Community Discussion: What changes are you seeing as a result of Penguin 4.0?
-
We've been waiting on the latest Penguin rollout so long it would have been appropriate for Google to launch it with a creepy meme titled "I'm baaack." But now that it's here, what changes are you seeing to the websites you monitor or manage?
We'd very much enjoy hearing you stories, thoughts and proposed courses of action below in the comments.
If you need to get up to speed on Penguin 4.0, Dr. Pete's post, Penguin 4.0: Was it Worth the Wait?, is a great place to start, as is the latest Whiteboard Friday by Rand: Penguin 4.0: How the Real-Time Penguin-in-the-Core-Alg Model Changes SEO.
RS
-
We track 35 sites carefully and we are yet to find any evidence that we can attribute to the penguin update. We have asked around and have not yet come across anyone who has been impacted. We are keen to hear from anyone with a clear and obvious impact.
-
Thanks. I didn't know about MozCast, so it is great to learn of that new tool.
-
Hi Liz,
Sorry to hear about the drop. It seems a new update happened yesterday as it is shown in the MozCast Although it is no possible to say if it was Penguin or other, with so little data. -
Thanks for the reply! Things had been steady until last week when we had a very nice gain out of nowhere and then this week where we are now dropped below where we were 2 months ago, eliminating any incremental gains and of course the big gain from last week. Hoping that things will settle down...
-
I've seen individual keywords leap +50 and then go back down again between September 1 and now. I think things have finally settled out. We also lost some Feature positions that have since recovered during that time. I know in my client's niche most of the competitors are relying on static content and directories. So, I am now assuming that all has settled out, sites have been crawled and we will see more consistency in our results.
In the past 3 weeks, I have seen very rapid responsiveness to targeting new keywords. I tweaked a few older blog articles to add a few words and uploaded new articles during that time. My ranking for the added keywords showed up on the next weekly results. It makes for a nice study, but if any of the competition starts adding content, then all bets are off.
-
I'm just seeing it this morning, so certainly more digging will be necessary. Yeah, the drop isn't super drastic, but enough to make me concerned.
-
Little drop? - you need to dig deeper into what pages are dropping, then action on those. Maybe a couple pages got hit by nasty-penguins, you never know.
-
I may be seeing some Penguin today. We've been seeing slow improvement on the SERPs for about 2 months now, with a nice spike last week. The work for thsi site is on the new side, slowly implementing Moz recommendations, a few quality links have been built and a blog has been added (fresh unique content weekly), so it seemed like this was the natural upward progression.
This morning, all of our improvement is gone and we are actually showing a little worse than where we started. We saw a nice spike last week (10/16) and now today we are seeing the drop (10/24.) Anyone else experience something like this?
-
My site was recovered after years in Google sandbox. I thanks a lot to this new update. I'm on the second page to most keywords of my niche.
-
Hey Ronell
We are over in the UK and work with a bunch of folks who have cleaned up their act and are hoping to improve. We also monitor several sectors where there is competition who are not exactly playing it by the book and we expected to fall.
Recoveries
We are seeing some good movement on the recovery front. Folks who were just decimated by Penguin seeing some solid improvements - not back to where they were on the house of cards they built but certainly feels like they are back in the race again. We are seeing one major UK player we work with who is seeing a recovery but not for the homepage. The major keywords are doing much better (like 50 to 20 sort of region) but it is inner pages. Thinking this could be the granular elements we are seeing.
Penalties
The other side of the coin is the penalties and we are seeing very little on that front yet. Certain sites we monitored and expected to see a big fall for have as of yet seen much of a difference. It's like the recovery side of things has rolled out but true impact of 'real time' crawling of URLs from a devaluation perspective is yet to be revealed. Either that are this is the spammers penguin!
Cheers
Marcus -
Hi Ronnel, in my case, the most important of my url (after the home) is missing in all google search, i tried to crawl in many ways but it´s like is not posible to recover, it´s strange becouse i did not heard this can of penalty, that happened the 12 of this month. (sorry for my english, i´m spanish).
UPDATE: i´ve just recover from my situatio prior 12, :), i don´t know how
-
Auditing all SEO On-Page - Title tags, meta descriptions, content, status, robots... Other SEO audits are Off-Page (Social Media) and Technical.
-
Thanks for your tips, Veronica. My inbound backlinks all have 4 or under spam score. So does my competitor. They have 250 total links whereas I have 75 -- that's how they've always have the #1 rank -- but neither of us show links from the past 60 days. Their DA/PA is 40/40, where mine is 25/35. Possum would not affect me as an ecommerce site only, neither of us have a local presence. Any other suggestions? What would a "full SEO audit" consist of?
-
Hi Taylor,
Maybe, due to Penguin 4 is about inbound links, a first step would be conducting a research/study of your own inbound links - spam score specially, and the same with your competitor website using the Moz Site Explorer, of course. Last month, there were other 2 major updates, Possum update plus the Unnamed one. Therefore if you check the NAP, if apply is another option. A third step is a Full SEO audit of the competitor's website.
Good luck.
-
I run an ecommerce site. My site used to rank #2 (my homepage) and #3 (my product page) for my primary keyword. #1 has always been my competitor's homepage. Now, my competitor's Shop page -- which uses this keyword only 6x within the content of that page -- is #2 bumping me down to #3 and #4
Any advice or guidance would be much appreciated.
-
No news is better than bad news.
RS
-
Sounds like you have some clients with strong content, then.
RS
-
I'm seeing no change at all, unfortunately!
-
I'm seeing a slight rise in results for some of my clients and no change for others.
-
Constant fluctuations of my keyword positions.
-
The key is quality content. I know we hear that a lot, so much that it becomes cliche', but it's true. A simple way of thinking about this is to never create a piece of content you wouldn't feel comfortable asking someone you know and respect to share.
RS
-
My client doesn't have a lot of backlinks and the website is less than a year old. Our focus has been on content. The client is in the service industry so we also benefit from the recent emphasis on reviews.
We've seen several pages move up in rank after September's ups and downs. I won't really know how well our content strategy is working until Penguin 4.0 settles out.
-
I like the wait and see/get more data approach. It's often tough to see a cause and effect relationship when there are so many potential factors at work.
-
It seems so. Although I must confess, I am not absolutely sure if it was a Penguin 4 catch or/and the Unnamed algorithm update occurred last month; as a fellow SEO practitioner, had suggested also.
By the way, due to that is a change not affecting the SERP position; I will not move, till we get more data. -
Sounds like your experience mirrors that of others, which seems to be as a result of Google taking more or a scalpel approach to penalizing content as opposed to the blunt-instrument trauma many faced in the past when entire sites were scorched.
-
Hi Ronell,
I noticed that Penguin 4, by devaluing some inbound links/page - though not the whole website - now shows other pages of the same website to the same query and the most important; with the same SERP position that the devaluated page had.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Regret changing the URL structure, Would it be appropriate to change it back?
Hi Moz Community, We changed the URL structure 6 months ago for our new site, and we experienced a ranking drop since then. From my understanding, changing URL structure and using 301 redirects will lose link juice, more or less. We think the ranking drop is because of the loss of link juice, assuming other factors remain constant. Here are my questions: How do those link juice losses have an impact on our ranking? Would changing URL structure back to original version regain the lost link juice, with all the redirects done properly? Would it take a lot of efforts? Is it recommended to change it back? Thank you so much in advance. Any thoughts and opinions are appreciated! Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raymondlii0 -
Why is my page not showing in Google results
Hi, My website chka.org is showing up in Google but this page is not : http://www.chka.org/kickboxing-classes-nyc/ I cannot figure it out why. I submitted in manually to be crawled and it showed up for a day or two and then it disappeared again. The website is not copy pasted, it has unique content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leokadiarapczynska0 -
Google search results
I have been doing some searches on google to see where my new site shows up, I started using the search words "graphic design firm st. louis" as a gauge, because my title is St. Louis Missouri Graphic Design Firm. I showed up on about page 5 to start , if I include the word "firm" and a few pages further back if I just search "graphic design st. louis", without the word firm. It seemed i was slowly moving up pages with both searches and then a few days ago I jumped to page 1 for search "graphic design firm st. louis" the thing is it doesnt show up at all now if i search "graphic design st. louis" without the word firm. what would cause the one search to jump so high while the other one dissapeared completely?? and what can i do? my keyword density is same for both , any ideas.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric69660 -
Should I try to change these links or no?
Hey guys, I need some advice on a link profile I'm currently working on. Our client sells a product in the hunting industry and has been around for over ten years. I just finished up classifying and looking at all of their links today and found that around half of them are sponsor links, links on "link pages," and a few directory links with almost all of them being followed. Because we are the first company to do SEO for them, I know that these aren't maliciously solicited links, but I'm worried that they may be having a negative impact on the site. Most of the links are coming from other non-competing websites in the outdoor industry which typically tends to have very antiquated sites with very antiquated practices. Essentially, I don't want to go out and try to nofollow or disavow all of these links that the website has had for a long time on other related websites if they're helping us, but I also don't want to be leaving anything up that could algorithmically be identified as spam. Below are some examples to show you what I'm referring to by the sponsor links and link resource pages. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks! Sponsored - http://www.becomeabetterhunter.com/ or http://outdoorobsession.tv/ or http://thehollywoodhunter.com/ Link Resource Pages - http://bowhuntamerica.com/links or http://cornerarchery.com/CompanyLinks.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
Is that Penguin 2.0 or just temporary situation?
Hey, i changed my hosting provider because better server hardware on 22 May. And many results dropped on google! My website opened only just 17 Jan 2013. Maybe you want to look my anchors. you can find attachment image. Total backlinks: 4,9K Is that temporary situation coz changing ip address (hosting provider) or penguin 2.0? nw68v.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | umutege0 -
Omitted results
Google used to display all my pages now most are under repeat the search with the omitted results included."_ what dose that mean? Dose this predict something bad?_ All pages are unique.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joseph-Green-SEO0 -
Site changes lead to big questions
I'm making some changes to my business that will cause me to move my blog to a new domain. The existing site will serve as a sales campaign for our full service programs and I want to keep visitors focused on that campaign. The old site will serve much like a mini site with a sales letter and video sales letter. In moving the blog content to another page - I found a post from Rand from a few years ago http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expectations-and-best-practices-for-moving-to-or-launching-a-new-domain. The way I wanted to approach this was to remove the content from the old site, and then resubmit the site map to Google for indexing. Of course they'll notice that the blog pages are gone. (probably a load of 404's) After perhaps a week, I'd repost the content (about 50 posts) on the new domain, which will be little more than a blog. I'd like some input on the way to approach this. Should I... a) Follow Rand's formula? b) Go with my idea (sort of the brute force model)? c) Consider an alternative method? It's probably worth mentioning that none of these posts have high search engine rankings. I appreciate your input Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sdennison0 -
301 - do i change old links once 301 is in place?
Hey all, I'm about to setup a 301 on a website that has pretty good SEO rankings and I have the ability to change all the old inbound links that point to the old site, to the new site - should I leave them pointing to the old site that has the 301 on it or change all the old inbound links to the new domain name? Which has better SEO value? Thanks for helping, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0