Stop thinking everything is a Panda/Penguin/etc. algo update. It's almost always not.

[deviatus]

G's algo already has built in features to move your sites up or down at any time, it's not new. Remember? We used to call them regular automatic or manual review penalties, not big updates to the algo that affect everyone near the same time. It doesn't take a team of Google engineers to penalize your site every time it happens, it's just the latest algo doing it's job. Now the Penguin update of April 24, 2012... now that was a fucking update. I can never remember dates, but I'm sure many of you will remember that day of reckoning for some time.

So if your site(s) drop suddenly, almost every time it's because they gave you a chance but you set off too many red flags with too much or poorly done BH seo, or Google is literally fucking with you... [related side note rant, skip if you want: they've patented it, don't know if it's implemented yet, but if their algo catches a certain amount of red flags but can't be sure if your site is gaming the system, instead of having a manual review (to save money) they'd just drop your rankings artificially to gauge your reaction as to whether you get scared off and stop building links or keep on building. If you stop your backlinking close to when they drop your site, they'll make sure it's not just a temporary test drop, all done automatic. Pretty smart, but then again your site can still hit #1 for months with Russian footer links before they catch on to this day, like they want crap ranking in certain niches so people use adwords more. But make sure to keep the travel, health, insurance, etc.. niches clean. Just a theory, but there is a patent they have akin to this].

There is a popular thread going on right now that started recently, speculating on another G update. Yet there hasn't been an update since Panda #24 a couple months back. I even bought into it for a bit and let my paranoia get the best of me and thought maybe they'd come out with an update announcement because of changes I saw in rankings when the thread was started. I found the reason my site drop later on, and it was a fault on my end.

The fact is that you could start a "Did Google just do a big update?..." thread at any minute of any hour of any day, and you'll have tons of people who just happened to have ranking changes that day (there's thousands of us here) all speculating and thinking they got hit by some new G update. Most of whom don't post in these threads, they just observe anxiously.

Countless sites either lose or gain ranking on any given day, it's been like that way before pandas and penguins stopped becoming our favorite animals.

 

[GiorgioB]

Shhh! You are ruining the best argument for all those "penguin/panda safe" BSTs... j/k

I've never had a site slapped **touch wood**

 

[Scritty]

Yes - this is the case. Normally someone with a poor website as well.

"I was hit by "P"anda" or "I was hit by "P"enguin" or "I got an overop "P"enalty". (the 3 "P's)
Always claim the site they have is the best thing since sliced bread, make claims about the onsite SEO and content - then you look - and more often than not it's a festering $4!t3 pile of a site with crappy onsite and offsite SEO.

"It's not my site" they moan "Google hit me with [penguin/panda/overop...delete as applicable]

but it very rarely is.

Here is a story of a weekend I spent a few months ago looking at 11 sites. Nearly all from webmasters claiming their site and their SEO was brilliant and that Google had hit them with one of the "P's". In 100% of the cases in that weekend "P" was not involved. Poor, thin websites and poor unfocussed offsite SEO that didn't deserve to rank was the culprit.

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...so-how-good-your-site-really.html#post4985306

Scritty

 

[deviatus]

Yes - this is the case. Normally someone with a poor website as well.

"I was hit by "P"anda" or "I was hit by "P"enguin" or "I got an overop "P"enalty". (the 3 "P's)

There's also another "P", for Propaganda.

I swear half of this SEO mass confusion is because they started naming their updates (and feeding that to the industry blogs) giving them a life of their own. The amount of SEO speculation we do on this site is absurd. If you're smart you actually study what is currently ranking, study the niches you want over time and see the fluctuation, what methods they're using, etc.

Studying the Google top 10s are better than listening to anything Cutts says. Rankings and their movements and patterns tell no lies.

 

[zoomoose]

they'd just drop your rankings artificially to gauge your reaction as to whether you get scared off and stop building links or keep on building. If you stop your backlinking close to when they drop your site, they'll make sure it's not just a temporary test drop, all done automatic. Pretty smart,

I've always had a problem with this theory which is: if a website disappears from google's search results, significantly fewer people will find it so you would expect new fewer links to be created pointing to it (as we are not supposed to be building links to our own websites, they should come form others because it's such a good site). So wouldn't it be natural for new link creation to all but stop when you site gets slapped?

 

[deviatus]

I've always had a problem with this theory which is: if a website disappears from google's search results, significantly fewer people will find it so you would expect new fewer links to be created pointing to it (as we are not supposed to be building links to our own websites, they should come form others because it's such a good site). So wouldn't it be natural for new link creation to all but stop when you site gets slapped?

Google's Best Practices actually leave some good breathing room for doing SEO yourself and hiring SEO firms to do "on purpose" link building. Vague as always, they warn against hiring SEOs who might do "particularly aggressive SEO".

True natural links (links not made by you or paid for or exchanged) are the rarest form there is. But if you have a popular site, like the Huffington Post, you're still going to get natural link velocity as most people are return visitors not relying on Google once they find a site they like.

If you check out the link profile's of most top 10s, those site owners put some serious work or money into unnatural backlinking. (Part of why I believe Google treats some niches more BH friendly to increase adwords revenue, they've already admitted to treating different keywords and phrases (niches) differently in terms of the SERPs. But some niches they won't let you fuck with. Like the term buy viagra changes everyday with new spam sites, but terms like "buy airline tickets" remain rock solid.

So I believe it might be when you hit what G's algo thinks could be the "particularly aggressive" stage but without manual review their algo can't be sure. So they drop you, leaving the IMer to think he blew it or that he has to slow down or just get lower numbers in quality links, instead of the counter-intuitive thing of carrying on and keeping your link velocity the same. They can also look at return visitors after the drop, lots of returns means more bookmarks and them remembering the URL, indicating it's quality.

And G knows most of the big dogs hire out for SEO for their sites, so they're protected. Look at the thousands of legit SEO providers (and the thousands of non-legit) around. So if they drop, their velocity should remain the same or even increase for as long as the webmaster trusts the SEO firm.

 

[gorang]

*snip*

I believe this to be the case too. I remember Google intervened in the Acai Berry niche. All top 10 sites there seem to be manually placed by Google. The face of he top 10 for "Acai berry" has drastically changed. You wouldn't get close to that niche no matter how many links you have unless Google gave the thumbs up. I might have exaggerated there but you get the picture.

 

[testdrive]

And yet another thread about "stop blaming google update, its your site"

I'm the op of the thread you mentioned, and I have answered so many times this type of thread/replies.

In case you missed it I'll quote one of my argument why i think its an update:

An I'll say this again too.. No one is arguing that you can not lose rank if there is no update..

I'll say this again.... We are not talking about just 1 personal site here... all major IM and SEO forum are talking about it because there are lots of webmaster affected.

You keep on talking about your site how it is penalized and how it recovered. In your case its more likely there is no update, because by the time you experienced it, no other person is talking about their sites losing their ranking. That is SEO, you rank, you get outranked and when you go overboard you sometimes trigger a penalty for your site alone.

Now... I'll say this again.. There are so many website affected at the same time, and the only explanation for that is, they tweak or update their algorithm thus hitting a lot of websites that the new algo targeted.

Either it's onsite or offsite thing, we can't be sure right now... The only way we can figure it out is to discuss about it and know the common denominator for the sites affected and maybe run some test. It will just a matter of time before we beat it. We always do.

P.S.: When you lose rank without update, the 1st page SERP will not be affected much it would be just you dropping off. if there was an update, you will see 3-5 new site in the first page and most of the time the 1st page result will be shuffled. This is specially true to micro niche where there so many sniper sites and made for adsense sites.

BTW.. Last panda update was march 15, 2013

G's algo already has built in features to move your sites up or down at any time, it's not new. Remember? We used to call them regular automatic or manual review penalties, not big updates to the algo that affect everyone near the same time. It doesn't take a team of Google engineers to penalize your site every time it happens, it's just the latest algo doing it's job. Now the Penguin update of April 24, 2012... now that was a fucking update. I can never remember dates, but I'm sure many of you will remember that day of reckoning for some time.

So if your site(s) drop suddenly, almost every time it's because they gave you a chance but you set off too many red flags with too much or poorly done BH seo, or Google is literally fucking with you... [related side note rant, skip if you want: they've patented it, don't know if it's implemented yet, but if their algo catches a certain amount of red flags but can't be sure if your site is gaming the system, instead of having a manual review (to save money) they'd just drop your rankings artificially to gauge your reaction as to whether you get scared off and stop building links or keep on building. If you stop your backlinking close to when they drop your site, they'll make sure it's not just a temporary test drop, all done automatic. Pretty smart, but then again your site can still hit #1 for months with Russian footer links before they catch on to this day, like they want crap ranking in certain niches so people use adwords more. But make sure to keep the travel, health, insurance, etc.. niches clean. Just a theory, but there is a patent they have akin to this].

There is a popular thread going on right now that started recently, speculating on another G update. Yet there hasn't been an update since Panda #24 a couple months back. I even bought into it for a bit and let my paranoia get the best of me and thought maybe they'd come out with an update announcement because of changes I saw in rankings when the thread was started. I found the reason my site drop later on, and it was a fault on my end.

The fact is that you could start a "Did Google just do a big update?..." thread at any minute of any hour of any day, and you'll have tons of people who just happened to have ranking changes that day (there's thousands of us here) all speculating and thinking they got hit by some new G update. Most of whom don't post in these threads, they just observe anxiously.

Countless sites either lose or gain ranking on any given day, it's been like that way before pandas and penguins stopped becoming our favorite animals.

 

[deviatus]

And yet another thread about "stop blaming google update, its your site"

I'm the op of the thread you mentioned, and I have answered so many times this type of thread/replies.

In case you missed it I'll quote one of my argument why i think its an update:

Did you even read your whole thread? Almost every post had a varied answer on their site ranking situation. No common theme. Maybe people who were just penalized were more likely to bitch and join the thread. But it looked just like any other day at the office, some people dropped, others had no change, some ranked higher. And Panda updates don't work the same any more, you wouldn't notice it because they switched to rolling updates.

BTW.. Last panda update was march 15, 2013

Panda #25 has only been confirmed that it will happen soon, it's not confirmed, and if you believe Matt Cutts who said it at SMX West, you should also believe that a Panda #25 update will have a much less noticeable roll-out process, more apt to be called a rolling update than a update. So you wouldn't even notice by now. Which makes sense because everyone in your damn thread had varied answers. Last confirmed update still January 22, 2013 Panda 24#.

 

[testdrive]

- In case you didn't noticed... a "there's an update thread" last long (at least 3 pages) when there is actually an update. At the same time there will be similar threads that will pop up withing the first 2-3 days of the update. The reason for this is, there are so many sites that are affected.

If there is no update, you will sometimes see one thread complaining about their ranking, but it seldom got a reply because no one is actually have the same problems, so people wouldn't bother answering.

Another thing is when there is an update, top SEO and IM forum talk about it like this:
www.seroundtable.com/google-sape-link-network-16465.html
searchengineland.com/was-that-a-google-update-or-wasnt-it-132258
forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/is-there-any-google-algorithm-update-20-traffic-decreased.2641474/

this type of threads and blog posts pops up when there is a shake in SERPS.

Now, if it is just a random site being penalized, it is impossible that every IM/SEO forum will see through it.

-Another point that you never answered is: When you lose rank without update, the 1st page SERP will not be affected much it would be just you dropping off. if there was an update, you will see 3-5 new site in the first page and most of the time the 1st page result will be shuffled. This is specially true to micro niche where there so many sniper sites and made for adsense sites.

- Of course people answering on the thread will have different answers, You just stated the obvious: When someone lose rank, some will gain rank, and some will have the same rank... This is true with or without update!


- I know panda will switch to rolling update as opposed to manually pushed update.. but guess what.... do you think panda algo will magically integrate itself to the current algo? NO!! they have to push the last manual update that will include it to the current rolling algorithm.

www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-25-16506.html

- OH, so you just call it an update if there is a confirmation from google? LOL.. how naive can you be.. if everything google do they report it to us.. Blackhat is so damn easy!!!

Did you even read your whole thread? Almost every post had a varied answer on their site ranking situation. No common theme. Maybe people who were just penalized were more likely to bitch and join the thread. But it looked just like any other day at the office, some people dropped, others had no change, some ranked higher. And Panda updates don't work the same any more, you wouldn't notice it because they switched to rolling updates.


Panda #25 has only been confirmed that it will happen soon, it's not confirmed, and if you believe Matt Cutts who said it at SMX West, you should also believe that a Panda #25 update will have a much less noticeable roll-out process, more apt to be called a rolling update than a update. So you wouldn't even notice by now. Which makes sense because everyone in your damn thread had varied answers. Last confirmed update still January 22, 2013 Panda 24#.

 

[jr_sci]

Google sends out tons of Algo updates every week. Not necessarily Matt Cuts will shout it out to the world with his world famous Twitter account.

I think you should just stick to the basics and leave the rest on Google.

 

[newman21]

well - they say, there is always a way round; even penguin, panda affected websites could be recovered quite quickly. we have recovered quite a few.