Matt Cutts confirms Penguin Data Refresh - Oct 5, 2012

[SnowMan68]

Looks like it finally happened!

Weather report: Penguin data refresh coming today. 0.3% of English queries noticeably affected.

[twitter.com...]
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:56 am (utc) on Oct 6, 2012]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[aristotle]

Is there any proof of this?

textex -- I meant it to be a theory or hypothesis. That's why i used the word "could". It's an attempt to explain the reports of people who removed backlinks but haven't seen any indications of a recovery.

[textex]

I understand. I think google is not just going to release sites once the link profile is cleaned up. I think they want to see the site to continue to establish authority in its niche. That's just wishful thinking.

[Jez123]

I have a site linking / was linking to me that is sitewide, using just about every anchor text that could pertain to my site. I have a feeling that the links are being added then removed, added then removed. Though I can't see any now and none are cached as far as I can tell. I suspect someone negatively SEOing my domain. Either that or google WMT is showing me very old data that it was not showing a month ago.

[BaseballGuy]

Speaking of "neg SEO", I'm doing rep management for a client. One of his customers bad-mouthed his business and it was on a pretty powerful PR5 website.

I blasted it for 3 months straight and it went from position #1 to the top of page 4.

"Blasted" meaning doing what's generally considered "negative SEO" in this day and age, with one or two "twists".

Penguin has been a god-send for negative SEO, for both people like me who use it for good purposes (by helping clients clean up negative press/etc that Google artificially ranks high due to certain keywords being on the site, such as: fraud, scam, lawsuit, etc), and those who use it for bad purposes.

[joost]

Great!

Google does not officially deny the existence of negative SEO anymore:
[webmasterworld.com ]

A new market is born:
@financialhost:

Lot's of SEO's are reporting requests to spam competitors - Google's spam team have lost touch on reality.

And it works:
@BaseballGuy:

I blasted it for 3 months straight and it went from position #1 to the top of page 4.

So, did you make a mistake and you got punished by Allmighty G? No problem: if you now rank #40, just blast #1-39 and you're back on top!

[Jez123]

@ baseballguy. Am I right in guessing that adding then removing then adding and removing links would probably do the trick? As I said, it's not like it was just one anchor either it was all of them. Must have raised a massive flag with google.

[webseos]

What is this penguin data refresh. We saw Penguin Updates in May 2012. May be later updated. But what is DATA refresh

[tedster]

A Data Refresh runs the same algorithm over new website crawl data and re-scores the sites. An Update is a change to the algorithm itself.

[smallcompany]

Data Refresh

It makes me wonder why a site would be hit on October 5 if it was not on previous two runs. The change in link profile was to let some blog post linking go away (mostly same keyword).

[Splugged]

@joost

I think it's only logical. Logical.
An algorithm is simply logic, made up of mathematical calculations, percentages, etc ... And Google is an algorithm. Advanced but still an algorithm. Not a single algorithm in the world is able to determine who has placed a link on a website. Until now, they were just lying.

[sunnyujjawal]

no major change as all were accepting from Matt...Jarring & Jolting is still in his pocket

[seoskunk]

I was one of the 0.3 affected. I wonder is it best just to start another website or to fight on?