Penguin update synopsis

[v1seo]

The drops I'm seeing may have nothing to do with Penguin or Panda, but they have all the hallmarks of the -30 penalties which were big news in 2004 2006.

Hope it's not the same, as one of my sites that got hit by a -30 in 2006 took over 3 year before it would even rank top 10 for it's own name

With that site I just mothballed it and moved on.

 

[vizzo]

Don't know if this helps but I have a site that does seem to have recovered.
It's not a great site, about 2 months old and was ranking well for exact match, near match and variations for a decent paying, low traffic, little competition keyword.

It had gradually risen to position 2 for its keyword.
April 24 it disappeared.
May 3/4 it's come back to position 2

I ASSUME it was hit by Penguiun.
It's stayed at position 2 for several days now (but not wanting to tempt fate!)

What did I do?
I de-seo'd my title, desc and h1 tags - still kept some keyword relevance but much less intensive. Removed an internal copyright link from all pages that linked back to the homepage.

This could just have been a non-penguin glitch, a fluke, or something else all together, but thought I would share.

 

[chippyb]

wasnt the penguin update on the 29th? and on the 24th there was a panda updat?

 

[max99x]

Hmm interesting! i may try this on the long tail page i have which i feel may be seo'd too much

Thanks for the post

Don't know if this helps but I have a site that does seem to have recovered.
It's not a great site, about 2 months old and was ranking well for exact match, near match and variations for a decent paying, low traffic, little competition keyword.

It had gradually risen to position 2 for its keyword.
April 24 it disappeared.
May 3/4 it's come back to position 2

I ASSUME it was hit by Penguiun.
It's stayed at position 2 for several days now (but not wanting to tempt fate!)

What did I do?
I de-seo'd my title, desc and h1 tags - still kept some keyword relevance but much less intensive. Removed an internal copyright link from all pages that linked back to the homepage.

This could just have been a non-penguin glitch, a fluke, or something else all together, but thought I would share.

 

[vizzo]

wasnt the penguin update on the 29th? and on the 24th there was a panda updat?

Panda was 19th, penguin 24th

 

[dougs]

17th another update

We believe this was a link penalty.....and this penalty is still being applied.Matt says a parked domain penalty that was fixed, but we have seen this on established sites but only for certain keywords

Doug

 

[retired_member36]

My update:

Ok so as per my previous posts, site dived down to page 28.

I added some extra content to home page, changed all my anchor text (removed my keyword from it), Changed my page titles.

The site jumped to page 12 and was dancing around there for a few days.

I removed some alts and played a little more with page titles, just checked then and was at the bottom of page 3. Fingers crossed it keeps moving.

Anyone else reporting any positive changes?

 

[VSC]

My strategy on previous updates is to change nothing for a few weeks and just see what happens after the dust has settled, and then act.

Of the pages that dropped, roughly half have now resumed their pre-penguin position and the other half have stayed dropped.

I have done absolulety nothing since the update.

The ones that resumed their position are all sites that EMDs. Some of these include very thin sites with only a few pages of content.

The pages that haven't resumed their position are pages optimised for keyword phrases that aren't a complete match for the domain - or that the niche is wide and that the page is targeting a phrase that is a higher exact that than the domain name exact.

Just FYI ...

 

[LisaV]

As an SEO copywriter what changes we are making include:

Emboldening your key phrases and not just words, so for a designer kids clothes site instead of just highlighting designer childrens clothes you would highlight buying cheap designer childrens clothes from online outlets.

Focusing on just 2 or 3 keyterms and spreading these out in the piece.

Focus on related keywords as the Penguin does place importance on these.

Other good practices include good anchor link text and now those anchor links should also be on your related keywords. Writing for the reader and not just for the search engines is a must, so knowing your audience is key. And of course using sub-headings.

Most SEO copywriters are already doing all of this and for us, the Penguin does mean that those copywriters who employ black hat methods will be removed quicker, making our clients happier and our jobs a lot easier.

 

[ClassicalGuitar]

Every site hit by this update needs to be evaluated differently, there is no one cap fits all approach.

 

[raymortim]

With my sites that were Penguin'd I was regularly updating with unique content and never really did any backlinking myself so I am thinking the on-page SEO was 'over optimized'

Because of this, when writing or re-writing content I find that I am now writing for the search engine, whereas before it was always for the reader.

It's often not so easy to find suitable synonyms or to reduce keyword usage and it's easy to end up with text that just doesn't sound quite right to a human.

The homepage of a site about Red Widgets, that has a decent amount of text (news, products etc), is natuarally going to feature Red Widgets a fair bit.

 

[chippyb]

I read last night that penguin is not a live update, so you will only find out if changes you make to your site work when the next update comes out,

 

[max99x]

i've just read 'Matt Cutts have said Penguin runs periodically (like Panda).'

 

[vizzo]

i've just read 'Matt Cutts have said Penguin runs periodically (like Panda).'

Interesting.
One of my sites was definitley hit on the 24th and came back a week later. That could be a coincidence or it might be that although it runs periodically it is still possibloe to recover between updates, or that it's abit grey round the edges and there are other algo changes that got associated with penguin or were affected by penguin.

 

[ClassicalGuitar]

This is an interesting post from WPMU.org regarding the Penguin update.

Monday 23rd April saw 8,580 visits from Google. Monday 30th saw 1,527

They are an established news source online since March 2008, with over 10,000 Facebook likes, 15,000+ Twitter followers, over 2000 google +1s and 4,000 RSS subscribers and still got smashed.

 

[rob]

Are those who were advocating 'sponsor a WP theme' offering refunds to their conferences!?

 

[julian]

I could help but notice on your personal site http://www.freelancelinkbuilder.co.uk/ it says:

"I use ethical (white hat) link building methods using hundreds of backlink sources, here are a few of them:"

Isn't that slightly contradictory statement?

blah

 

[SamSites]

Interesting.
One of my sites was definitley hit on the 24th and came back a week later. That could be a coincidence or it might be that although it runs periodically it is still possibloe to recover between updates, or that it's abit grey round the edges and there are other algo changes that got associated with penguin or were affected by penguin.

I've seen this on the majority on my sites too. Heres a example I've got from paint skills & Google Analytics:

 

[vizzo]

Sam - thanks for sharing that.

My own thoughts looking at your graph and if I'm understanding it correctly are that for your site there's something other than Penguin going.

Looks like you were already on the downward trend before the Penguin strike on the 24th/25th. In fact Penguin seems to mark the start of your recovery.

 

[Marcoose]

Link wise, all the link requests from the bog boys are asking for variations on URL anchor text so I think this is probably the way to go if you're looking to rank an EMD. Do as the big boys do!