Google Penguin's Unbelievably DEVASTATING Effects on SEO

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Well the funny part about google. They our the biggest scrapers on the planet. Everything on google is scraped and duped content. The rankings now our filled with junk. I had a site get hit that I never thought would get hit. It was a 13 year old site has a very unique set of products. Gets mentions on forums and social media 5-10 times a day. Over 1000+ real google +1 and 10k facebook likes.

The first page consist of.

Overstock
Nordstrom
Etsy
Amazon
Coach
Target
Wikipedia
Walmart
Zappos

For almost all my 500 keywords I use to rank for.

Seems like they knocked off the little guy. It reminds me of the old Microsoft days. Google slowly digging them a hole. What use to make google great is being lost.
 
google it s trying to change something,my site is coming back to the prev position for a few minutes and after that it s tanked again.
 
OK It's late and I should be in bed but started reading this thread and couldnt stop until I had read every post! I have a number of websites that have been built to promote the products my company sells. Two of my sites that previously ranked page 1 for a number of keywords dropped of the face of the earth after the algo update, except (and this is the part that is freaking me out) pages that had videos of our products on them, these two pages are still ranking on page 1!

I am wondering if it is something to do with the videos, both of these pages return in search results with a thumbnail of the video. Previously it was the home page that was ranking the highest (always in the top three for several keywords) now its the inner two pages that have the videos. The home page dosent appear in the first 100 pages for any keywords, previously it was ranked for around 20, many were page 1.

Could it be that Google is so in love with video content that it is keeping these pages in serps?
 
I have noticed my "homepage" no longer ranks for any keywords, at least no in the top 100. All my rankings for keywords are for inner pages. Anybody else seeing this that has been hit by the penguin.


It is like my homepage received a received a penalty.

*Note*- I would say 95% of my backlinks where made targeting only my homepage and not inner pages, with only about 3 keywords.
 
_clicking_ said:
I have noticed my "homepage" no longer ranks for any keywords, at least no in the top 100. All my rankings for keywords are for inner pages. Anybody else seeing this that has been hit by the penguin.


It is like my homepage received a received a penalty.

*Note*- I would say 95% of my backlinks where made targeting only my homepage and not inner pages, with only about 3 keywords.
Click to expand...

i am seeing the same thing...it seems the filter google applied can single out individual pages on your site where we over optimized...
 
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.
 
So big G decides to penalise everyone except itself, well done big g, well done..
 
I've suffered a penalty on a site a few months ago. It was half assed and I use blatant horrible spam to rank it. Well one day it just feel out of the ranks. No message in webmaster. The weird thing was 3rd teir pages where ranking around 40-50 positions lower and random pages where taking its place. (example http://domain.com/teir2/teir3)

Well honestly I didn't care much about it and I just let UAW plugin dump an article a day into it for a month or so. Well it came back on its own. So you people talking about random pages bouncing around now it's penalty. Will it come back I dunno just wait and see. In the mean time. Try using more then like 2 anchor texts and spread the love throu out the site, that might help ya on your next site. Should you back link your site now? I don't know that's up to you. If your still getting traffic I would, if your not I might not back link just yet.
 
I want to point out that Penguin not only destroyed a lot of SEO efforts, but also Adwords efforts as well. Out of no where, after many months of running one of my sites on Adwords last night it was suspended as a bridge page.

Good times!
 
letterman said:
OK It's late and I should be in bed but started reading this thread and couldnt stop until I had read every post! I have a number of websites that have been built to promote the products my company sells. Two of my sites that previously ranked page 1 for a number of keywords dropped of the face of the earth after the algo update, except (and this is the part that is freaking me out) pages that had videos of our products on them, these two pages are still ranking on page 1!

I am wondering if it is something to do with the videos, both of these pages return in search results with a thumbnail of the video. Previously it was the home page that was ranking the highest (always in the top three for several keywords) now its the inner two pages that have the videos. The home page dosent appear in the first 100 pages for any keywords, previously it was ranked for around 20, many were page 1.

Could it be that Google is so in love with video content that it is keeping these pages in serps?
Click to expand...

I haven't even begun to figure this out, but I checked a keyword and page which had only a few quality backlinks to it. My page doesn't even register in the SERPs, but the youtube video supporting the page ranks #1. There are several other pages which appear to be autoblogs that scraped the video which are showing up on the first couple of pages of rankings. Hell even a pinterest pin I did of the original page is on the 1st page.

Madness.
 
DatingChap said:
Could this simply be a temporary weeding process algo - bringing all the crap to the top briefly so they can manually review and penalize or de-index?

One of my sites - that earns me nothing as it's unmonatizable - is a specialist interest site built around my interest for others sharing the same interest (nothing sordid honest!) and its been #1 for 2 years, getting 600 uniques a day, no big cheese. It's an EMD dot com and also gets a bunch of long-tail naturally.

It's filled with genuine unique content from me and some friends that answers everything there is to answer on the subject. I've got a single 300x250 adsense block in the RH margin and thats it.

All links are genuinely built by people linking to the site - i built nothing artificial.

It's not particularly optimized other than a few H tags and a couple of alts and titles.

Anyway the point is it's now sitting at the bottom of page 2 and I'm getting 20 a day if I'm lucky. 100% unique and pretty much unmonatized content.

Page one is FILLED with completely unrelated garbage and answers-type sites with a single paragraph vaguely on topic.
Click to expand...

If you care to share your niche/domain I'd be happy to check it out. Before making any outlandish claims, I'm always looking at sites that were negatively affected and shouldn't have been.
 
_clicking_ said:
*Note*- I would say 95% of my backlinks where made targeting only my homepage and not inner pages, with only about 3 keywords.
Click to expand...

I think that's exactly your problem. Lack of anchor text diversity and URLs which you are backlinking.

I think its safe to say that Google not only targeted over-optimization onsite, but also over-optimization off-site. I also think that this had more to do with blatant linkbuilding being a target, rather than the source of links.

I have a lot of "throw-away" test domains that I like to run Scrapebox and Xrumer tests on. One thing I tested was the backlink methods and diversity to a few of these domains. Again, the linkbuilding methods were the same, and so were the linklists/auto approve lists that I utilized.

For some sites I simply used a few (two or three) anchor texts and only backlinked the homepage. For my other domains, I created a gigantic backlink list, with each page on my site and atleast 7 anchor text's per page. This took a shit-load of time to create, but I wanted to test the results.

Low and behold, those sites which I had major diversity, backlinking every internal page with 7 anchor text variations SKYROCKETED in the SERPs. Those sites that I focused on only a few keywords, and the homepage are gone, blasted into oblivion.

Most onsite variables are the same, so its unlikely that onsite variables were the cause.
 
Here is what happened to my site.

Before the update i had over 80 keywords on page 1, and another 20 on page 2. Yes some were long tail but none more then 4 different words, most of them just two words.These were the ones i used to rank track any way, of course i got found for loads more longer tails.

Out of these 100 keywords there were only 20 which i really cared about and 4 that were very important and spent time link building too. I had actually built links to the other 80 keywords, but only three links each if i remember correct, a year or so ago I bought a profile links blast to them, 3 profile links each. The other 20 keywords I built more links too and bought some link pyramids to the 4 main ones.

After the update i dropped out for 99 keywords, ending up with just one ranking, my main keyword, which was position 1 and is now 18.

My on site SEO concentrated on the 20 main terms and especially the main 4 terms. Many of the other 80 keywords i didn't do an onsite or content for; i must have been ranking just from the small number of backlinks they had, the fact that many of them were synonymous with my main terms and because i believe my site was deemed an authority site for this niche.

My onsite SEO was not spammy, my content was all original, none of it was spun, I have no ads on my site.

This has lead me to believe that this update has included a massive change in the way they view back links, but also probably due to trying to target so many keywords on a single page, eve without being spammy.
 
milian said:
Here is what happened to my site.

Before the update i had over 80 keywords on page 1, and another 20 on page 2. Yes some were long tail but none more then 4 different words, most of them just two words.These were the ones i used to rank track any way, of course i got found for loads more longer tails.

Out of these 100 keywords there were only 20 which i really cared about and 4 that were very important and spent time link building too. I had actually built links to the other 80 keywords, but only three links each if i remember correct, a year or so ago I bought a profile links blast to them, 3 profile links each. The other 20 keywords I built more links too and bought some link pyramids to the 4 main ones.

After the update i dropped out for 99 keywords, ending up with just one ranking, my main keyword, which was position 1 and is now 18.

My on site SEO concentrated on the 20 main terms and especially the main 4 terms. Many of the other 80 keywords i didn't do an onsite or content for; i must have been ranking just from the small number of backlinks they had, the fact that many of them were synonymous with my main terms and because i believe my site was deemed an authority site for this niche.

My onsite SEO was not spammy, my content was all original, none of it was spun, I have no ads on my site.

This has lead me to believe that this update has included a massive change in the way they view back links, but also probably due to trying to target so many keywords on a single page, eve without being spammy.
Click to expand...

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?
 
manny521 said:
What I have been noticing is that google is not ranking the page that I want it to rank for, matched with the keyword. Let me give you an example:

For example, if I optimize an inner page on my site to sell "big blue trucks", google will rank the page on my site that sells "little green cars"...its really weird...

this is happening throughout my SERPs, its really frustrating b/c how is that returning a result that the user was looking for?

My SERPs tanked on April 24th across the board.
Click to expand...


turdface said:
Yes, this is happening to me, too. Unrelated pages on my site are being returned in the search results.
Click to expand...

AT LAST, other people this is happening to !!!! I've searched countless forums and put out similar messages, only to watch tumble-weed drift by......

Not one of my pages is raking for the correct keywords. I'm also seeing just the 'category' ranking rather then the actual post. AND today, I'm noticing the my About Us page is ranking for 5 or 6 of my keywords.

As one of the sites this is happening to is a simple product focussed Amazon review type site, there is no-way that the keywords (Brand Names / Model Numbers) should be 'promoting' anything other than the page they are designed for (I'm seeing totally different brands of the product being promoted in SERPS with the wrong keyword). I'm ranking as high as #34 for a totally different product (although most of the 'ghost / fake rankings' are down at #80+).

Pheww - it's NOT just me then........(a glimer of hope)
 
What I will add to the above is that I'm seeing a huge spike in spider activity on my sites for the past 4-5 days (like 3-4 times normal) and I'm not really touching the sites to warrent this 'additional interest'.
 
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.
 
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