1 year anniversary of penguin, no recovery

[Shepherd]

Well it's been a year since our site got hit by penguin demoting pages for specific keywords. Over the course of the year we have attempted to correct the issues that presumably caused the manual action and as of yet have had no success regaining the ranking we had for the specific keywords.

Early on we launched a campaign to remove the inbound links that we created/had built. We were successful in getting about 90% of the links removed.

We submitted a list of all links that were created/built by us to google along with the attempts that were made to have them removed.

We removed directories/pages that had excessive inbound links. (for example, example.com/widgets was removed and the content was added to example.com/widget)

We did not use the disavow tool.

We did no link building since penguin was applied.

We have not yet seen any upward movement in the serps for the affected keywords, still ranking 900+ for the affected keywords and the pages that are ranking are obscure pages that should not be ranking for the keyword.

Also, when penguin hit we lost site links and those have not come back even for a search of the domain name (example.com).

With the exception of the site links issue I would think that we have not regained our rankings due to the fact that we have not done any link building since penguin.

We still rank very well for long tail keywords.

[jetteroheller]

Just a notice about rumors.
One rumor was about spelling is now a quality indicator.

A pupil from me has a page which was first not affected and started to loose traffic middle November 2012. His site is German only. Now he has lost about 40% of traffic.

In February, he corrected all typing mistakes.
But this has no effect.

[Shepherd]

from the flag on your domain

It is my opinion that penguin is keyword specific, not so much a "domain" penalty in traditional thinking. We still rank very well for many keywords. However the main money terms, the ones that we did link building for, were hit specifically.

So, does penguin say:
1. example.com is not going to rank for "example" for (time period) no matter what, no matter if every pr9/10 website in the world links to them.

OR

2. All those links built pointing to example.com with the anchor text "example" are crap and are no longer going to be counted.

OR

?

[purplekitty]

It is my opinion that penguin is keyword specific, not so much a "domain" penalty in traditional thinking. We still rank very well for many keywords. However the main money terms, the ones that we did link building for, were hit specifically.

Yes, this is what I'm seeing as well. Penguin targeted highly searched for terms, not all keywords. I'm not dead in the water, but it would sure be nice to get the most highly searched for terms back.

Also, as I mentioned, I'm seeing a lot of pinterest boards showing up on the first couple of pages when I do a cursory check. My websites are very popular in social media - lots of page shares - including pinterest, so it will be interesting to see if my increasing footprint on pinterest has an affect with another Penguin update.

[aristotle]

It is my opinion that penguin is keyword specific, not so much a "domain" penalty in traditional thinking.

In most websites, the pagerank "juice" from backlinks is distributed throughout the site to most of the pages to one degree or another. So if you disavow any backlinks, or get them removed, or if the Google algorithm discounts them, then the whole site is weakened.

[netmeg]

I'm really over the attacks on SEO. Talk about 2007.

[Shepherd]

then the whole site is weakened.

That's a good point except I'm just not seeing it in my real world case.

example.com
keyword1: "example"
- 70% of links built to example.com had "example" for anchor text.
- #1/#2, ranking prior to penguin, page ranking example.com
- #100+, ranking post penguin, page ranking: example.com/(random-pages)

keyword2: "example widget"
- 95% of links built to example.com/widgets had "example widgets" as the anchor text
- #1, ranking prior to penguin, page ranking: example.com/widgets
- #100+, ranking post penguin, page ranking: example.com/(random-pages)

keyword3: "special example widgets"
- no links built
-#1, ranking prior to penguin
-#1, ranking post penguin


keywords 1 and 2 are the exceptions, keyword 3 is the norm for the site and all other keywords.

[aristotle]

Shepherd - Apparently you misunderstood. I meant that the "weakening" occurs IN ADDITION to specific demotions for specific keywords.

[taberstruths]

I recently have done a test that would give some evidence that this is true.

I had a bunch of pages that were knocked into oblivion. They were not on the top 10 pages of the serps, so -100

I moved all these pages to a subdomain of my main site. The only links they had were the interlinking I did between the two. No outside links.

I waited 3 months to see where the the pages settled.

I then tested 3 pages further.
red widgets about keyword1
red widgets about keyword2
red widgets about keyword3

At the start of the test
Keyword1 was on page 4
Keyword2 was on page 1
Keyword3 was on page 2

All 3 pages had received approximately 50 FB likes, 1 tweet from an account that tweets on this subject, and 1 G+ from an account that shares on this subject.

I then posted 7 blog comments on articles that were on the exact same subject with the same keywords in the title or had close synonyms, with a link pointing to keyword1 and keyword2. I left keyword3 alone. All the links were not keyword laced with 6 being links under my name and 1 a bare url. All of them were "no follow."

Keyword1 dropped from the serps the next day. It reappeared the next day at the top of page 2. It bounced on page 2 for a week then settled at position 13

Keyword2 remained unchanged for a week, bounced to down 1 position for a day then moved up 2 positions before settling back to it's original position at the moment.

Keyword3 remained unchanged during this whole process.


My thoughts on this are

#1 Google is taking keyword signals from the title of the page the link is on.
#2 No follow links affect the serps
#3 This method will only get you so far. It also depends on the strength of the competition. Thus keyword 2 although showing signs of movement still settled in the same spot.
#4 This would seem to indicate that bare links or non keyword links have more weight than they did prior to Penguin. It also seems to indicate that no follow links from blogs are considered natural.

[diberry]

"Lose" implied the loss of link juice asssociated with the links that are obviously still there.

Ah, thank you for clarifying. While one can never be 100% sure what other sites are going through, the best analysis I managed to do did NOT suggest that any of my high quality linkers had been hit by Penguin. The rest of my links were from little websites and blogs which are harder to analyze, but they also appeared to be unaffected.

It's been well established that Penguin is NOT just about backlinks. I don't know how that concept got started, but it's just not accurate.

It is my opinion that penguin is keyword specific, not so much a "domain" penalty in traditional thinking.

Exactly. My Penguined site still ranks very well for some phrases, but the most lucrative ones were "taken away" from it and "given to" other sites.

2. All those links built pointing to example.com with the anchor text "example" are crap and are no longer going to be counted.

I lean toward this explanation, but I'm an optimist. ;)

Taberstruth, the page of mine that was most hurt by Penguin had over 100 quality, editorialized links in it. Because many of these links were to blogs, it developed a huge number of nofollow trackbacks. The vast majority of its backlink profile is these nofollow trackbacks, because the page didn't resound with visitors enough to get many natural links (and I don't build). I had been thinking: maybe when your profile has a vast majority of nofollow links, Penguin sees that as spam. Do you think your test here rules out that possibility?

[taberstruths]

diberry

Since my link size was limited, I do not think it rules that out. However since trackbacks are basically automated, I think that may have something to do with it.

[Shepherd]

Shepherd - Apparently you misunderstood.

No, I understood, and as I said it's a good point in theory. What I'm telling you is that there is no noticeable or measurable "weakening" of the rest of the site. With the exception of 2 main keywords everything else is ranking as good or better than pre-penguin.

[diberry]

Thanks, taberstruths! For both the quick response and the initial test, which I found illuminating.

[TheOptimizationIdiot]

I recently have done a test that would give some evidence that this is true.

That's really interesting, but Penguin hasn't run afaik which would mean something else is triggering the bouncing.

* It's not at all that I don't believe what you're saying or don't think you might be on to something. I haven't tested the nofollow linking like you did, but I have seen similar bouncing from different actions myself. I don't think we can attribute the bouncing / ranking signals you're noticing to Penguin though.

[incrediBILL]

It is my opinion that penguin is keyword specific, not so much a "domain" penalty in traditional thinking. We still rank very well for many keywords.

I doubt it's keyword specific but may have targeted specific keywords on your site.

Remember, this is stuff from the anti-spam team so if one of your keywords looked spammy within the definition of their algo then POOF! you lost a keyword.

Why you probably still rank for others is perhaps you didn't try as hard for those keywords and they looked less spammy to the algo.

What's probably more amusing is people not knowing Panda/Penguin weren't updating daily probably fixed their site, broke it, fixed it, never saw changes because they didn't understand it only ran now and then, and have no clue because obviously nothing ever changed because nothing was changing.

I'll be a lot of clients have spent a lot of money on a lot of consultants tilting at this windmill and, depending on what they did, got no measurable results if the site was primarily kept in the status quo. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what tends to happen when people start thrashing without all the facts.

[taberstruths]

TOI,

Has it been established that Penguin operates like Panda used to? Meaning that it is refreshed manually. I know we have seen a couple of updates but updates are different than refreshes. Google has said that Penguin is algorithmic. I assumed that meant that it was placed into the algorithm. I am not an expert so I might be wrong.

edited for typo

[TheOptimizationIdiot]

Has it been established that Penguin operates like Panda used to?

Yes, definitely.

(1) There was some speculation based on a video hangout with John Mueller that Penguin refreshed regularly. It does not, it never did, and the truth is, it refreshes very rarely.

Google has told us that Penguin is rarely refreshed, unlike Panda and we didn't miss any Penguin refreshes since.

From SearchEngineRoundtable: [seroundtable.com...]

[taberstruths]

Thanks TOI

[mcneely]

... waiting for the other shoe to drop ..

It is what it is .. The early days of Google gobbling up as many pages/documents as it can are quite obviously over .. Now it's sorting thru all of the garbage it's collected and tossing out the trash .. er .. um .. baby with the bath water.

I never really ever wanted to *stuff words in here or in there because I thought I might rank better, or because that's what the Adwords guys wanted me to do .. it was always usually just "here it is" .. "take it or leave it".

Google wanted to own the world .. so I obliged with like minded builds. Then one day I woke up to Google wanting to own Local, and again, I obliged.

Even still, I can't help but coming away with the notion that Google, what with being all grown up and all these days, has a flavor for the established. Those would be those that might be licensed in their local or regional area .. those who might be listed in their local Chamber of Commerce, or those who would sport an "A" rating with the BBB.

I'm sort of wondering about all of what might be considered by Google overall with regard to TOS, Contacts, and other backend boring stuff that a lot of folks seem to forget from time to time.

Case in point? .. I pulled a very well written AUP off of a site a while back and Google threw a fit 20 minutes after the fact .. the entire site dropped 20+ positions and stayed there for 6 weeks (The AUP was loaded an hour after it was removed)

Part of the reason I think a few of my sites are doing so well these days is that I've completely reworked my service pages. Re-written to be much more specific about things like privacy, terms, contacts and other things.

I could only just be chasing my tail here, but good writes should be accompanied by good information about who you are and what you do.

I think that Google sort of gave up on passing out second chances .. I mean, if you couldn't get it right by now, you aren't going to get it right, so POOF, you're gone. End of story.

I can look back at the two of my best performers before Penguin and sort of see where I could have done things a little differently (it was so much more than just words and links) .. Back in the day I was too busy loving that top spot to pay much attention to what I really needed to do .. Will I get it right this time? Who knows. All I can say is that I've managed to get back on to the first page for a lot of the stuff I lost the year before.

Time will tell. Wild swings in the SERPs don't much impress me, and these days, I've discovered that I can be fine with the happy medium, should it ever occur.

[particleman]

Why you probably still rank for others is perhaps you didn't try as hard for those keywords and they looked less spammy to the algo.

What's probably more amusing is people not knowing Panda/Penguin weren't updating daily probably fixed their site, broke it, fixed it, never saw changes because they didn't understand it only ran now and then, and have no clue because obviously nothing ever changed because nothing was changing.

I'll be a lot of clients have spent a lot of money on a lot of consultants tilting at this windmill and, depending on what they did, got no measurable results if the site was primarily kept in the status quo. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what tends to happen when people start thrashing without all the facts.

I agree.

See my first post in this thread. The changes I made took 6-8 months to fully filter through google. Re Computing the page rank for thousands of pages on your site isn't something google does overnight. I see the process similar to creating a new site, not sure if I would use the term sandbox, but the abrupt page 20 to page 1 is not how it happened. Gradual increases over time. It is even worse when you have a seasonal business to measure these changes.

[aristotle]

No, I understood, and as I said it's a good point in theory. What I'm telling you is that there is no noticeable or measurable "weakening" of the rest of the site. With the exception of 2 main keywords everything else is ranking as good or better than pre-penguin.

Shepherd - Some sites may be weakened only slightly. It could depend on the internal linking pattern, for example, or which backlinks were removed or disavowed (if any), or other changes in the algorithm in the meantime, or what happened to other sites competing for the same keyword. Also, It's hard to monitor every long-tail search term that a site ranks for to know if any rankings have changed or not. In addition, the effect of disavowing backlinks may not become apparent until the next Penguin update.

In any case, I've seen other threads in which the OP described how overall traffic had fallen even more after backlinks were removed in response to Penguin, which could possibly indicate that the whole site had been weakened. Yes, you're right that it's only theoretical, but I haven't seen anything that would rule it out.

[Shepherd]

aristotle- Given what is commonly accepted as fact relating to link juice what you are saying is spot on, no dispute.

So, here's a thought, what if penguin did not devalue links. What if it looked for unnatural use of anchor text and devalued the page being linked to for the specific search term being abused in the anchor text?

If that is the case then there would be no bleed over to other pages or keywords. There would be no weakening of the rest of the site since there was no link juice lost.

That is what we are seeing. A very specific targeting of keywords/pages. We built unnatural links to 2 pages on our site using 2 keywords without variation and those were the only 2 keywords/pages affected when penguin rolled out. It has to be more than coincidence.

Now there is a possibility that the 1000's of pages/websites that linked to us were hit by penguin and that caused the devaluing of links incoming but I don't believe that we would have seen the effect of that during the first wave of the penguin roll out. Seems to me that would have been something we would have seen later as the algo recalculated our page rank based on the devalued incoming links.

[aristotle]

Shepherd
I don't have time right now to say much more. But if you read my original post, I was mostly thinking about cases in which backlinks have been removed or disavowed.

[incrediBILL]

Case in point? .. I pulled a very well written AUP off of a site a while back and Google threw a fit 20 minutes after the fact .. the entire site dropped 20+ positions and stayed there for 6 weeks (The AUP was loaded an hour after it was removed)

That's insane as AUP, Privacy and Legal pages are typically boilerplate stuff and if Google were to issue a site-wide demerit, not just give the page a demerit, they've effectively put anyone selling boiler plate documents, or giving them away for that matter, out of business if they damage every site that uses them.

[1script]

@incrediBILL:

they've effectively put anyone selling boiler plate documents, or giving them away for that matter, out of business

As if it ever stopped them from implementing whatever change they see fit to their algo or from handing a penalty to a site of their choosing. If there might be a reason something is done or not done by Google, we have to look at what purpose it serves for Google, and not whether it makes a logical, moral, political etc. sense. I would also assume that in any large system there are things that the engineers want the system to do and things that the system actually does and they are not 100% the same. In other words, "insane" does not make it "not true".

In the spirit of "everything is possible" I'd like to throw an idea in the hat to see if anyone thinks it makes any sense: it seems that the theory that over-optimization for a keyword leads to the page no longer ranking for that keyword also seems "insane" (see above !== false) to me.

Almost every CMS in existence (certainly WP) has an option to "prettify" URLs. Meaning , if the page is about "blue widgets in the morning", its URL would have some kind of a combination of the words "blue widgets in the morning", like www.example.com/blog/archive/blue-widgets-in-the-morning/

URL of the page is by far the most common way to link to it. So, your anchor text is guaranteed to have in most instances the exact title, which, if you gave the title any thought, would be a short summary of what the page is about. If you wrote the page well (not for SEO, for clarity) it would most likely have "blue widgets in the morning", "blue widgets", "morning widgets" and all sorts of combinations thereof. This sounds exactly like the over-optimization people at talking about ever since Penguin.

It seems "insane" to me to presume that this type of straight forward and benign use of keywords very important to the page (alas, it's about that exact subject) in links, title, h1 and in the text would lead to automatic demoting of the page to the back of the queue. This approach (pretty URLs) has been in use for about a decade now and is incredibly wide-spread. Penalizing it seems to be exactly opposite to Google's own interests (keeping SERPs relevant so people come for more).

So, is this another example of (insane !== false) or am I not seeing something obvious in the case against over-optimization?

[taberstruths]

1script. The difference is in the code. The exact match or keyword rich anchor text is the html code added after the html for just the bare url.

[1script]

The difference is in the code. The exact match or keyword rich anchor text is the html code added after the html for just the bare url.

If I understand what you are saying correctly, you consider this version safe
old school links parsing most common on forums and blogs

<a href="http://www.example.com/blog/blue-widgets-in-the-morning/">http://www.example.com/blog/blue-widgets-in-the-morning/</a>

and consider this version over-optimized Penguin bait:
this is how you'd do it manually

<a href="http://www.example.com/blog/blue-widgets-in-the-morning/">Blue widgets in the morning</a>

Do we know this much about the way G parses text to say that it's safe? What about services such as WP.com reblog, FB, Pinterest and I'm sure many others that send a crawler, read the linked page's title and automatically insert its title as the link's anchor text? Essentially converting the first version into the second without your input (or even consent in most cases).

[Ralph_Slate]

@Whitey, I got hit on April 24 - that is beyond dispute. @Fathom believes that I was not hit by Penguin. I had no manual penalty applied, so whatever hit me was algorithmic. If you go with @Fathom's theory - that it wasn't Penguin - that means that if he's right, other sites could be chasing phantoms too - that they were hit by Panda coincidentally on the Penguin day. I don't know how anyone can validate that theory though.

I do get a lot of branded queries, and my site name comes up in the Google autocomplete quite a bit. I also have a weird phenomenon in that although 65% of my traffic is organic, 60% to 70% of my traffic is from repeat visitors. I don't know what to make of that.

The reason I float my theory is that the 2nd best league in my niche sport happened to start on October 12. It was an off-site event which I'd expect to naturally increase traffic. However the jump was more than expected, and was clearly the result of the removal of the penalty - I verified that with certain queries that were being capped at #11 but went to #1 after Oct 13. My graphs show the same thing - a new plateau was hit on Oct 13. April 24 did not correspond to an off-site event though, that is why the April drop makes no sense.

A possible explanation is that there is a threshold that beats penalties. Google claims to give the people what they want. If people are searching for "widgetmania" and Google is suppressing them at #11 because of an algorithmic penalty, maybe if they see enough people asking for "widgetmania" they give that site a get out of jail free card. We'll see what happens this summer, I guess.

@Fathom is correct in saying that a lot of my pages might appear thin to Google. Those pages definitely benefit from being associated with my brand, but it's long-tail stuff, so this seems like the correct behavior for Google. Why should my thin pages rank below known scraper sites (like Pipl) that scrape my content, or below irrelevant pages (like pages on Wikipedia where the search phrase doesn't exist, the words just appear on the page nowhere near each other)? If I'm the only source of a piece of information that someone searches for, I expect to be #1 for someone searching for it. During my penalty phase I was not. Since October 13 I am again.

[decaff]

Tedster:
"The successful approaches I know about always seem to include a focus on conversion optimization rather than traditional SEO methods. Focusing on the user experience with a strong value-add for the visitor seems to make a big difference."

Thank you for pointing this out. My take on Penguin is that this change in the algorithm was about educating the respective website owner to get busy focusing on their visitors with content development, usability and conversion testing. I've always encouraged the idea of working on this as the core objective then adding a bit of SEO in the mix.

This makes sense to me as Google is working to improve the usability of the web experience and has to battle so much spam on a daily basis..(and there's a ton of it in the index still...just saw an egregious example the other day...).

Big challenges for site / business owners these days but a necessary evolution in the process. And don't forget the Social side with Google. This takes real time and energy to engage with the tools (G+, Youtube...etc...)

[taberstruths]

1script. Yes that is what I am saying.

[fathom]

That's really interesting, but Penguin hasn't run afaik which would mean something else is triggering the bouncing.

* It's not at all that I don't believe what you're saying or don't think you might be on to something. I haven't tested the nofollow linking like you did, but I have seen similar bouncing from different actions myself. I don't think we can attribute the bouncing / ranking signals you're noticing to Penguin though.

(1) There was some speculation based on a video hangout with John Mueller that Penguin refreshed regularly. It does not, it never did, and the truth is, it refreshes very rarely.

Google has told us that Penguin is rarely refreshed, unlike Panda and we didn't miss any Penguin refreshes since.

Debuking a theory is always good but I think you also need to understand what Google implies instead of misinterpreting their quotes.

First, many years ago I fell victim to misinterpreting a Matt Cutts quote.

It involved Google addressing websites that have a re-occurence of a penalty.

Matt Cutts was quoted as saying (paraphrasing the quote)

1) a first offense would last for 30 days (even if you cleaned up after a single day)

2) a second offense would last for 60 days (even if you cleaned up after a single day)

3) a third offense would last for 90 days (even if you cleaned up after a single day)

I spent a year repeating that quote until one day Danny Sullivan heard it and directly asked Matt about it... and Matt quoted (paraphrasing again)

those were only examples of what Google MIGHT DO!

...which is a polite way of saying don't expect us to verify anything specific. Four witnesses actually heard the original quote.

I say that because:

Google has told us that Penguin is rarely refreshed, unlike Panda and we didn't miss any Penguin refreshes since.

This is meaningless. Google does need to refresh PENGUIN or even update PENGUIN in order for anyone to recover. Assuming they inferred that refreshing affords recovery isn't what was said.

Google's updates to PENGUIN can be likened to changes to Microsoft's Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, VISTA, 7 etc.

Bug fixes, new features OR better ways to advantage high quality websites... they are not changes to release anyone from PENGUIN's grips.

If you are waiting around for refresh changes that will afford you some relief from PENGUIN devaluation... you'll wait forever.

Google is never going to allow you to re-start using webspam... that's is a huge misinterpretation of what Google desires in top positions.

[edited by: fathom at 9:47 am (utc) on May 5, 2013]