Google Penguin's Unbelievably DEVASTATING Effects on SEO

I have been in seo (both white hat and black hat) for many years.
I have always been proud of the fact that I had never had a site drop off of Google.

I have been working on a nation water damage franchise site for the past 2 years and gotten the site from only coming up for the site name to having thousands of results in the number 1 spot and almost everything related to the industry in the top 3 pages.

The site has about 1,200 pages for different cities in the United States.

The home page was ranked high for keywords like "water damage", "toilet overflow", "water extraction", "flooded basement", "sewage backup" and hundreds of other top keywords. We was also ranked for these types of words for the city pages with the name of the city before the keyword as well as after the keyword.

The penguin update killed the site. Most of the keywords are totally gone, some keywords didn't get affected but they are few and ones that are not going to get any real traffic.

We was using a combination of black hat and white hat to get the site ranked. We tried to do things as white hat as we could but used programs like senuke so that we could compete with the companies with hundreds of thousands of backlinks. I was also in the process of totally redoing the website, so I do not know if the problem was from the backlinks or the site itself.

Google tells us they want the links to come naturally and be given because the other people like the content on your site and want to link to it. How many people are going to want to link to a water damage site which is a problem that most people have once or twice in their lifetime? Plumbers and stuff like that will exchange links but that again is something Google is not to fond of.

This is a company that was struggling just to pay the bills but I was working hard to help him get things going and gave up my own carpet cleaning company and seo company to help get it there, he has taken very good care of me over the past year, many months he gave me over half of his profits (which wasn't all that much lol) in the hopes that I would be able to get his business to the top and making a lot of money. His income and mine are now a big 0 and if I can't figure out something fast his business will be gone along with my income. I feel like I have let him down and it just makes me sick to my stomach.

If I can't figure something out fast I am in huge trouble, this isn't a site that can just be rebuilt and ranked again.

I think this update was a huge mistake on Google's part, not because of how it messed me up but because the top sites right now are really off. I can't believe some of the sites on page 1 of Google. I really hate how many sites with no content, bad content, Amazon, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia and other junk like that are on page 1. Everyone knows they can go to Amazon to buy stuff, why do they need to show us that for everything we search for?

What can we do to beat this problem? I am not one to sit back and whine about it, I complain for a few and then get on with it and figure out the solution and fix it. I just hope that I can figure out how to fix this mess.

Thank you for listening to my rant, now lets figure this out and beat it

Well i think we can also call the new penguin update as genocide attack on Affiliates , as you mentioned in your post that sites that were pointing to some LEAD generation tactics were hit hard , i think that is quite correct .

On WF there was a post that also explains the same , he says

I have 2 awesome Wordpress sites in a niche topic that make pretty good money from clickbank ebook affiliate sales, and also some change from Adwords and Amazon Astore iframe, but clickbank is the real money driver. BOTH of these sites were hit by Penguin update. For instance, my main keyword and homepage are now rankings #2 instead of #1 (which is big loss) and some other high value pages also fell a few positions, but other smaller pages including less popular posts and tag pages plummeted 2-5 pages and are now average #50-70. Neither of these sites had ANY spun or duplicate content, all stuff I wrote myself. Probably a hundred hours of research and writing went into each site.. These sites were text-heavy, had embeded Youtube videos and image and all that, good stuff, people loved it, you guys would love the sites too, they both had social (few hundred Facebook likes etc. twitter). I did the same exact slow but steady link building method I do for my small business clients, and and all that. These were high quallity sites that got a few thousand unique a day and made $20-100 per day.

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So Cloak your links clearly with precautions

Dan Da Man said:

Anyone noticing that more sites that are paying for adwords are ranking on the first page?

I noticed a few niches that were like this.

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Thats just a conspiracy theory.... Google would NEVER EVER jeopardize their business model to do that. Perhaps this is the FUD that they are looking for throughout the SEO community. The above the fold and loss of links + over optimization penalty is the most logical cause of wacky movements at the moment IMO

I am really have troubles working out what to do about this. If i combine the text of all the top 5 pages in my niche there is a total of 245 words, with 3 of the top 5 offering no text except links on the page that is ranking.

gregghawes said:

I am really have troubles working out what to do about this. If i combine the text of all the top 5 pages in my niche there is a total of 245 words, with 3 of the top 5 offering no text except links on the page that is ranking.

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I'm also seeing this as well, I've done research on a ton more niches and I see EMD's with little to no content, and a lackluster backlink profile ranking on the first page.....

WTF

I deleted a whole load of Adsense and moved the bits I kept so its not first thing on the page. Only did it because I wanted to try a different ad system. Now with less Adsense I'm seeing a recovery! Doesn't make any sense at all.. Nahh,,, coincidence !!!

Minister said:

WTF

I deleted a whole load of Adsense and moved the bits I kept so its not first thing on the page. Only did it because I wanted to try a different ad system. Now with less Adsense I'm seeing a recovery! Doesn't make any sense at all.. Nahh,,, coincidence !!!

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This could prove my theory of above-the-fold part of the algorithm. Of course Google loves additional revenue, but this is an algorithm update that likely analyzed the amount of ads/images/lead gen taking up space above the fold.

Google rolled out this algorithm change back in early January, and I believe it was tweaked in this latest update as well. Notice how it was mentioned in the official Penguin announcement?

To that end we've launched Panda changes that successfully returned higher-quality sites in search results. And earlier this year we launched a page layout algorithm that reduces rankings for sites that don't make much content available "above the fold."

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Let's face it, it's usually not a good user experience when a user does a search, to find a site full of ads or lead gen forms across the top of each page on the site. Especially when the real content is below the fold, or isn't the "spotlight" of the page. Google's goal is to return useful results, pre Penguin , and content above the fold is important.

That's why I'm recommending analyzing your sites using Googles Browser resolution tool if you were affected and testing a new web design that puts content first. Yes this will hurt conversions. But its likely better to have traffic and some conversions than a higher conversion rate and no traffic.

rpkrocks said:

Well i think we can also call the new penguin update as genocide attack on Affiliates , as you mentioned in your post that sites that were pointing to some LEAD generation tactics were hit hard , i think that is quite correct .

On WF there was a post that also explains the same , he says


So Cloak your links clearly with precautions

Click to expand...

I think penguin is mainly onpage.

I have a couple theories, to what they might be, but it's premature and running a few tests over the next couple of weeks.

I think that affiliate links and meta tags are being hit. I have been analyzing a lot of the front page results, and a large portion have NO meta tags whatsoever.

I am currently running a test on a brand new name and website with NO html or links and reverse build it to what Google responds to.

ryannull said:

I think penguin is mainly onpage.

I have a couple theories, to what they might be, but it's premature and running a few tests over the next couple of weeks.

I think that affiliate links and meta tags are being hit. I have been analyzing a lot of the front page results, and a large portion have NO meta tags whatsoever.

I am currently running a test on a brand new name and website with NO html or links and reverse build it to what Google responds to.

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Please feel free to share theories. I think the more that these theories are out in the open, the more people can debate, and analyze the data accordingly.

I'm having a lot of PM's and emails from fellow SEO's that lead me to believe there was a revamp of their above-the-fold analysis in Penguin. I'm running a few tests with those affected and will let you know the results as they get closer as well.

SuperLinks said:

Please feel free to share theories. I think the more that these theories are out in the open, the more people can debate, and analyze the data accordingly.

I'm having a lot of PM's and emails from fellow SEO's that lead me to believe there was a revamp of their above-the-fold analysis in Penguin. I'm running a few tests with those affected and will let you know the results as they get closer as well.

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I will.

In my opinion, I think the only way to really get a grip on what penguin is doing is to use a fresh brand new website with no backlinks or outside variables to compromise the experiment. This way you can do one thing at a time and see how Google responds and adapt to the changes.

ryannull said:

..... I think that affiliate links and meta tags are being hit. I have been analyzing a lot of the front page results, and a large portion have NO meta tags whatsoever..

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Errr,, actually, I did nofollow a bunch of affiliate links and reduce on them at the same time... was too embarrassed to say they weren't nofollowed in the first place. Didn't seem to make much difference before.

Minister said:

Errr,, actually, I did nofollow a bunch of affiliate links and reduce on them at the same time... was too embarrassed to say they weren't nofollowed in the first place. Didn't seem to make much difference before.

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Regardless if it is nofollow or do follow, I think Google is targeting the link itself and not whether or not it passes pagerank.

That is one of the theories I am working on, is to get rid of the entire link and use a php redirect. That way Google thinks it's an on site link. You just make sure it is nofollow and block the php file in the robots.txt, so Google doesn't cry foul.

The thing that bothers me, is that Google can easily wrongfully target urls that aren't even affiliate links, such as tracking urls.

Google screwed up. Stop trying to understand what they have implemented, they do not know what they have done either.

Have a little patience.

The same thing happened in our industry. The top 10 results are UNBELIEVABLY bad and pretty much all point to the same, new company who is monopolizing the industry on Google. Somehow.

I wrote a blog on it if you guys want to check it out : http://lilyfaden.com/blog/this-penguin-update-is-a-crock-of-b-s/

When I do raw searches for results I think are post-update ridiculous I'm finding backlinks from high-traffic URLs, I think you'd find some correlation between backlinks from alexa top 1000 and sites that have done some serp climbing with no particular merit of their own.

Man you all are working too hard... Just get one of these.

Annah said:

Have a little patience.

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In my opinion, this is the best piece of advice. You think you have figured it out already with 301s or something else, you might get slapped again soon. It's all a big mess now and Google has to sort it out. They cannot afford to be made fun of...

parasitus84 said:

In my opinion, this is the best piece of advice. You think you have figured it out already with 301s or something else, you might get slapped again soon. It's all a big mess now and Google has to sort it out. They cannot afford to be made fun of...

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301's are only a quick fix and nothing long term will come out of it.

Made fun of? They should feel embarrassed. I am more curious to see what comscore search market share will look like after this mess. Google drop and others gain?

My 10 year old authority money site got hit a couple days ago.
Went from #6 to #25, plus a shit load of other rankings dropped.

jon_xx_x said:

My 10 year old authority money site got hit a couple days ago.
Went from #6 to #25, plus a shit load of other rankings dropped.

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I think overloading on web 2.0s (and blog networks) is causing this... the sad part is, bing/yahoo LOVE that, so it's one or the other it seems!

Anyway, as I rebuild, it is ALL about domain diversity and traffic diversity this time... I don't care if I have nofollow links from good sources or not, I will be aiming for the most domain diversity for backlinks as possible (of course, automating this task and creating ******** links for the most part is the goal)

Also I'm going to be blasting sites for temporary gains, like the common practice is in pharma niches