Panda, Penguin, unnatural links warning - anyone get all of them?

[indyank]

Has any site you control or manage been affected by two or more of the following?

1) Panda
2) Penguin
3) Unnatural links notification for individual pages.

I have never come across sites that were affected by both Panda and Penguin. If you perceive that you had been affected by both, did you recover from Panda before being hit by Penguin?

[edited by: tedster at 1:20 pm (utc) on Jul 25, 2012]

[JoeSinkwitz]

Yes. Have a few sites that had panda + penguin issues; all took the required steps and recovered from Panda after ~9 months, and then were hit with first iteration of Penguin...no recoveries there yet and I don't expect any for a while.

[indyank]

Interesting! So you got hit by Penguin only after you recovered from Panda. I was interested in these kind of replies.

Does this mean that Penguin is not run on sites that were affected by Panda? Awaiting to hear more responses.

[mhansen]

We have one site hit:

No - Panda
Yes - Penguin
No - Unnatural links notification for individual pages.

However, we have a different site in the same WMT account, that GOT the link warning message in March/April, but has never been effected by any algo changes.

[sid786]

There's barely a correlation between the Panda release date and the day my site went down. Anyway... I will just assume the site was pandalized.

Yes - Panda
No - Penguin
No - Unnatural link notification

No recovery thus far. The site was hit last year at the end of April I believe, and it passed through all the other panda and penguin updates.

[indyank]

Hmm...Thanks for the replies...pls. keep it coming...

so the little evidence here so far suggest that a site affected by one algo is not hit by another, unless it recovered from one... :)

[errorsamac]

I'm currently working on a site that has been hit by all three. In my case, the site got hit with Panda, then unnatural links, then Penguin. There was a period of time (between Penguin 1.0 and 1.1) when all three things affected the site. Eventually, it did recover from Penguin and now I'm fighting with unnatural links. After that, I get to tackle Panda.

[indyank]

the site got hit with Panda, then unnatural links, then Penguin.

I think you are talking about the first ever unnatural links notice that Google sent a month or two ago (just before Penguin). That was a manual site wide action and did you file any reconsideration request to come out of it? If not, how are you saying that Penguin had later affected your site?

[indyank]

between Penguin 1.0 and 1.1

and how are you saying there were two versions of Penguin?!

[errorsamac]

Here is the history of the website:

Oct 2011: Hit by Panda.
March 30th 2012: Unnatural links warning. No change in rankings.
April 19th 2012: Unnatural link penalty kicks in and rankings fall.
April 25th 2012: Hit by Penguin. Almost 0 Google traffic going to the site after this.
May 25th 2012: Penguin 1.1 runs and site regains pre-Penguin/post-Unnatural links rankings.


I filed a reconsideration request (due to unnatural links, not Penguin/Panda) and the penalty was "partially revoked" 10 days ago. So far I've seen no change in rankings after this partial revoking of the penalty.

[indyank]

I think you were not affected by Penguin at all. The fall in rankings for the manual spam action on unnatural links would have triggered after a few weeks and it happens to be April 19. The almost zero traffic on April 25 is something that you had to investigate. It could be anything from server issues to a temporary glitch. There was never a Penguin 1.1 update AFAIK.

Updated: Penguin 1.1 was just a data refresh and not an algo update. So if Penguin 1.0 had mistakenly reduced your traffic to zero, this would have brought it back.

[Lame_Wolf]

No - Panda
No - Penguin
No - Unnatural links notification for individual pages

[idolw]

Panda - No
Penguin - Yes
Unnatural links notification for individual pages - No

I am afraid that means I am stuck deeper than I'd wish to.

[buddhu]

Yes, yes, yes.

Hit by every damn thing.

Long established site, heaps of substantial, original content. Admittedly some badly designed (image) pages that would look to a bot as if the pages were empty apart from template elements. Also some old paid and template links, including some sitewides.

On balance though, most of our activity has been building content and genuine links. Compared to many competitors we are way cleaner, but only one major competitor seems to have been hit harder. :-(

Cleaning and restructuring the site, nuking questionable links, crossing fingers, submitting r-i requests...

...and hoping for the best.

[indyank]

Unfortunately reconsideration requests won't work for Panda and Penguin...

Did you see a significant traffic drop after every update? Traffic must have been zeroed out or gone so low if you had been hit by the animals and others...

[buddhu]

No, the reconsiderations are after the notices (*with* yellow icon) about unnatural links.

We got through Panda until 2.5 and suddenly lost a lot that day. We saw further falls with Penguin. We've seen fluctuation with subsequent rollout versions. I can easily identify shortcomings that probably account for the hits. Some are issues caused by gallery and testimonial pages that would seem thin and probably dupe to an algorithm. Also some spun reworks of subjects previously covered in older articles.

I am also aware of link profile issues.

When I say we lost a lot I don't mean a total tank, I mean dropping from Google #1 on most terms to like 6th and 7th place - or page 2 for some terms.

I have a roadmap for a mountain of site fixes and improvements, and a cooperative web designer who gets the jobs done fast. It's be quicker if I could make the edits myself, but we have a strict site management and security regime that permits server access only to the IT manager, server/database admin and the web designer. :/

The link profile issues I'm dealing with in various ways. Getting bad links removed where possible and trying to put measures in to satisfactorily block juice passing from those links I can't change.

Also have a lot of link-building going on via content creation, PR activity, social networking etc.

Too few hours in the day.

[buddhu]

I've been doing this for 10 years, and this is the first period of more than a week or two that we haven't enjoyed #1 for the majority of our money terms.

I think the phrase is "shock to the system", or perhaps "wake-up call".

[aristotle]

Presumably Panda and Penguin are separate parts of Google's ranking algorithm and work independently of each other. However, since Panda was implemented more than a year before Penguin, it could have produced some effects or reactions by site owners that later affected how Penguin sees the site. For example, if Panda caused a major drop in traffic, or a change in the nature of the traffic, then user metrics could be affected. Also, if a site lost most of its Google traffic due to Panda, then any effects from Penguin might not be noticed because of the extremely low traffic.

[indyank]

No, but I am talking about sites that get 7000+ unique visitors per day after the Panda hit...that is good enough to notice a drop...