Why not just paste the article / content here instead of a link to your website that doesn't even load...
PENGUIN 5 UPDATE LEARNING'S SO FAR 19/10/2013
By Lucas Abraham October 19, 2013 6 Comments Case Study
So this is an update on the post I originally made here. After some time has passed now, I decided to revise this and have another look.
So as stated before in the previous post. We had multiple domains and used certain link profiles pointing to each domain:
Blog comment Blasts
Social Signals
Web2.0s
Directories
High PR links
No backlinks made at all just content
Press releases
Bookmarking
And then we used some mixed link profiles to see if what worked well and survived and what got annihilated:
Social signals with High PR links and a few Web2.0s (all Tier1 no Tier2 built)
Blog Comments, web 2.0s, press releases, social bookmarks and some social signals.
Directories with Bookmarking and Blog comments
Press releases with High PR links and Directories
Social signals with High PR(From blog networks)
What survived and what has been condemned?
On the whole only 3 of the domains are still ranking well:
Social signals with High PR(From blog networks)
No backlinks made at all just content
High PR links
This is more or less what I was actually expecting from the case study. Getting links from blog networks is a very strong addition to your profile as long as you know what you are doing and alongside social signals. As I expected the domain with no links made to it is still alive but doing a lot better than I thought it would.
No linkbuilding, just content
The website that was just based around content and had more content uploaded than the rest was relevant and high quality content. This site is currently ranking very high and sitting at #8 for the keyword that we targeted. It's not a very high competitive keyword but am still beating domains that have been linkbuilding.
Social signals with High PR
This domain is currently ranking 2-3 positions higher than the High PR only domain sitting at a steady #21. This has been a steady decline over the long period of time as the social signals were only placed on the site once at the beginning of the case study. This sums up the fact that social signals are a good boost for ranking but only for a short period of time before having to be refreshed to regain the boost.
High PR
This domain is now ranked only 2-3 positions lower than the domain that included social signals compared to in the beginning were it was around 10-15 places lower. From what I can tell this is based on Google using the social signals as a strong ranking factor and as time has passed the other domain has ranked back down to meet with this one.
What do these results mean?
It's still hard to give a definitive explanation of what this penguin update did due to needing a much larger sample size, but from what I can see Google are still respecting the contextual links from high authorities domains (Blog Networks). They are obviously still loving content rich websites that add value and with no dodgy link building, with social signals looking stronger than I have ever seen.
As for the rest, from now on I believe it is going to be mandatory that Tier 1, Tier 2 links and possibly even Tier 3 links are going to have to be at least manually spun and any link building done to the site will have to be done carefully. This is in the case of a white/greyhat site, there are still a lot of ways to game Google and get your site ranking very highly for competitive terms with blackhat churn and burn methods but these sites will die fast.
I have been hit by penguin, what do I do?
Over the past week or two I have cleared most of my sites and got them ranking again. The only way to really shake the Algo penalty is to remove the links that got you the penalty in the first place. I have done this to my own sites and to some clients sites that have reached out to me, if you are not sure what you are doing and need help with this feel free to contact me:
[email protected]
