Penguin 2.1 Launched; October 4, 2013

[netmeg]

Tweet from Matt:

Penguin 2.1 launching today. Affects ~1% of searches to a noticeable degree.

[Shepherd]

we grouped our links into 4 groups and gave a brief description above the link groups:

#domains
domain:example.tld
#questionable links from WMT
http://www.example.tld/links
#links we built that HAVE been REMOVED
http://www.example.tld/badlinksgone
#links we built that HAVE NOT been removed
http://www.example.tld/westilllinktoyou

That was it, no more explanation than that, 100% success rate, manual penalty removed from 2 sites.

[Whitey]

100% success rate, manual penalty removed from 2 sites.

I presume this was accompanied by a reconsideration request Y/N?

Would you have applied such detail with manual actions on " Partial matches " not requiring a reconsideration request?

[Shepherd]

our manual action was of the "partial match" variety on both sites.
both sites were also affected negatively by the original penguin.
1 site improved ranking and traffic with this most recent penguin update, the other site got worse.

My thinking with the site that got worse is that it was a result of our disavow file, disavowing too many links, and not so much a penguin affect.

[Shepherd]

I presume this was accompanied by a reconsideration request Y/N?

yes.

[Shai]

@whitey

Would you have applied such detail with manual actions on " Partial matches " not requiring a reconsideration request?

What makes you think that Partial manual penalties do not require a RR? We have always done so and have found it the only way to get the penalty actually revoked.

[aquanaut]

@Carlos

Of course less than a month later we got nailed by Penguin ...

Do you think that you have a bunch more link spam that has shown up since the original disavow?

Maybe we need to be continually disavowing sites as a preventative measure. If so, this makes be extremely annoyed, I have far better things to do!

[yahalimu]

I can also report a semi-recovery.
Our site go hacked as it was on an insecure plesk (lots of those still about) at the same time as a gradual decline for our main keywords. We spent 5 years in top 3 but then declined with our main keyword from first to down in the hundreds, due to a penguin I believe.
I installed a new website with as many redirects in htaccess for our keywords that i could remember.
(As an aside I have many sites that seem to die after 5 years exactly, link juice lifetime probably)
Because of the keywords that were affected I first suspected keyword stuffing on pour main keyword, so I brought the ratio down. (I hadn't changed the ratio for about 7 years). This brought it back to about page 4 so maybe i was correct.
About 100 high quality posts for about 5 keywords resulted a jump of 2 to 4 places.
I have never used a disavow tool but i did remove/move a few PDF's that were being linked to from other sites i knew nothing about.
Also deleted a very similar structured sister site with no activity but a few links to our main site and removed it from WT.
The Penguin rollout on the 4th jumped them another 4-5 places or the keywords I have concentrated on.
I have noticed a drop in one of our competitors, who only use good quality links and practices, but a little too often in my opinion.
We are now at the bottom of page 1 from nowhere in 6 months and i am STILL getting reports in WT about pages that were on the old site but they are much less since Oct 4th suddenly.
Traffic has also jumped by about 15%. Now only Brands get the first few places on page 1 due to masses of sitewide links I assume, the bottom half is as good as can be expected these days.

[carlos the jackal]

@aquanaut - no, I don't think so buddy. I monitor inbound links daily, and anything dodgy coming in that isn't already disavowed goes straight on the list and updated.

I tend to only need to update the disavow list once a week, but it's worth doing I think. Well, I THOUGHT it was. Thats why I was so surprised that we were hit last Friday.

[Whitey]

What makes you think that Partial manual penalties do not require a RR? We have always done so and have found it the only way to get the penalty actually revoked.

@Shai - I guess the guidelines are not clear :

If you don't control the links pointing to your site, no action is required on your part. From Google's perspective, the links already won't count in ranking. However, if possible, you may wish to remove any artificial links to your site and, if you're able to get the artificial links removed, submit a reconsideration request. If we determine that the links to your site are no longer in violation of our guidelines, we’ll revoke the manual action. [support.google.com...]
If the links are outside of your control, what are you being reconsidered for? It doesn't make sense.

Paraphrased : If you remove the link Google is already ignoring, Google will stop ignoring the now non-existent link.

I think what Google means is... they'll remove it from the WMT console.

Therefore, I don't believe it's necessary to file a reconsideration request to get out of a Penguin penalty, but am happy to hear any contrary logic or reference points.

fyi - I have seen the manual action notifications removed from the WMT console without a reconsideration request being sent, following link removals not reported in a disavow file.

[Shai]

Hi Whitey, yes I see your logic but I think we learnt from experience not to read too much into Google's notices.

It has nearly always been our experience in over 10 cases since Google started to report these actions in WMT that a removal does indeed result in improvement in rankings which suggests that that they are certainly not just ignoring the links. There is one case right now, where the penalty has been revoked on the 8th of October but the site has not seen ANY improvement whatsoever just yet. However, if anyone is reading this, I would certainly recommend the clean up and removal of the action as in more cases than not, it has helped although admittedly some more clearly than others.

Thanks for the information about removal of a message without a RR. That is extremely interesting. Did it just disappear one day from WMT? No messages? Any serp movement to accompany this occurrence?

[Whitey]

Thanks for the information about removal of a message without a RR.

@Shai - Yes, but work had been done on removing links from sites under their control. Still early days to observe the effects of what they've done, as Google's de-indexing of those links and others is continuing - could be several months or even more depending on how Google handles their penalty refresh timelines.

Also, since Penguin is algorithmic, I don't think removing partial matches need necessarily be a cause of that penalty. It could be indicative, but I don't know.

No disavow file is involved yet, although that may come later for that particular site which is Penguin penalized.

Any serp movement to accompany this occurrence?

None