Sudden drop from Dec 20th of about 20 positions, Penguin? Panda? .
Oimachi2
4:07 am on Dec 30, 2014 (gmt 0)
My site has been on top 1-5 since early 2000's
Suddenly it dropped to 20+ positions.
The site does have a bad link profile and many exact anchor text on article directories and forum signatures.
No manual penalty in the back end.
What affected it?
newbamboo
8:37 am on Dec 30, 2014 (gmt 0)
I've seen the same Oimachi.
Likely to be another Penguin rollout.
Oimachi2
9:52 am on Dec 30, 2014 (gmt 0)
I thought penguin was october? This is way into December?
goodroi
12:49 pm on Dec 30, 2014 (gmt 0)
I would not rush to blame this on penguin. This could just be a normal ranking drop. Have you reviewed your backlinks to see if there have been any changes? Is your traffic down? How widespread is the drop? Has another site stolen your content? Did your server have any issues? There are many reasons a site can lose rankings and/or traffic.
toidi
2:09 pm on Dec 30, 2014 (gmt 0)
The site does have a bad link profile and many exact anchor text on article directories and forum signatures.
What exactly makes these links bad? Can you be more specific?
ie, are they relevant forums, are the articles spun or are they well written articles?
Oimachi2
11:54 pm on Dec 30, 2014 (gmt 0)
They are bad quality articles, not always relevant to my signature, excessive anchor text ect...;(
Things that were advocated years ago...
Robert Charlton
9:25 am on Dec 31, 2014 (gmt 0)
I agree that all ranking drops are not automatically Penguin, and I wouldn't go disavowing at every slip in position.
That said, having articles in article directories with links back to your site is automatically trouble. The writing's been on the wall about these for some time now.
Also, nothing needs to have changed on your site for Penguin 3 to have dug deeper into it. Google has announced that Penguin is now running continuously. It was clear to many SEOs, since early on in Panda and then in Penguin, that Google would start with the obvious low-hanging fruit and would be constantly raising the bar on every aspect of its algorithm. That's what's been happening. There may be a pattern to be extracted from your particulars in comparison with others here, or maybe not.
If you've got junk out there that you're responsible for, get it down, and/or create so much good stuff that the bad stuff is buried. Easier said than done, but I think that's what the challenge is. If you've been sitting on the sidelines, hoping that Google wouldn't notice those pages that you know are bad, you've got your head in the sand.
I'd take down all of the article directory pages I could, good or "bad". By the nature of what they are, they are "bad"... and, really, they're not going to help you.
Forum signature links are probably not going to help you. Even unlinked forum signatures that clearly identify you or your company might hurt you if you have enough of them. IMO, identifying them depends on your sense of proportion. An occasional legitimately relevant forum link, one that's for the user, not just for SEO, might help you. A barrage of them might hurt.
It's not, btw, that Google is telling a forum or blog owner what they can do with their own sites. It's more Google's saying that the Google search engine is its site, and Google doesn't want to send its users to pages where there hasn't been enough concern about what's posted. If you don't care about that, you can do whatever you want.
