Woke up today and ran my SERPs and what do you know, most of my rankings have returned pre-penguin... Did google run a penguin refresh? Maybe, its been a little over a month since penguin 1.0 (April 24th)... Seriously, I started to weep like a child after I saw the increase in rankings...I could not be happier... Has anyone else experienced this? So, the obvious question all of you will have is what did I do to escape penguin? I did four things over the past month and I don't know if these things are what pulled me out of penguin, but I will state them here b/c this is an obvious question that will be asked. 1. I have been building an authority site and currently it has a little over 1,000 indexed pages, prior to penguin I did not interlink any of these pages. I had been studying what characteristics an authority site had and one of the biggest characteristics is that an authority site has super strong interlinking between most/if not all pages on the site. My template for this was looking at wikipedia and noticing the super heavy interlinking between all of its pages. Pull up any page in wikipedia and you will notice the heavy interlinking. For full disclosure, I have only completed the interlinking on about half the pages as I am doing this by hand. There are some wordpress plugins that automate this and I used one briefly, but it didn't do as much interlinking as I wanted or could be doing so I uninstalled the plugin and proceeded to start this by hand. Also, I started to heavily add outbound links to other authority sites in my niche, I even linked to my competitors, I gave the google bot some link love. 2. Major diversification of anchor text. Used my brand name for the site in most if not all of my anchor text. And never used any "money" keywords. 3. Prior to Panda 3.3 (Feb 17th, yes I received unnatural links message and -50 penalty then, and recovered all of my long tail keywords and was on good trajectory on short tails and then penguin hit (April 24th) and destroyed everything), most if not all of my link building has aimed at five of my money pages and there was a very big imbalance between links to money pages versus links to the other pages on my site which are informative about the program I sell, so what I have been doing is trying to create more links to my other pages so there is a greater balance of links to all the pages on my site. There is still a great imbalance so I don't know how much this would of helped in what occurred today. 4. I decreased my keyword density on my money pages, I don't know what the percentages were before I decreased the frequency of keywords and I don't know what it is now, but I decreased the number of times the keyword was mentioned. Did this help? I don't know, I think my pages were more naturally written with the higher frequency of keywords, but I did this b/c I was reading so many people mention it that I thought I would give it a try. A couple other things to note, after penguin hit, all my pages were not displaying correctly for their keywords, for example, my blue widget page was showing when someone would google for the red widget product I was selling. This has changed today, now proper pages are showing when customers do the appropriate search term. You might ask, what did you do to correct this? I have no fucking idea, I didn't do anything, I think that was all on google, so ask them. My opinion is that penguin only affects certain pages on your site as most of my blog posts target super super super long tails and all of those pages were never affected by penguin, it was only my money pages where 99% of my links were built. Lastly, this could be a flash in the pan, one time ranking increase so I could of written this all in vain only to see that all my rankings crash again. If this happens, I will probably weep like a child again, but I feel good today so I am going to go with this feeling for now.
There was an official penguin refresh done earlier today. Happy to see that your sites came back from the dead
actually penguin 1.0 increased the SERPs of my site.. but yday got a site which I was not paying any attention to, sprang up for some good keywords keywords. From 50-80 uniques per day to 2500 uniques per day.. but it is now more than 3 months since I quit focusing on google serps. If it happens then fine, else I have my alternatives..
Yeah I just checked out Matt Cutts's Twitter and Google's Inside Search official blog. He has confirmed there has been a Peguin algo data refresh he says it will effect <1% of English Searches. Just wonder how many searches that means exactly? Like millions or billions?
Here is some press on penguin 1.1: http://searchengineland.com/google-pushes-first-penguin-algorithm-update-122518 http://techwelkin.com/google-updates-penguin-algorithm-for-the-first-time
What kind of links did you create since you got penalized by penguin and now recovered, web 2.0, articles, press, social stuff?
Don't hold your breath they stay. There was a refresh on the 24th in the middle of the day, and yet another last night (100% sure there was one) The data isn't lying. 15 of the sites I track (none are mine) that weren't hit during penguin 1.0 are now gone... and a lot of the spam sites (301 redirects, Xrumer blasts etc) that ran up in the last month disappeared entirely. My site that was hit went up a few spots again... nothing major. Penguin is clearly a negative algorithm/punishment update and is going to be refreshed. The search results are all over the place on almost every term worth SEOing. I'm surprised SEOers keep pretending they understand this update... there's a heck of a lot of BS being spouted right now from a lot of "gurus" and a lot of it is clearly not correct. This is a much, much bigger paradigm shift than Panda in 2011, and the SEO community is mostly silent.
I agree. No one get a 100% grasp of this yet. Every "guru" out there chimes in and gives their own recommndation. Pick good advice and throw out the rest, I guess. Idling is not an option for webmasters and publishers...
I agree...Like I said in my post, this could be a "flash in the pan" so I am not going to declare victory or anything like that, but it feels good today so I am going to enjoy it... Also, this could all go away next month when they do another refresh...
This is the same site...This is my one and only site...I know, I should spread around my work and not have all my marbles in one basket, but this site is too time consuming to do anything else... On Feb 17th got hit by Panda 3.3...Took two months to recover my long tails, short tails were on a good trajectory up... On April 24th, Penguin hit, wiped me out completely, now with Penguin refresh, I am back to my pre-recovery levels after panda 3.3... I can make money with these new SERPs...I was still making some money without these SERPs as I have built a brand name in my niche and my site is talked about a lot in the forums related to the niche...
This one totally baffles me. A few rankings up, a few rankings down - my most important site kept almost all of its #1s (one kw dropped to #2) ------ but my traffic and sales are virtually gone. The rankings are the same, but the results are cataclysmic. I can't figure it out yet.
Has anyone seen any negative results from the refresh? I had actually regained all my first page rankings with minimal link building. (I was trying not to do too much to see what would happen). Now today I've dropped back down to page 5+ for all my keywords.
