Penguin Punished URL returned to first page over the weekend

[neildt]

During this weekend, I noticed that a page we thought had been hit by Penguin has returned for the keyword phrase we were targeting back on page 1 of the SERPS.

Now it's either just a coincidence that it has returned, or it is due to the changes we made throughout our site for this page based on why we were hit by Penguin.

Anyone else see any changes over the weekend like this ?

[timwilliams]

nope, didn't see any changes this weekend, in fact it was eerily calm, no movement at all, is a storm a brewing?

[renomart]

Are you able to determine the length of time since the page has returned to page 1 of the serps?

[pons saravanan]

I was seeing very little positive movement on Saturday and Sunday. I thought it was due to some dancing. However, Today I could see some of my inner pages started ranking those were not ranking since April 24th.

In addition to this, My home page was thrown out of nowhere to started ranking inside the 100+ pages. Which indicates some sort of recovery from panda happened in the past days

And finally, I could see the rankings are quite inconsistent. There are a lot of fluctuations in ranking going especially today.

[neildt]

Are you able to determine the length of time since the page has returned to page 1 of the serps?

Basically from the 24th April when we appeared to be affected by Google's Penguin update, I took a totally random page that was affected and changed the internal linking structure that pointed to the page.

Before the 24th April this page would rank on page 1 of Google for "hotel name" and "hotel name city" as example phrases we were targeting. After this time, the ranking for those phrases was beyond page 30 of Google's SERPS.

Until yesterday (Sunday 24 June) when I checked if these phrases had made any progress and there were some changes in Google's SERPs. To my surprise we are ranking on page 1 for "hotel name city" and page 3 for "hotel name".

I've a fair idea what the problem is on our site, and this test proves it to some extent. But if I was affected by the Penguin update, why has this page come back to the first page, and Google haven't mentioned of a new Penguin update or data refresh of late (or has there been a update this weekend) ?

[jkdt0077]

I personally think there was an update on 19th June, but nobody else has echoed this. My site disappeared completely for a particular term that had quite a few exact anchor text links. Other sites were unaffected. I can't see this as being anything other than penguin.

[crobb305]

During this weekend, I noticed that a page we thought had been hit by Penguin has returned for the keyword phrase we were targeting back on page 1 of the SERPS.

Now it's either just a coincidence that it has returned, or it is due to the changes we made throughout our site for this page based on why we were hit by Penguin.

Anyone else see any changes over the weekend like this ?

Do your traffic data support the rankings you see?

[neildt]

If you mean have I seen new traffic from this keyword phrase over the weekend I'd say no, however, I only changed this 1 page that was affected by the Penguin update.

[crobb305]

If you mean have I seen new traffic from this keyword phrase over the weekend I'd say no, however, I only changed this 1 page that was affected by the Penguin update.

The reason I ask is because over the past month or so I have checked rankings only to find my site fully restored (seemingly) but not a single visitor. Google seems to be showing me on occasion what it thinks I want to see (my site ranking well), even though I keep a clear cache, history, stay logged out of GWT, and have personalization turned off. It is a very odd phenomenon that someone else may be able to explain better. I am not saying that you are seeing this, but I know I have -- and it's very frustrating.

[gouri]

Basically from the 24th April when we appeared to be affected by Google's Penguin update, I took a totally random page that was affected and changed the internal linking structure that pointed to the page.

@neildt,

Can you mention what you changed about the internal linking structure?

Did you change the number of internal links going to the page and/or the anchor text of the links going to the page?

[neildt]

@crobb305

I made sure I logged out of my Google account, clears history etc. Also I tried from different devices and browsers and different IPs etc to make sure.

Can you mention what you changed about the internal linking structure?

Yes actually that, the number of internal links going to the same page was reduced from about 30 links to just 3.

[Jez123]

Yes actually that, the number of internal links going to the same page was reduced from about 30 links to just 3.

Surely that's going to damage how your human visitors find your stuff isn't it? So much for write pages for people not for SE's! :)

[backdraft7]

I noticed a definite drop in traffic starting on Saturday June 23rd. The results are full of garbage again. Semantic search is producing ridiculous results in Google.

[neildt]

Surely that's going to damage how your human visitors find your stuff isn't it? So much for write pages for people not for SE's! :)

But at least this proves my point on why I think our site was affected. Now we can work at better ways with regards our internal anchor text linking

[Jez123]

Thanks Neildt. Interesting. I guess if mine doesn't improve, that's possibly the next thing to look at.

[gouri]

Thanks for the response.

Yes actually that, the number of internal links going to the same page was reduced from about 30 links to just 3.

Are the anchor texts of the links that are now there variations of one another?

Can you describe the links that you removed? Were some of them using the same anchor text?

[pons saravanan]

@crobb305
Yes, I am seeing this(inner page ranking) from my logs.

The only thing I can't check from the log is the home page ranking. Which I have checked in In Private Browsing mode and also I checked in a proxy seperately as well.

And I asked one of my friend to check in his PC in In Private Mode and he confirms that MY homepage ranks in 100+ positions.

[Bewenched]

@backdraft

I noticed a definite drop in traffic starting on Saturday June 23rd. The results are full of garbage again. Semantic search is producing ridiculous results in Google.

I saw a shift over the weekend as well, our pages which had been on a slow recovery seemed to have lost some traction as well.

I should note that we are a 14 year old ecommerce site that was hit by the initial panda which dropped us about 1/3 in traffic. We had been on a traffic increase slow and steady until this last week.

[klark0]

Isn't Penguin a sitewide penalty ? Correct me if I'm wrong.

If you had only one page that was penalized, doesn't that indicate that you weren't hit by Penguin in the first place, but rather you lost link juice from backlinks pointing to it or some other unrelated issue ?

[pons saravanan]

I have got my rankings dropped right on April 24th. Thats when the penguin released. I did not receive any WMT messages. If that is the indicator, then my site was hit by penguin. Due to my experience with this penalty, I am pretty sure that penguin is not sitewide penalty.

However, due to the impact that flows through links. It can affect all the pages that are linked from affected page(homepage).

Thats the reason my newly created pages were ranking for a short period of time. And then later gone beyond 100+ results.

[neildt]

Isn't Penguin a sitewide penalty ? Correct me if I'm wrong.

All of our hotel profile pages lost there rankings on the 24th April. So we were under the impression that it is a site wide penalty for this "type" of page. I believe that the issue we have on our site is site wide because all the pages that were affected have a common linking pattern.

This test I did on 1 particular page, appears to have got the rankings back. I've other example pages, that I tested that have also returned, or stayed on page 1 because of the technique I used.

[PaulJa]

When we got hit by The Penguin it effected everything that was sat on the penalised subdomain. We run other subdomains within the site for various other reasons (blog.*, news.* etc), and none of those pages got penalised, they held their SERPs, but everything on the penalised subdomain was smacked.

[neildt]

Similar to us, we got hit on all hotel profile "type" pages.

[PaulJa]

were your profile pages on their own subdomain?

[neildt]

No the profile pages were a sub directory off the normal domain name

[PaulJa]

Do you think maybe those pages just got deemed to be less relevant than they were prior to the latest updates?

I know why we got penalised by the update - we'd been a bit over zealous in the exact anchor link building for that site. But when Penguin hit, we lost everything. Even SERPS for terms & pages we'd never built a link in for for that subdomain.

[neildt]

@PaulJa I believe the page I tested came back to first page of Google because I reduce the number of exact match anchor text pointing to this page.

[martinacastro]

@neildt

the site wide links are from third sites, for link blogrolls or side links or footer links?

[neildt]

Some side links, but no footer, blog links etc

[martinacastro]

thanks!, but they are links from the same domain (internal links) or from other domains?