Google Algorithm Update Just Now?

ThopHayt said:

If Google collected lists of bad links and waited to take action then it wouldn't effect links instantly. This instant action is what Penguin Live is supposed to do rumors have it.

Click to expand...

Let me put some pieces together for you that you may be missing. Currently Google does not announce updates to their algorithms, and sometimes does not confirm them when other spot them. The last generally accepted algo update was Nov. 19, 2015. I started the link building mentioned after that on Nov. 23, 2015. This mitigates your assertion that bad links are dealt with after an update.

Your claim of Penguin live would be a reference to the RankBrain algorithm.
https://www.besthostnews.com/ai-rankbrain-now-part-of-google-search-algorithm/

Reading that link, RankBrain is nothing more than a semi-supervised Bayesian Classifier that connects words used in a search query and contracts them into general itemized categories. The problem is that such a classifier can be wildly inaccurate in use and can go off on some wild tangents. Most often, this type of classifier is used with a small input set that is classified and the expanded results are inserted into a new run of the classifier as the training data. This process is repeated numerous times.

Knowing the above, and being able to build a classifier in Python in about two hours, an enterprising person could scrape a large number of webpages, classify the title, headings, and body and make a very good estimate of what RankBrain finds important. Once a person finds the words that the algorithm finds most statistically relevant. that person could write an article that intelligently incorporates the most statistically relevant words into an article. You would scam RankBrain in very short order.

Anytime I start building links, I use a process that is somewhat similar to what RankBrain would use. The difference is that for the last several years I have been flying by the seat of my pants as to what is important. Lately, I have been working on Bayesian classification; what that will work out too, I do not really know at the time. Considering that it takes my I7, 4770k with 20 gigs of ram 17 seconds to calculate every possible combination in a 69 choose 5 matrix (11,238,513 combinations in a 10 x 7 matrix), along with the deviation and variance, as well as three gigs of ram to do do it, you can determine just how computationally and resource expensive it is. I can speed the process a little using my GPU, but not as much as you would expect. By way of contrast, it only takes three seconds to calculate every possible 5 card hand in a deck of cards (52 choose 5) and does not break a gig of ram. Scaling up, you need some serious computational power devoted to search queries. Human language is a large data set.

You may also wish to look at rank ranger while remembering that I asserted that I noticed changes on Dec. 09, 2015
https://www.rankranger.com/rank-risk-index

MozCast also shows a small spike for Dec. 10, 2015
http://mozcast.com/

Algoroo also shows a small spike on Dec. 10:
https://algoroo.com/

I can relate to Justus' observations , i have a wmt report to show u guys , we were never impacted with the penguin refresh or the panda thing in massive scale however this dec 10 out two sites tanked down and the only thing that coincides with this event that we gained some negative links by 5th dec that lost by 9th dec .

so it must be something that relates more with the link factor . Not many are noticing this but i am pretty confident that something has happened for sure .

Nothing unusual here.

no change for me

Are you sure, OP?

A lot of people have been saying otherwise - could it be a "shadow update"?

I can't a4d to rank.

Funny how some people, when they see minor changes, start preaching about new algo update

Updated and my keywords are rolling up lol this update made me smile actually.

on Dec 10 ... And going steep down , so far i have had this site averagely steady from 2011 with no panda or penguin issues like i said.

JustUs said:

Let me put some pieces together for you that you may be missing. Currently Google does not announce updates to their algorithms, and sometimes does not confirm them when other spot them. The last generally accepted algo update was Nov. 19, 2015. I started the link building mentioned after that on Nov. 23, 2015. This mitigates your assertion that bad links are dealt with after an update.

Your claim of Penguin live would be a reference to the RankBrain algorithm.
https://www.besthostnews.com/ai-rankbrain-now-part-of-google-search-algorithm/

Reading that link, RankBrain is nothing more than a semi-supervised Bayesian Classifier that connects words used in a search query and contracts them into general itemized categories. The problem is that such a classifier can be wildly inaccurate in use and can go off on some wild tangents. Most often, this type of classifier is used with a small input set that is classified and the expanded results are inserted into a new run of the classifier as the training data. This process is repeated numerous times.

Knowing the above, and being able to build a classifier in Python in about two hours, an enterprising person could scrape a large number of webpages, classify the title, headings, and body and make a very good estimate of what RankBrain finds important. Once a person finds the words that the algorithm finds most statistically relevant. that person could write an article that intelligently incorporates the most statistically relevant words into an article. You would scam RankBrain in very short order.

Anytime I start building links, I use a process that is somewhat similar to what RankBrain would use. The difference is that for the last several years I have been flying by the seat of my pants as to what is important. Lately, I have been working on Bayesian classification; what that will work out too, I do not really know at the time. Considering that it takes my I7, 4770k with 20 gigs of ram 17 seconds to calculate every possible combination in a 69 choose 5 matrix (11,238,513 combinations in a 10 x 7 matrix), along with the deviation and variance, as well as three gigs of ram to do do it, you can determine just how computationally and resource expensive it is. I can speed the process a little using my GPU, but not as much as you would expect. By way of contrast, it only takes three seconds to calculate every possible 5 card hand in a deck of cards (52 choose 5) and does not break a gig of ram. Scaling up, you need some serious computational power devoted to search queries. Human language is a large data set.

Click to expand...

Penguin Live (what many are dubbing the upcoming Penguin update because its alleged real-time action) isn't the same thing as RankBrain. RankBrain is Google's new AI essentially. It may USE the RankBrain AI to guide Penguin when Penguin is updates, but as of right now my understanding is that RankBrain is only being used on the part of Google that associates search queries and content (language and association). Essentially Google wants to be also to interperate what a searcher means and correctly associate that query with a CORRECT page of results that aren't reliant on EXACT KEYWORD matches. So you search for "the actor who played neo" and the results would have nothing to do with the matrix, but instead be about Keanu Reeves. Because your question wasn't REALLY about the matrix... it was looking for an actor. RankBrain is doing that right now from the news I've read.

Here are my thoughts. I get the feeling that right now Google has automatic "feelers" that go out and look for spam, PBNs, and link networks. These are then probably put onto a black list of suspicious sites. I'm guessing this list is watched and at some point the worst of the list merits a manual review in an attempt to decide if your website is using a PBN (or whatever) to try to rank. If I had to guess as to what Penguin Live is trying to do I'd guess that its trying to take the human labor completely out of the equation and give Google the ability to go straight from black listing links to evaluating them and reviewing your site for slapping in one clean motion. Right now it seems that there is a "waiting" period where Penguin needs some sort of human action.

The other possibility is that the "Live" part of Penguin would be more about adjusting the algorithm on-the-fly to respond to blackhatters tactics. So if lets say the algo notices that known blackhatters are favoring linking pattern XYZ then Penguin can adjust itself to reward XYZ less on-the-fly rather than allow people to abuse that tactic for X months until the next update.

At any rate I see Google giving an AI such power as a potentially HUGE headache. And I'm guessing that getting reliable results in testing is proving harder than they had hoped. Either way Penguin Live is late as shit.

ThopHayt said:

Penguin Live (what many are dubbing the upcoming Penguin update because its alleged real-time action) isn't the same thing as RankBrain. RankBrain is Google's new AI essentially. It may USE the RankBrain AI to guide Penguin when Penguin is updates, but as of right now my understanding is that RankBrain is only being used on the part of Google that associates search queries and content (language and association). Essentially Google wants to be also to interperate what a searcher means and correctly associate that query with a CORRECT page of results that aren't reliant on EXACT KEYWORD matches. So you search for "the actor who played neo" and the results would have nothing to do with the matrix, but instead be about Keanu Reeves. Because your question wasn't REALLY about the matrix... it was looking for an actor. RankBrain is doing that right now from the news I've read.

Here are my thoughts. I get the feeling that right now Google has automatic "feelers" that go out and look for spam, PBNs, and link networks. These are then probably put onto a black list of suspicious sites. I'm guessing this list is watched and at some point the worst of the list merits a manual review in an attempt to decide if your website is using a PBN (or whatever) to try to rank. If I had to guess as to what Penguin Live is trying to do I'd guess that its trying to take the human labor completely out of the equation and give Google the ability to go straight from black listing links to evaluating them and reviewing your site for slapping in one clean motion. Right now it seems that there is a "waiting" period where Penguin needs some sort of human action.

The other possibility is that the "Live" part of Penguin would be more about adjusting the algorithm on-the-fly to respond to blackhatters tactics. So if lets say the algo notices that known blackhatters are favoring linking pattern XYZ then Penguin can adjust itself to reward XYZ less on-the-fly rather than allow people to abuse that tactic for X months until the next update.

At any rate I see Google giving an AI such power as a potentially HUGE headache. And I'm guessing that getting reliable results in testing is proving harder than they had hoped. Either way Penguin Live is late as shit.

Click to expand...

What you choose to describe as 'Penguin' would fit very well within what I am describing as 'RankBrain.' The methods used for spamming generally include a link within supporting spun text. If you input several thousand pages of spun text into a Bayesian classifier, you will end up with a pattern of the frequency of given words that might be spam indicators. If you take the same method and input what you consider valid pages, you end up with a word indicator that might be legitimate pages. In both instances, the same classifier is used, the output is simply used in a different fashion; the word instances *might* lead to an associated pattern that is different.

Human language is fuzzy. The literal meaning of a word is dependent on the sentence, paragraph, and subject the word is used in. Semantic analysis can be challenging. As an example, Fuck you." What does it mean. Is it always an insult? If we have a hostile argument and I use the phrase, its meaning is generally clear. What if you and I are shooting the shit and telling stories and I use the phase? Depending on the topic, is may be a way of saying that your story is unbelievable, or it may be a way of complimenting your latest scam to beat Google. Once you get into bigrams and trigrams, and more complex sentence structure, the problem of semantic analysis becomes more difficult. This includes us poor humans, not only computers that we are trying to program to decision trees that approximate human speech and emotional intent.

If we compare Google voice to Cortana. Cortana is well ahead of Google Voice. Cortana more frequently presents links that are more relevant to what is asked. Both of these are examples using different programming strategies of the BrainRank algo. Maybe it is just my bias because I use a Windows phone and it trains to my patterns. However, I never use a search engines voice recognition on a computer so I cannot speak to that.

Your idea of 'Feelers' could very well be pages that people report as Spam to WMT, or that are picked up off the honeypots and spam reporting sites like Stop Forum Spam and Akismet. That would be beyond what I know and have explored, let alone the commercial spam sites that use data mining. When we go into neural networks, the game changes, and so far has been less reliable.

I will leave you with five hours of video that cover machine learning and illustrate at a low level some of the things I have gone over:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG_gQpXJNGU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns6YNl2fysg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3IGd5CjsVA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW9CHXNhwng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-jVjTchpiE

Be careful about unnatural links, try to minimize footprint as much as you can.

No change for me, still waiting someone updated

sk7411 said:

View attachment 73757

on Dec 10 ... And going steep down , so far i have had this site averagely steady from 2011 with no panda or penguin issues like i said.

Click to expand...

You can have the cleanest link profile in the history of mankind, you'll still get slapped by Google at some point. It's almost random. They profit with every penalty - the machine just feeds itself.

bartosimpsonio said:

You can have the cleanest link profile in the history of mankind, you'll still get slapped by Google at some point. It's almost random. They profit with every penalty - the machine just feeds itself.

Click to expand...

Google employees want more Adwords money to buy a yacht for Christmas so they come up with this penalty.That is only explanation I can come with.

JustUs said:

What you choose to describe as 'Penguin' would fit very well within what I am describing as 'RankBrain.' The methods used for spamming generally include a link within supporting spun text. If you input several thousand pages of spun text into a Bayesian classifier, you will end up with a pattern of the frequency of given words that might be spam indicators. If you take the same method and input what you consider valid pages, you end up with a word indicator that might be legitimate pages. In both instances, the same classifier is used, the output is simply used in a different fashion; the word instances *might* lead to an associated pattern that is different.

Click to expand...

What Google is calling Penguin (their link based update) will surely utilize the rankbrain AI as you describe. But we should also be on the lookout for where and how else Google will use this. As you point out Cortana is ahead og Google for now, so I fully expect rankbrain to attempt to turn the tables there soon. In the long view Google is an AI company, not a search engine anymore. Those who live on spun content are in for a shocker, btw.

There was a bigger spike than December 10th yesterday, yet nobody has said anything about that.

My money is on no change and a completely plausible explanation can be found for all those sites tanking. Also noticed no Jnr VIP members chipping in either which say alot to me.

Nothing has changed, it's just the same old "seo is dead dontcha know" thread.

Jumbuck1976 said:

There was a bigger spike than December 10th yesterday, yet nobody has said anything about that.

My money is on no change and a completely plausible explanation can be found for all those sites tanking. Also noticed no Jnr VIP members chipping in either which say alot to me.

Nothing has changed, it's just the same old "seo is dead dontcha know" thread.

Click to expand...

As I said in my previous post, it ended up being a batch of Unnatural links warnings handed out to several of my sites. It just took a while for the message to come into GWT. Note: The sites were not in GWT during the time they ranked. I assume it was competitors reporting and the sites were manually reviewed (this is a very competitive market).

Jumbuck1976 said:

There was a bigger spike than December 10th yesterday, yet nobody has said anything about that.

My money is on no change and a completely plausible explanation can be found for all those sites tanking. Also noticed no Jnr VIP members chipping in either which say alot to me.

Nothing has changed, it's just the same old "seo is dead dontcha know" thread.

Click to expand...

Most "SEO expert" blogs miss the big updates. They only copy and paste what Google releases on the webmaster blog afterwards, copying word for word.

Well... discovered these results this morning for one of my keywords! WTF?



I'm scared to run a site wide analysis. And here I thought it was going to be a good Monday. SHIT!