Google update just now? 10/4?

Just my observations for my tanked pages:
- Have lots of dirty links targeting approx. 30 low / med keywords
- Lots of Blogposts, Profiles, etc. but no paid PR network
- All decreased from 1st or 2nd page to 4+ page
- Many keywords disappeared completely
- Strange pages now linked to keyword (e.g. category site)
- Continued link building and didn't change strategy much after tank, but slower building and exclusion of the very bad strategies.

Last two three days some of the bad ranked keywords came back to page 2 or 3, but the disappeared ones (not in top 100) are still away.
I (want to) see this as slightly improve. Beside of the spamy links my site contains very unique and high quality content.

My short time strategy:
- Stay tuned no hurry, Bing and Yahoo improve constantly
- Mid of next week I will clean the absolutely worst high PR do-follow domains (you know what blog post shit I mean) from Google and see how it performs the next weeks.
- Continue quality article posting (self written, VA written)

Just my two cents ;-)

cybersage said:

After reading this thread and seeing confusion, I'll give my two cents, which will hopefully help some people.

1. If your site was hit around October 4th, you were hit by Google's most recent spam filter Penguin 2.1. Google has said this is a revision of 2.0 that "goes deeper". I've found it useful to refer back to Penguin 2.0 analysis that has been performed. Most people that were hit by 2.0, and recovered find themselves being hit again, and some that escaped 2.0 were hit recently. It seems as though Google has tightened the filter to catch more sites; this explains why sites that didn't get hit before 2.0 and had no link building done, got hit by 2.1. This is all speculation, as I don't have a large sample size to test and am trying to infer based on what others have said.

2. For the people concerned about hummingbird, please take the time to read relevant posts on various SEO blogs to understand what the premises and concept behind hummingbird is (there was a great post on GOY referenced earlier in this thread). Google announced that Hummingbird was released in the middle of September. From my reading of everything I can find on Hummingbird algo (including the patent), it will favor more content, and the use of LSI terms. Hummingbird re-writes search engine queries to provide more relevant search results.

3. Finally to all the people saying their "white-hat" sites got hit, you clearly don't understanding the meaning of the term "white-hat", but this is personal opinion. If you got hit, it's almost certainly because you were spamming or had spammed in the past. I'm really starting to think that Google is trying to push SEOers away from anchor text altogether. As google becomes more sophisticated, it will not need anchor text as an indicator about what a particular page is about. Please keep in mind that I'm not saying links are dead, just that anchor text may be going that way.

Question to my fellow BHWers: Did anyone that has only links back to their site with generic anchor (click here), and naked urls (www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com) get hit?

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Than what about the negative SEO? How google (or you) can know that the links are created by site's owner?

About Hummingbird - someting I see from the panda update 2012 - g00gle's synonym database improved. The terms like wear, dress and clothes are absolute the same for google from the panda beginning. I think this algorithm is the same that trying figth with the spun content.

Abouth the big dropp in the SERP again - may backlinks sellers says "my site is raising" lol. Too many people feel hit, but what is really going on in search while penguin2.1 is rolling?!?. This is what - internetassociation org robbing. Billion of looses in the small business leads to Milion winnings for gogay (g00gle).

Just my point.

naskootbg said:

Than what about the negative SEO? How google (or you) can know that the links are created by site's owner?

About Hummingbird - someting I see from the panda update 2012 - g00gle's synonym database improved. The terms like wear, dress and clothes are absolute the same for google from the panda beginning. I think this algorithm is the same that trying figth with the spun content.

Abouth the big dropp in the SERP again - may backlinks sellers says "my site is raising" lol. Too many people feel hit, but what is really going on in search while penguin2.1 is rolling?!?. This is what - internetassociation org robbing. Billion of looses in the small business leads to Milion winnings for gogay (g00gle).

Just my point.

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So basically spun content is pretty shite nowadays, not that it was ever good. Most of the sites I've seen that haven't been hit have 100% unique content on their site and all backlinks apart from a small minority have unique content too. New sites I have in the making with no links yet are going to be as whitehat as I can, which is hard and slow, but it should help me get through this fucking updates.

As Zso would say , penguin taget only little puppies :
Have a look here : http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/614795-you-wanna-see-my-sites-rankings-after-penguin-2-1-a.html

It's now so much more worthwhile to spend the extra money on a domain with a lot of authority, will make ranking your pages significantly easier with how much emphasis they are putting on your overall domain authority now. Their algorithm updated for the better and I've seen nothing but positive movement across ALL of my websites, and better search results as well.

Just did a search on .co.uk for "buy gucci polo" 4th spot is a China site selling fakes and 8th is Russian .ru site selling fakes aswell, they are no were near done with this update.

chris187 said:

Just did a search on .co.uk for "buy gucci polo" 4th spot is a China site selling fakes and 8th is Russian .ru site selling fakes aswell, they are no were near done with this update.

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Or they've just fucked it all up?

Anyway, I don't see any point in waiting, if you've been link building or paying for services and your site's been hit then it's gone and that's that.

Need to move on, get new sites up, and not make the same mistakes again.

chris187 said:

Just did a search on .co.uk for "buy gucci polo" 4th spot is a China site selling fakes and 8th is Russian .ru site selling fakes aswell, they are no were near done with this update.

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Im in the UK too and I see a lot of results now from .za, .nz and .au domains which isnt relevant at all for a UK search. I also lot of deep pages in the results from blogspots and wordpress sites going back as far as 2009.

There are not any results on the first page showing as an exact search in the words that Google highlight on the results. Mostly they are very related but reversed the other way round. Something like "hat for big head" is "big head hat" Silly example I know but I hope you can see the principle.

Weird

I'm in the UK too - see some sites turning up that dropped through the floor on the rankings last time around. Interestingly enough one of my sites which was tanked on the first round of penguin has reappeared in the SERPs - not done anything with it in 2 years.

I only saw one site take a major hit, all other sites are ranking well...some lost just a couple of positions so nothing major. I use the same strategy for all sites, the only difference is that the site that tanked had many more forum links pointing in, im not saying forum profiles but rather in text forum links that are totally white hat with unique content around them (not spun) and many web 2.0 properties.

It seems like many people give up when this happen, I am pretty sure from my observations across about 50 of our clients that I have analyzed over the years of algorithm updates that:

* They devalue the "type" of links that people are building the most at that specific time across the board (google can see what kind of links pop up the most)
* They raise value for a new type of link (needs to be figured out)

In short this is my analysis (I intentionally left out forum profiles Xrumering and linkfarms/directories):

-5-6 years ago you could SB yourself to the top with blog commenting....everyone was spamming with SB
-Around 4 years ago they stopped the blog commenting frenzy and it jumped to social bookmarkings
-3 years ago people that had been using BMD started to tank...the social bookmarking era was done and article links white hat strategies was the shit
-2 years ago Google started hitting Private blogging networks and the white hat articles was somewhat done for and web 2.0 sites became the link of choise , also social bookmarkings and social signals started giving a lot of juice
-1 year ago nothing major happened to the type of links as Matt Cutts had people "think" it was all about the spun spam links, although link diversity became more important as well as anchor diversity, all of a sudden blog commenting started working again (I know many of you did not know this and you still have to figure out how to use the blog commenting to make it work)
-Today....from what seems to be the issue (just guessing so far) they devalued the web2.0 profiles and forum intext links.

I am yet to figure out what the new strategy should be based upon...I am considering doing a lot of PDF marketing and diversify my links even more, more anchor texts, more type of links and not have such a strategic link building pyramid.

Most people set it up with different kind of links meaning that a web 2.0 property might not ever get other web 2.0 properties to link in but rather wiki sites, social bookmarkings etc. This is an easy way to sort out an unnatural strategy....my suggestion is build every type of link to whatever link you have built (confusing, I know)

Also have a look at what Google are doing to analytics, it has overgone a huge change in the recent couple of weeks, maybe you can sort something out inside analytics with all the new tools available. Another thing is.....why do you think Google removed their adwords keyword tool that everyone loved. They want us to loose all our insights to why we are getting traffic. I am pretty sure that CTR will increase it's value over the years as the (not provided) section is increasing inside our analytics accounts

They can't penalize webspam for real as that would destroy their algo, they can however keep changing the game and sometimes one type of links get devalued and then a couple of years later they give back some of its strenght (thats when you see your sites jump back)...diversity will help you win.

I do not really write much here but I thought I'd share this time around to give you some hope

islandman1010 said:

Im in the UK too and I see a lot of results now from .za, .nz and .au domains which isnt relevant at all for a UK search. I also lot of deep pages in the results from blogspots and wordpress sites going back as far as 2009.

There are not any results on the first page showing as an exact search in the words that Google highlight on the results. Mostly they are very related but reversed the other way round. Something like "hat for big head" is "big head hat" Silly example I know but I hope you can see the principle.

Weird

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Me too (in the UK too). Seeing stupid results, which I suppose is a good thing, as I want my homepage rankings back (for 3-4 sites). Inner pages are still ranking, homepages are gone. Hopefully they come back and stick to the top, as there is no reason for them not to rank. Google's either fucked up or their dopey ass update is taking forever (it's a week today).

My views on this update are pretty simple

If you were building crappy links, then accept the damn consequences and move the hell on!!

Stop praying that your sites will magically reappear at the top, they won't.

And stop getting emotionally attached to your sites (LOL). It just a few pages, some coding, images and a bit of content stuck together.

This was clearly a multifaceted update by Google to confuse the crap out of peeps. They didn't target any one thing, but lots of different things.

On to building better sites, with better links ;-)

xtube said:

They can't penalize webspam for real as that would destroy their algo

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Why can't they?

Do you think Amazon, Yelp, Ebay and the other big boys rely on spam links, whether it be direct to their site, or "tiering" the sites that link to them?

These sites would still stand strong if spam links were 100% devalued (maybe they already are). These are the only sites google care about.. They couldn't care less about the knock on effects of devaluing or penalizing every spam link ever made so long as page 1 of their serps is made up of these type sites.

I've only seen rank improvements from this update...A lot of weird "dancing" up and down the SERP's, and competitors that had EMD's with massive amounts of spammy links have tanked, some t1 high authority web 2.0's seem to be doing worse, while some of the strong but not as authoritative one's have risen in several of my niches (all 100% unique content, manually written). This is a small sample I'm taking my information from, so I can't say anything as a solid fact, but that's what I've observed.

videouploader said:

What Type of links building can be done to recover site back ?

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You'd have to know exactly why your site got hit / was penalized. Even then it can be extremely hard and sometimes not even worthwhile to try, and is better to just start fresh.

Also Penguin 2.1 did amazing things for me personally, I feel the algorithm is much improved and it's working beautifully with the way I do things for my sites. The most important thing is to DIVERSIFY YOUR SHIT. Your links and anchors need to be as natural looking as possible, check out legit authority sites in your niche that rank and have been ranking for a while. This will give you an idea of what a natural backlink profile looks like.

I am really struggling to decide if I should redirect to a new domain, or de-index current site and move.
I have a really nice domain that's worth a lot of money and is perfect, but I don't want to waste it by 301ing and getting popped again in a month leaving that domain name worthless. However, I was front page for tons of keywords in a very hard niche (still am in bing).
I like the sound of quick 301 redirect and getting traffic again.. What do you guys think? Traffic is still 1/4 of what it was pre 2.1, I need to make a move!

brooktroutballer said:

I am really struggling to decide if I should redirect to a new domain, or de-index current site and move.
I have a really nice domain that's worth a lot of money and is perfect, but I don't want to waste it by 301ing and getting popped again in a month leaving that domain name worthless. However, I was front page for tons of keywords in a very hard niche (still am in bing).
I like the sound of quick 301 redirect and getting traffic again.. What do you guys think? Traffic is still 1/4 of what it was pre 2.1, I need to make a move!

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I have a domain like that, so I'm trying not to completely trash it just yet, I'm trying 301s and moving content to new domains for other sites that were hit, but the one with the valuable domain isn't just worth throwing away yet, in my opinion. I resurrected it from the ashes once before already (unfortunately, it took SAPE to resurrect it the first time, though lol)

Rua999 said:

Why can't they?

Do you think Amazon, Yelp, Ebay and the other big boys rely on spam links, whether it be direct to their site, or "tiering" the sites that link to them?

These sites would still stand strong if spam links were 100% devalued (maybe they already are). These are the only sites google care about.. They couldn't care less about the knock on effects of devaluing or penalizing every spam link ever made so long as page 1 of their serps is made up of these type sites.

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They might not rely on webspam but these sites are also spammed to death....if you have ever analyzed huge site:s link profiles you would see all kinds of dodgy links. However they also have huge amounts of great and natural links meaning that they have "link diversity" which is what I was speaking about in my post. Thus if they would target webspam and spun content these sites could potentially also see penalties if they aren't exempt from penalties which some sites most probably are (the huge ones)

Weird, my homepage isn't ranking at all but the inner pages are. What is this? It's like all the kws my homepage was ranking for have gone and have done since the update. Inner pages are doing well and ranking for the main kw that the homepage was ranking for.

Will this come back? Can you just get a homepage penalised and not the rest of the site? I've never seen this before.