Penguin: Core, realtime and updated today

[Shaddows]

[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google's algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin's data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we're not going to comment on future refreshes.

[teokolo]

We have 3.000 domains and 100 domains in our disavow.

[Nutterum]

Expected more to be honest, but yeah, 3k domains can get you in trouble if not careful.

[westcoast]

We are seeing crazy traffic patterns today. Big surges from google, followed by -50% drop offs , followed by big surges.

While our site's DNS is not affected by the ddos issues, I suppose it could be having ripple effects net-wide.

Anyone else seeing wacky patterns today?

[EditorialGuy]

No wacky patterns here, but our traffic was up slightly. (Maybe people who couldn't tweet decided to look things up instead.)

[jpalmer]

So my question is, can the Penguin RT core algo now also catch referrer spam links that bash our Google Analytics, whose footprint I can ID when viewing > Audience > User Explorer > and the Client ID looks like a 36 character Alphanumeric string like this: 3815421c-9a4c-499b-9f39-1cbe9a07bd25 , rather than the 21 bit numeric only string with a period between two 10 bit strings e.g. 0000000000.0000000000?

Because if Google can do anything useful in their analytics and search algos right now, deleting those asshats from my stats, without my having to resort to a war of attrition with GA referrer blocks and filters, would greatly improve their image to me.

[Root13]

I agree, that this update is not so important, sometimes it seems Google just need to announce something to imitate huge activity

[mikejag]

<example.com> was hit by penguin update in 2012, it recovered in 2014 but was on # 5. When penguin became real-time ranking improved and brought the site to # 1 for <partial match keywords> phrase. Surprisingly today it dropped to # 3 which is the reason why I am on this forum again to find out if others on this forum are seeing the turbulence today ?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:44 pm (utc) on Dec 14, 2016]
[edit reason] removed specifics for poster's protection [/edit]

[Vuffy]

Just wanted to report a recovery story.

I joined my company in Dec as a Project Manager. Had personal SEO experience, so I offered to take on that responsibility since SEO wasn't ever a focus for the company despite it being an all online business.

Found out a majority of their keywords tanked from position 1 to several spots even pages around Oct-Sept 16. The first thing I did was audit their backlinks profile and realized they purchased backlinks in the past *sigh*. Around mid-December, I submitted over 220 domains into Google's disavow tool.

Most of our important keywords and traffic saw a recovery in January. Looking back at the trendline for our keyword rankings, it's an outline of a bucket between Oct-Jan. A lot of the keywords haven't regained pos 1, but it's expected since competitors have been hard at work.

[Nutterum]

The bad thing is that honest non-SEO organic backlinks from client mentions in forums and comments on topic related information websites are suddenly being shafted by the new Penguin. I am seeing this on two big properties and on one smaller local business. It's like the new Penguins went in and said, you know what, those 2014 link mentions are not doing anything for you anymore (they are not but hey they are as white hat as one could get) so I am going to ignore their weight.

This resulted in several keywords very related to the core business to plummet. My clients were forced to pay big bugs to media outlets to get some coverage and basically "legally" pay for new backlinks, which sucks major .... if you ask me.

[martinibuster]

non-SEO organic backlinks from client mentions in forums and comments on topic related information websites

Non-SEO comment links? Forum links that clustered in 2014?

Doesn't sound organic or non-SEO, especially if the client or their SEO had something to do with those links happening.

[Nutterum]

@martinibuster - They are purely organic. Just clients mentioning the business and praising the information and services on boards they are active at. These comments and mentions are purely customer or word-to-mouth based and were in no way created by the businesses. If that is not following guidelines and is not white hat, I do not know what is. Yet all of that referral traffic new and old coming from such comments and linked mentions vanished in the period between December and especially after the 7th of Feb update.

Now I suspect that the sites those comments were coming from can be targeted more heavily by the recent algo updated and by proxy target the properties I monitor, but that does not change the fact that SERP change can have more non-direct and far-reaching implications. To the point where because of those links not being considered by google, organic traffic coming directly to the business website for certain keywords mentioned by these clients on these boards plummet, forcing me to ask for big budget so I can "legaly" buy links from media outlets that would accept and publish my content for a price.

And let's not pretend this is not happening on a global scale. Mashable has a "premium content publishing" package that for a few thousand dollars they can publish, do-follow and promote your content that will lead to more reposts on other outlets. Basically the new age of buying links. Cnet and even Forbes have such practices that are in strict violation of the Google guidelines, but hey, somehow Google turns a blind eye. In the UK it is almost impossible to get a do-follow link from a media outlet without paying now-a-days too. Do you think this is OK? I certainly don't.

Edit: more clarifications added to the post.

[martinibuster]

Forum links are more or less useless to begin with. If the page has no inbounds outside of the forum itself then that page will not be useful. Also consider that over time an active forum will push it down. Thirdly, multiple forum links only count as a single (low quality) link. Fifty links from one forum only counts as a single link and no more. The same can be said about blog comment links, with the additional burden of the fact that many comment links are no-followed. Thus, forum/comment links start out fairly useless and go downhill from there.

As for Google turning a blind eye, imo Penguin discounts these kinds of links. Those paid link sites have put themselves into a link farm neighborhood. No need for punitive action.

Obviously you are ethical and care about the client, do not let the actions of those unethical or ignorant SEOs trouble you. Just do your job to the best of your ability.

[Nutterum]

Yes, I am one of those old school white-hat folks that believe that with great content and UX comes great value. And it does. That does not stop me from ranting when algo changes make the venues I can still practice my approach to SEO smaller and smaller. I've said it before here on WebmasterWorld that the day I stop doing SEO is the day, good content and proper client approach in the digital space fails to deliver. So far I am in a good place.