May 5th Delayed Penguin effect

My website was doing great up until Friday may 5th. Friday morning I checked my rankings and I was moving up nicely for all my keywords (over 50)....I checked saturday night my rankings and my site was wiped off for almost all my keywords. I'm still indexed in google. This seems like a delayed penguin effect of some sort. I checked my cloudflare account and it shows that google last crawled my site exactly on may 5th. Looks like they found something on page that they did not like - i think its on page since the effect only took place after google crawled my site. there's no dup. content on the site and the articles are pretty good quality.

anyone seen something similar?

it doesn't have to mean that you got hit because of inpage seo

if you trigger penalty with your off page stuff - google crawler still comes to your web page to get all factors they need to determine how badly you must be punished

there was a PR update 2days ago, obviously google may have discovered negative backlinks for your site as they crawls whole interned during pr update.
So ur site crawled thats the part of pr update, and they may found -ve backlinks during crawl.
We cant predict exact reason.
God knows...
Oh sorry GOOGLE knows

There are a lot of things happening behind the scene.

For example, Google algorithm may not run in real time. It may take a while for them to analyze and penalize. And I do believe they have separate bots to fetch and process data.

It also may take a while before data get synced from one datacenter to another.

There are a few threads about how to recover from Penguin. If you feel like you're penalized, try to analyze the situation and follow those advice.

Weird you went down on the 5th. Maybe you got hit with a little NSEO.

Doubt it was onsite related, Penguin is mostly offsite focused i.e webspam. Must of been something in your link profile they didnt like

Just because there was the Penguin update doesn't mean G doesn't continue to penalize sites every day like they have been doing for years.

You just got a regular penalty. Your site might have triggered more red flags during Penguin, but that might not have been enough to derank you, but now your red flags have added up.

It might be specific to your site. like domain penalization

Unfortunately Penguin finally caught up to you.

maybe its google dance.
or google pr update ..devaluation of some inbound links.

Exactly the same thing happened to my site. Same date. Must have been the damn BIRD

mcaorg said:

My website was doing great up until Friday may 5th. Friday morning I checked my rankings and I was moving up nicely for all my keywords (over 50)....I checked saturday night my rankings and my site was wiped off for almost all my keywords. I'm still indexed in google. This seems like a delayed penguin effect of some sort. I checked my cloudflare account and it shows that google last crawled my site exactly on may 5th. Looks like they found something on page that they did not like - i think its on page since the effect only took place after google crawled my site. there's no dup. content on the site and the articles are pretty good quality.

anyone seen something similar?

Click to expand...

Yes. I had a sight that had survived penguin, but then two days ago this delayed effect it my most important money site. My health has deteriorated since :lol:

Penguin seems to be penalizing some individuals - you get full slapped and drop 5-10 rankings per keyword minimum. My delayed effect is almost as though my backlinks are just devalued; my rankings have slipped 1-4 spots per keyword, most keywords have just slipped 1 position (which is still devestating).

I'm going to be modifying the onsite content in case its that, but my guess is its the shoddy backlink profile of this site that I have inherieted. Its got lots of spammy directory links. My guess is those got devalued heavily, and now contextual links rule the day. Directory links are NOT contextual or relevant in the slightest unfortunately so its like those links have been devalued, and as a consequence our site is now ranking below sites that have higher PR links (but fewer links overall - they have less spammy ones).

I don't think its a co-incidence that my rankings dropped in the post-PR update. Links changed value.

Where's Batman when you need him. He'd take care of the Penguin!

Now I'm going to imagine a maniacal Danny DeVito running around punishing sites

It might not have been because of the penguin update- check out your other factors

I had something similar happen but on the 29th. Was your site in the top 10 for a high competition term? If so I think it could be a manual penalty.

I say this because the site of mine fared very well for some high money terms in the beginning of Penguin. It was mid top 10 for a short while until it started its descent. It was pretty clean on page. KW density of around 2%. No private blog networks. It dropped about 10-20 places per day until it was out of the top 100 and keeps on slipping. A search for the domain name without extension (thesitename) brings it up in as first and a search for the "the site name" (no quotes) brings it up in the top 3 so that shows it's still indexed. In fact, site:xxx.thesitename.xxx (can't post www yet) shows everything is still indexed. I have other sites with a very, very similar link profile and on page structure that didn't get hit. Sites with much worse on and off page factors rose above the fallen site after the hit. I'm assuming that they moved up in the natural queue after the elimination of my site and just didn't get reviewed.

Anyway, that's my theory on my case, which is kind of similar to your case. I guess I could always sign up for Webmaster Tools to see if there are any messages there but I'm very apprehensive because I don't trust Google not to track what sites I own by IP/cookie association.

Oh and as of this writing, googlebot hasn't been to the site since the 5th.