Google Penguin's Unbelievably DEVASTATING Effects on SEO

[manny521]

I run a website for a local realtor/property manager in a fairly small community in Western Washington. The domain is 13 years old, the website has been up since 2002, all links were slowly and naturally built over the past decade. We have tons of original content.

For the past four years we've ranked number one in Google for half a dozen local keywords, i.e., homes for rent in....., homes for sale in........, etc. All very relevant, local search terms that linked to a relevant page listing the available homes and property.

As of today, on all of our relevant keywords, home.com, zillow.com and something called burgerprofessionals.com hold the entire first page of Google. Not one of them link to anything relevant to the search term, half the time it is for a county or city in a different state, and burgerprofessional.com simply scrapes the MLS and throws up hundreds of pages of irrelevant, keyword stuffed listings.

All of the sites on the first page are huge corporations that spend millions of dollars a year in advertising. We are a small real estate office that have been relying on organic search results for 90% of our traffic, and now we are getting about 1/3 the amount of visitors, and people searching Google for homes for sale or rent in our county are shown only irrelevant search results from huge corporations who do not even rent or sale homes.

Google is broken.

Yeah, google really killed so many small businesses its ridiculous and the reality is they don't care. Its really a shame...

Remember, never click on any ads in google and don't buy a android smart phone...if you already have an android smart phone, don't buy one the next time you buy a new phone...these are small steps, but they are very doable for each and every one of us...

 

[designsonline]

So what is going on?
I think the theory that there are 2 seperate algorithms that have been released nake the most credible sense to me.
One focused on the onsite and one on the quality of backlinks and the relevance of back links etc...

The result has been mass confusion as people are saying it has to be over optimisation on site because.....
And others are saying their on site wasnt over optimised, but they have use spam links (as to be honest most of us here have to some degree)

Whereas in reality it is an attack from both directions at once (quite clever really, although it has also ruined the serps for now).

So what do we need to do about it?
We need to focus out efforts now on getting the on-site cleaned up, (it is amazing when you relook at your website how much you notice that you have forgotten about which needs cleaning up.) Once that is done, we need to focus on gaining quality links using a wider vartiety of related keywords, and only placed on relevant website to the topic of our website.

It is not beyond the realms of possibility to adapt techniques like Scrape box to find only related site to post to.
Although we need more variety and better quality from now on.

 

[Jungle123]

Ok guys, I have read a lot and here are my thoughts:

There are plenty evidence for On-page and Off-page algo changes that are really affecting us without any logic. But I must say, that there should be logic and there is no way that just like that (because of notting) Google would slap you. I hear you, if you say, that you where crystaly clear and newer did annything unnatural or bad...etc.

In my opinion, Google always new it and watched it and preppared to this moment a long time before. Now it's action time - face it - you new it that this time will come.

My two cents: Even if you NEWER did anything bad with your main domain, even if you newer did anything bad with your On-Page ,Off page for particular domain, Google has a resourses to track you down and FLAG all your activities, IP's of the site, Host Ip's, your bank details - name,IP of the PC from where you pay + IP where you hosting a site and info like this that your host or other tracking tools are providing for Google constantly. At this case, you need to become dirty only once! And ALL your activities will be marked...that means everything on shared hosting...everything with the same IP...all activity after you have been 'marked' could be considered as a bad now.

Google could apply even special/different ALGO for those persons and Google can categorise and can be selective regarding those 'flaged' accounts. Possibilities are endless....
Everything is on the plate now - on-page 'overdo' stuff,keywords,anchor url's(show me a non seo person that knows how to build anchor backlink!?), timings(when did you build and how did you build your backlinks and what traffic did you received, how fast, from where), traffic+site age+autority algo (it is not naturally to receive huge amount of traffic so fast and if you are not autority site) etc. There is no end to those possibilities as this is Google's business and they do what and how they want and seems - they are unstoppable ;(

Do not shout on me now, all this is just a theory ...and bottom line is - if you 'marked' your site,host ip, content etc. activity only once - you get your butt burried now in all your on=line activity! You are just bad boy and it's does not matter what and how you do afterwards - you are with this 'crazy' algo now that takes traffic from you...because - it thinks, that this traffic does not belong to you!

Would be great, if someone would be resourseful enough to change punished site Host,Ip address, Servers etc. Then immediately retweeted his HOME page with 'retweet Fiverr gig' and meanwile monitored rankings. That info would be really great and priceless to analyse now.

Cheers to all and keep going.....!

 

[Bizmarkie40]

My sites were unaffected by penguin; a number of variables are responsible for their durability. My company is about to launch a link building service in the coming days which conforms with my link building principles. Nothing magic, just common sense and a definitive understanding of "organic"

I'll upload a couple of relevant graphs from majesticseo to further substantiate my position when I'm not so busy.

sounds good. Please share your link building services with the rest of us and if it is at a reasonable price, I might be interested.

 

[SuperLinks]

Google is broken.

You mentioned that you have been building links slowly and naturally, my question is whether or not you diversified your linkbuilding efforts. Such as anchor-texts used, URLs in which you backlinked, etc.

Most people that were crushed, regardless of the domain age and ranking history, didn't have an authentic backlink profile. Most links consisted of a number of perfectly optimized anchor texts, and all pointed to one or two pages on the domain.

I'd be curious if this is how your backlinks were built...

 

[assphuck]

To help remove some of the speculation of what may be impacting your sites, check out Google's official April Search Quality post at the URL below. It may help to shed some light on the problems you may be experiencing. Google made 53 total changes impacting search.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/search-quality-highlights-53-changes.html

 

[VinBed]

To help remove some of the speculation of what may be impacting your sites, check out Google's official April Search Quality post at the URL below. It may help to shed some light on the problems you may be experiencing. Google made 53 total changes impacting search.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/search-quality-highlights-53-changes.html

The "domain diversity" part bothers me - if you have more than one page ranking for a term you could lose a significant portion of your traffic.

 

[milian]

Let me just confirm, you have pages that don't have any real content what-so-ever? Only a title and maybe some H1 tags targeting the keywords?

You say that you have no ads either, how are you monetizing the site? Do you have forms or large opt-ins/lead gens that are sitewide on the site that take a up a large section above the fold?

Finally, what kind of anchor text diversity did you have when linkbuilding those pages? You said 3 links each, I'm assuming they were all optimized anchor text links?

I only targeted 2 pages on my site, home page and 1 inner page. I do have other pages that dont have much content on, but they weren't worked on. Although I have just changed my url structure, as my main keyword was used in products urls and category urls. I felt this might have an effect Penquin wise, as it could be seen as keyword stuffing, although it it a common way to structure urls, especially on eCommerce site e.g:

[/COLOR][COLOR=#000080][URL="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/blue-widget-model-06.htm"]www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/blue-widget-model-06.htm[/URL][/COLOR][COLOR=#000080]

now they look like

[URL="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/model-06.htm"]www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/model-06.htm[/URL][/COLOR]

I sell a physical product (although my site isnt ecommerce) On my home page I have my welcome message and a big image of my product, the main content is below the fold. Its also in a content slider with 6 different slides.


I don't think I was very clear in my initial post. There were 20 keywords I mainly built links for, 4 main ones i concatenated on heavily. I also did a bit of link building for another 80 related keywords and variations, only about 3 links to each of these phrases. So i should have approx 100 different keywords variations (not total amount of links) that have been used as anchors - and i ranked on page 1 for most of these.

 

[pdoods]

Is it just me or does Youtube videos rank better now? I mean, while doing my everyday searches via G on a 'regular' things (not IM related), I'm seeing lot of YT videos on top 10 search results..

 

[ComputerEngineer]

Is it just me or does Youtube videos rank better now? I mean, while doing my everyday searches via G on a 'regular' things (not IM related), I'm seeing lot of YT videos on top 10 search results..

not surprising . these new algos are for people using more adwords. youtube is also owned by google

 

[ComputerEngineer]

The "domain diversity" part bothers me - if you have more than one page ranking for a term you could lose a significant portion of your traffic.

It is complete bullsh*t. When i navigate via search results pages i keep seeing more results from same domain. And it is more than before.

 

[SuperLinks]

I only targeted 2 pages on my site, home page and 1 inner page. I do have other pages that dont have much content on, but they weren't worked on. Although I have just changed my url structure, as my main keyword was used in products urls and category urls. I felt this might have an effect Penquin wise, as it could be seen as keyword stuffing, although it it a common way to structure urls, especially on eCommerce site e.g:

[URL="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/blue-widget-model-06.htm"]www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/blue-widget-model-06.htm[/URL]

now they look like

[URL="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/model-06.htm"]www.examplesite.com/bluewidgets/model-06.htm[/URL]

I sell a physical product (although my site isnt ecommerce) On my home page I have my welcome message and a big image of my product, the main content is below the fold. Its also in a content slider with 6 different slides.


I don't think I was very clear in my initial post. There were 20 keywords I mainly built links for, 4 main ones i concatenated on heavily. I also did a bit of link building for another 80 related keywords and variations, only about 3 links to each of these phrases. So i should have approx 100 different keywords variations (not total amount of links) that have been used as anchors - and i ranked on page 1 for most of these.

Your use of colors made it near impossible to read your response...

A few takeaways that could help you rebound. As you mentioned you only backlinked two pages on your site. It's important these days, as seen via Penguin, to diversify the pages in which you are backlinking. Even if you have pages that aren't "backlink worthy", still backlink them!

In my own personal experience, I have sites in which I used Xrumer and Scrapebox on in which I backlinked every page on the domain with 7-10 various anchors that skyrocketed after Penguin. The websites that I focused only on a few pages, saw the most significant drops in rankings.

I'd also reconsider the layout of your site. As you mentioned you have a big image and your main content is below the fold. Again, I'm seeing a commonality of sites which plummeted in the rankings having huge above the fold images/optin forms/lead gen's/etc that were sitewide and/or a significant part of their site.

Google's goal is to provide relevant CONTENT to the end user. By providing SERP results that were heavily focused on "conversions" rather than content, they are doing a disservice to their end users. Sure, your site *may* be the best for the end user but algorithms don't make generalities. It's cut and dry for each and every site. Try moving your content up and in the focus more by reducing your image size/location.

 

[bigfoot1]

Now guys,

I see a lot of claiming that Google has killed small businesses. However, the results are broken, its likely Google will create further algorithmic changes to bring back normalcy.

Thats why we see a lot of irrelevant and spammy results on the SERPS right now, once Google cleans it up we should our ranks increase especially if we have quality sites.

 

[manny521]

Now guys,

I see a lot of claiming that Google has killed small businesses. However, the results are broken, its likely Google will create further algorithmic changes to bring back normalcy.

Thats why we see a lot of irrelevant and spammy results on the SERPS right now, once Google cleans it up we should our ranks increase especially if we have quality sites.

Unfortunately, google has never done this in the past so they probably won't do this in the future...look at past behavior to anticipate future behavior...

 

[Seo-Devil]

I write this post who are planing to make changes onsite SEO

What i seen:

before penguin updates

I done all my known onsite optimisation, content is unique (but nothing special)

No backlinks at all

And now i check targeted keywords is 2nd or 3rd page

So nothing to change onsite (of course more unique and good content):ranger:

 

[ComputerEngineer]

Now guys,

I see a lot of claiming that Google has killed small businesses. However, the results are broken, its likely Google will create further algorithmic changes to bring back normalcy.

Thats why we see a lot of irrelevant and spammy results on the SERPS right now, once Google cleans it up we should our ranks increase especially if we have quality sites.

recent algos forcing people to use adwords. so i think this is made with intention. but results are also getting horrible. so what will happen is not precise

 

[kegnum]

Wait so you are saying is to write unique content! OMFG! I never thought of that before.

 

[crazyz]

most of my sites have been dancing on acid but today they seemed to be back to where they used to be or better, has the dust settled?

 

[vuedoolor]

Dudes... I have a question(s)

What about link velocity? Wouldn't it look unnatural for a website/webpage to have consistent links per month? Wouldn't it be more natural for a site to have lots of links one month then very little the next and so on?

OH and is it just me or am I starting to see a lot of the top sites in the SERP with no h1, h2 tags?

 

[IMShane]

Dudes... I have a question(s)

What about link velocity? Wouldn't it look unnatural for a website/webpage to have consistent links per month? Wouldn't it be more natural for a site to have lots of links one month then very little the next and so on?

OH and is it just me or am I starting to see a lot of the top sites in the SERP with no h1, h2 tags?

Check this out:

http://searchengineland.com/adjusting-your-seo-strategies-during-panda-penguin-120108

I like this one:

"Make your link building consistently inconsistent."