-4 days in my areas. I'm seeing some pretty drastic changes though like they're following Bing for a change instead of vice versa. Then again I'm now seeing more of what Penguin sufferers saw in April.

[tedster]

I don't quite follow you, outland. Isn't Matt McGee also making it clear that the first Penguin algorithm is still in play, and not changed? That only the data it works on has been refreshed?

[outland88]

Read some of DS's comments. I just saw his comments a few minutes ago but he also seems to feel it does include what they might have missed. His thinking seems to follow the way I interpret it and how to proceed.

[tedster]

I also think we should make note of the form Google published for those who feel they were a false positive for Penguin:

[docs.google.com...]

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I wrote about a massive crawl of my site a couple of weeks ago and I had another on the 25th(not the 26th). As far as I can tell my site remains unchanged in rank, has anyone who reported being affected also noticed a big crawl increase?

I'd like to see if "data refresh" means "spike in crawling" because I can see the crawl patterns and would know something might be up before it happens(officially). That might not be entirely useful information to have but I can get in the habit of auditing my own sites when I see the spikes and, perhaps, get a jump on fixing the damage.

[gouri]

I can guess a lot of people were hit this way. A lot of people have not recovered from this iteration because you will need to build back up your back links since many lost all/most of their back links from the penguin update, especially if you were only backlink building using 1 method such as spammy blog networks, link wheels etc.

@brinked,

It can sometimes take time to build links so I was wondering if adding good content can help to deal with Penguin?

[brinked]

gouri,

That is hard to say and depends heavily on your site. I would suggest you take a good hard look at your backlink profile. Does anything seem un-natural? Do you have all blog links on sites that seem to have been developed only for the purpose of linking out?

You can have the best content in the world, if you're in a competitive industry, you're going to need some solid backlinks. When I say "solid backlinks" I am not talking about high pr links. I stopped chasing PR about 5 years ago. Now I only check the PR of the homepage of the site to make sure it does not have any sort of penalty. Most reputable websites will have some kind of home page page rank. Once that is established, I do not mind pr0 or low pr links at all. If someone wants to link to me from a deep page on their site that will likely never receive a high pr, I have no problem with that.

These are the natural links that are working. Sitewide links will not do you any good. You need the non flashy links to back up the strong links. Think about when something goes viral. Something new just popped up and its awesome. Now think about the kinds of links it is going to attract. Is it going to get 100% high PR links? No of course not, for every sitewide or high PR link its going to receive, it will receive hundreds of deep links on new pages or low authority sources. And they will come from various types of sources (social media, blogs, forums, personal sites, etc etc).

If you feel your backlink profile is not the issue, take a hard look at your site. Over optimization has been around for a while so I would stick with the basics. Is there any anchor stuffing going on? Any keyword stuffing happening in the footer that might seem innocent? I saw one guys site get hit by penguin and he had in the footer "our coverage area" and when you clicked it, it revealed a massive list of like 100 different cities and 50 different zip codes. This was all innocent to him, but could be a very real possibility of the reason why he was hit by penguin.

[santapaws]

in my niche all the true information sites have gone, the sites that actually self wrote about the topic from a position of knowledge. I guess their downfall was trying to make a living off that information by ultimately having to send some visitors to other sites to pay the rent. Only big brands have survived but they just use a database feed, the unbiased expert information wont be found for several pages deep. The only surviving non-brand site is there because of massive blog links paid for within articles. They arrived with panda and have stayed ever since. It was sad when i saw where Panda took this search engine, i am truly amazed to see penguin has doubled the dose.

[outland88]

anyone who reported being affected also noticed a big crawl increase

Yes I noticed it before the initial Penguin and about May 24-25. The reason I noticed was four bots come in each time. One bot only comes in for about 50%. Three bots are not unusual, at times, if you utilize Adwords. Myself, I have always looked for those things before a big change. With the initial Penguin it baffled me because I was seeing what people mentioned but not that extreme. What I see now is ultra extreme, contains a lot of academic work, seems to chase US sites, and erases many “mom and pop” sites entirely from the game. In my areas If you’re not a very recognizable brand now you’re gone. What makes me laugh is after years I see Google giving an accurate link picture.

I think also people gain a false perspective they do things correctly but for years Google has let large sites penetrate many genre’s based upon their size. In other words automotive areas may not be forced to deal with Playboy, the Times, Huffington Post, etc, etc, because those mentioned decided to run a page on the subject.

[MrSavage]

This explains the traffic on one of my sites. Pretty much punted from existence. Penguin was dealing with spam correct? I would assume that I need to fill out that form. Honestly I am getting a bit confused on what happens from week to week. So for me, 1 site seems fried, checking others and will report back.

[gouri]

@brinked,

Thanks for the response. It is really informative.

That is hard to say and depends heavily on your site. I would suggest you take a good hard look at your backlink profile. Does anything seem un-natural? Do you have all blog links on sites that seem to have been developed only for the purpose of linking out?

I had a lot of links coming from forum signatures using a keyword phrase as anchor text. I removed them, but they are still showing up in WMT. Do you think that I will have to wait until they don’t show in WMT to see the effects of the change?

I also saw the content from one page of a site that I am working on, on multiple pages of another site. There is also a link back (using the URL of the page as anchor text) to the page that my content is on. This is on many pages of their site. Do you think that this could be causing duplicate content issues and also too many links to a page coming from another site?

I also see a couple of web directories linking to the home page of the site using the title of the site as anchor text from different categories, in some cases from many different categories. Could these links be affecting me in some way?

Is there any anchor stuffing going on?

From one of my pages, I had several images linking back to the home page using the alt text as the anchor text. The alt text for all of these images are similar, and they are phrases that I want the page that the images are on to rank for and not the home page. I had these links for several years and don’t think that they were causing a penalty but I am not sure. Do you think that Penguin is taking a close look at links, both internal and external, and may have seen this as over optimization?

Also, could using the same anchor text (e.g. great widgets) a couple of times on different pages (Page A, Page B, Page C) to link to the same page (Page D) from the body text of these pages when on the whole there aren’t too many internal links (these three links would be over 15% of all the internal links) also be considered over optimization. Before Penguin, I don’t think that I was penalized for this but I was wondering if you think that this is something Penguin would target?

[brinked]

I had a lot of links coming from forum signatures using a keyword phrase as anchor text. I removed them, but they are still showing up in WMT. Do you think that I will have to wait until they don&#65533;t show in WMT to see the effects of the change?

Worst case, these links were probably devalued. Google wont really punish a site for low quality links, they will simply disregard them. You could try removing them, but I doubt that will get your ranks back without building up better links.

I also saw the content from one page of a site that I am working on, on multiple pages of another site. There is also a link back (using the URL of the page as anchor text) to the page that my content is on. This is on many pages of their site. Do you think that this could be causing duplicate content issues and also too many links to a page coming from another site?

No. That is a good link. Google knows where the content came from, especially if they are linking to you. So many people like to put the blame on duplicate content when that is not why they were penalized.

I also see a couple of web directories linking to the home page of the site using the title of the site as anchor text from different categories, in some cases from many different categories. Could these links be affecting me in some way?

A lot of directories are garbage and dont offer much. Google probably devalued these links and that is why you might have lost your rankings. Sounds like a lot of your links are now lost due to penguin.

From one of my pages, I had several images linking back to the home page using the alt text as the anchor text. The alt text for all of these images are similar, and they are phrases that I want the page that the images are on to rank for and not the home page. I had these links for several years and don&#65533;t think that they were causing a penalty but I am not sure. Do you think that Penguin is taking a close look at links, both internal and external, and may have seen this as over optimization?

If its just on that one page probably not an issue. You can try removing that if you think it might be a concern.

Also, could using the same anchor text (e.g. great widgets) a couple of times on different pages (Page A, Page B, Page C) to link to the same page (Page D) from the body text of these pages when on the whole there aren&#65533;t too many internal links (these three links would be over 15% of all the internal links) also be considered over optimization. Before Penguin, I don&#65533;t think that I was penalized for this but I was wondering if you think that this is something Penguin would target?

If its being over done then it could be a cause for over optimization. Try to cut back on areas where it may seem redundant. Read it out loud and ask a friend if they think those links would be useful.

[Sand]

Do you think that I will have to wait until they don’t show in WMT to see the effects of the change?

Your links have probably been devalued. They were maybe helping you once, and now they no longer are. Unless you've received an unnatural links warning, removing them will probably do you no good. It's like saying, my shoes have holes in the bottoms, will taking them off help my feet feel better. No...you just need to go get yourself some new shoes.

So go out and get yourself some real links.

[gouri]

Thank you for these responses guys.

They really help tell me where I should focus my efforts.

I think that I need to get some external backlinks. The ones that I have may have been devalued. Would links from related sites be what I should focus on?

Also, could using the same anchor text (e.g. great widgets) a couple of times on different pages (Page A, Page B, Page C) to link to the same page (Page D) from the body text of these pages when on the whole there aren’t too many internal links (these three links would be over 15% of all the internal links) also be considered over optimization. Before Penguin, I don’t think that I was penalized for this but I was wondering if you think that this is something Penguin would target?

If its being over done then it could be a cause for over optimization. Try to cut back on areas where it may seem redundant. Read it out loud and ask a friend if they think those links would be useful.

@brinked,

I looked and also see that this phrase is in the navigation link, the title tag, the h1 tag (along with other words) and the h2 tag (along with other words). In these instances, I don't think that things are overdone.

I am thinking that the internal links in the body text also using the phrase might be causing an over optimization penalty, if there is one. Would changing a couple of them to related phrases perhaps help deal with over optimization if it is there and maybe also strengthen the theme of "great widgets" (the phrase that I am trying to rank for)?

[diberry]

I just found something odd in my backlinks in WMT. I have inbound links for 98 pages of my site from another website. When I try to click any of these inbounds, I get an OpenDNS "phishing" warning and it won't go onto the site. So I went through a proxy, and the site appears to be a sort of directory that's tracking traffic increases/decreases on various sites, including mine. Just a sort of junk site.

The phishing warning part is worrying in terms of my backlink profile. I would think Google would easily catch onto what a site like that is doing, so it shouldn't be a problem. But I'm not sure. And I don't see that I can do anything about it.

[crobb305]

I just found something odd in my backlinks in WMT. I have inbound links for 98 pages of my site from another website. When I try to click any of these inbounds, I get an OpenDNS "phishing" warning and it won't go onto the site. So I went through a proxy, and the site appears to be a sort of directory that's tracking traffic increases/decreases on various sites, including mine. Just a sort of junk site.

Yeah, Google Webmaster Tools displays those types of links, including search portals, competitor-spying websites, etc. I'm not sure if they are really counted as links, but I'm also not sure why G would display them as such. Many of them are the cause of erroneous 404s. It's also one of the reasons that tracking down "unnatural links" is an impossible task.

Worst case, these links were probably devalued. Google wont really punish a site for low quality links, they will simply disregard them. You could try removing them, but I doubt that will get your ranks back without building up better links.

We are seeing Penguinized sites that don't even show up for snippets of their own content outside of the supplemental index, and they rank position 3 or higher for their own company name. This is a penalty, above and beyond simple link devaluation. Gouri, does your website rank for snippets of content, or do scrapers show up?