Recovered a Penguin hit site. Simple, but worked.

Dan Da Man said:

Expertpeon,

What sites are showing up instead? All my niches have amazon #1. If google were to replace Amazon and target listings, who would they replace it with? I don't think you could get more authority than that

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Oh you have the usual info sites that are thin content from shape or other terrible content farms. You also have wikipedia of course, despite the fact that the wiki page is not relevant to the niche whatsoever.
Amazon was hit across SEVERAL niches I'm in, dropping to page 2 or below.
Also a lot of sites from page 2 got boosted ... it was like a fish flapping on the deck of the boat right after Penguin for awhile, and a few new sites stuck to the top 10. Russian footer farms have a new site in one niche that's #2 and my own sites that I had prepped are also in the top 3. The 3 update whammy had me off guard, as several sites I had JUST started were hit by Panda because I didn't even have enough time to really add content to them yet to a significant degree.

I am of the mind after this most recent update that Google's motives are much more sinister than the larger community realizes. I don't really want to be called a loon for it, so I won't talk about it here.

Expertpeon said:

I am of the mind after this most recent update that Google's motives are much more sinister than the larger community realizes. I don't really want to be called a loon for it, so I won't talk about it here.

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Just about every electronic device is moving towards internet connectivity. Google has a large enough footprint and other Google owned companies that they could enter the defense industry by providing counter-terrorism services for governments.

You probably could not top that for guessing what Google's motives are. Am I a loon? Hell no. Search will only take Google so far. Dipping into taxpayers pockets opens up a whole new revenue stream not subject to anti-trust laws.

Great simple solution and thanks for your bravery for posting during hurricane sandy

Adam718 said:

It wasn't hit by panda, as all of the on page factors were completely fine. It's a legitimate business with a good site.

It wasn't hit by the EMD penalty, because it's not even close to an EMD.

It was hit by penguin, and I'm 100% sure of this.

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Haven't read the rest of the comments, but...

It sounds like a general drop to me as well. Unless the drop in traffic coincided with a specific penguin refresh date (or the original) then it wasn't penguin. This sounds like the website just lost its ranks. The backlink profile doesn't sound penguin-esq at all.

Do the drop in rankings/drop in traffic specifically coincide with a penguin refresh?

Expertpeon said:

Doesn't matter... this isn't what Penguin does.
At any rate, not trying to bust your balls about it, but there are a lot more filters/algorithms than just the 3 you mention in this thread anyway. It could have been reduced for a variety of reasons, however, if it was Penguin it would have happened on 10/5-10/7 otherwise it was something else.

Above is a Penguin hit site's rank. Why did it recover? absolutely JACK CRAP that's why... it went from #1-#3 (for months) to #200, to #15 .... by doing nothing to it.

This is in a niche so competitive, that top rankers (like myself) make low 5 figs/day profit. Of course, I have another site ranking top 4 already... which I had waiting for this.
Penguin is NOT what you think it is, and it's NOT heavily related to anchor text, no-follow or otherwise. Except on the extremes of course.

The above is the anchor pie chart for the #1 site right now (post 10/7, before that my site was #1 for almost 3 months).
Notice that 41% of its anchors are the keyword it is ranking for or keyword XXXX
It also has 94% no-follow links

Penguin anchor diversity is a myth.F
Fair warning, no non-news/ultra authority sites made it through penguin 10/5-10/7, meaning that there may not be ANY long term strategy for ranking such ultra competitive keywords now. All niches I'm in, if the site was ranking for >3 months it's now not ranking on the first page (all but myself disappeared entirely).

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Anchor link diversity is an issue that has been studied, and it really does seem to be a contributing factor. I have seen the figures; what makes you think that it isn't a part of the filter?

Windmill said:

Anchor link diversity is an issue that has been studied, and it really does seem to be a contributing factor. I have seen the figures; what makes you think that it isn't a part of the filter?

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I see a whole lot of sites ranking that have poor anchor diversity across a lot of niches...
I never said it wasn't a contributing factor though, I said it wasn't the only one, and perhaps not even the most important one.

Analytics tells only WHEN was the drop. You can't do much with that unless it was a big update that Google made a statement about. I monitor about 100 sites and see penguin related movement every 2 weeks. They announce only big updates.

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I don't really understand your point. I manage well over 100 websites, so I understand that the algorithm is constantly updating on a rolling basis. I would disagree with with your timeframes, and find that they are much more random, but this is for another discussion. The easiest way is to check ranking data, which I was assuming that this client did not have. Therefore, the next step I would take would be to look at the traffic data. If the client does not have analytics, then there is other steps you can take, but it becomes much more difficult to identify. My point was that you have to first identify the problem before you take action.

OP answered my question though, so thanks!

Russian footer farms have a new site in one niche that's #2

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Yep, I have seen this in the top 5 in close to 100k monthly search health/fitness related keyword, site is under a year old. most of the top links are footer (not site-wide though) links many of them Russian.... Churn and burn is the word I guess...

Expertpeon said:

I see a whole lot of sites ranking that have poor anchor diversity across a lot of niches...
I never said it wasn't a contributing factor though, I said it wasn't the only one, and perhaps not even the most important one.

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I see that too, though I do think that to an extent some of this is random.

Like, I look at my website that got hit by Panda. In one particular search engine, the top 8 are poorly optimised. In fact, they break a bunch of panda's rules. Its somewhat embarrassing.

Stuff slips through the cracks, other stuff glitches (look at what always happens to the search term 'Viagra' after big updates). I think the best way to judge is to look for overall patterns, and to also look at change-effect type things. E.g. if you do nothing BUT change anchor link diversity, and you go back up, that would suggest it was correlated.

assphuck said:

Just about every electronic device is moving towards internet connectivity. Google has a large enough footprint and other Google owned companies that they could enter the defense industry by providing counter-terrorism services for governments.

You probably could not top that for guessing what Google's motives are. Am I a loon? Hell no. Search will only take Google so far. Dipping into taxpayers pockets opens up a whole new revenue stream not subject to anti-trust laws.

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Honestly I think that Google is allowing a lot of small businesses to rank for awhile, and then crushing them completely to encourage them to use money they accumulated from ranking in order to buy Adwords, thus increasing the CPC, potentially past the point of even profitability.
Therefore, Google is after a bigger piece of the "profit pie" so to speak over the wider ecommerce business itself.

Bookmarked the thread... Very useful information you all have posted so wild stuff here which hopefully will help me with ranking my future...With my hit ecommerce site...

I honestly think from what I experienced and saw that anchor text was the main problem with penguin update, those who had a wide variety of anchor text didn't suffer at all.
Also, I hope you're alright OP if you need anything just hit me up.

It doesn't matter what kind of google-pet hit him. It does matter how he recovered. It's logical and easy to implement.
LINK DIVERSITY is queen now (and still CONTENT is king) ...

D.

I bet what you did will not work on 90 out of 100 sites. Not because is bad but simply because the factors are so inter-connected that it would not work in the same way for all sites.

It is a good idea though not to have n0f0llow or sitewide links and to pay attention to link/domain and domain/c-class ratios.

Expertpeon said:

Honestly I think that Google is allowing a lot of small businesses to rank for awhile, and then crushing them completely to encourage them to use money they accumulated from ranking in order to buy Adwords, thus increasing the CPC, potentially past the point of even profitability.
Therefore, Google is after a bigger piece of the "profit pie" so to speak over the wider ecommerce business itself.

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Another way to put it is Google is manipulating the market for self-serving purposes, not merely playing "good cop" in shaping standards for web site creation or promotion. If the whole dynamic of how it handles 'natural,' organic search results is simply to steer businesses to eventually embrace paid placements, then natural organic results are a myth. Or at least, natural (Google defined) = artificial, = try Adwords.

Expertpeon said:

Doesn't matter... this isn't what Penguin does.
At any rate, not trying to bust your balls about it, but there are a lot more filters/algorithms than just the 3 you mention in this thread anyway. It could have been reduced for a variety of reasons, however, if it was Penguin it would have happened on 10/5-10/7 otherwise it was something else.

Above is a Penguin hit site's rank. Why did it recover? absolutely JACK CRAP that's why... it went from #1-#3 (for months) to #200, to #15 .... by doing nothing to it.

This is in a niche so competitive, that top rankers (like myself) make low 5 figs/day profit. Of course, I have another site ranking top 4 already... which I had waiting for this.
Penguin is NOT what you think it is, and it's NOT heavily related to anchor text, no-follow or otherwise. Except on the extremes of course.

The above is the anchor pie chart for the #1 site right now (post 10/7, before that my site was #1 for almost 3 months).
Notice that 41% of its anchors are the keyword it is ranking for or keyword XXXX
It also has 94% no-follow links

Penguin anchor diversity is a myth.F
Fair warning, no non-news/ultra authority sites made it through penguin 10/5-10/7, meaning that there may not be ANY long term strategy for ranking such ultra competitive keywords now. All niches I'm in, if the site was ranking for >3 months it's now not ranking on the first page (all but myself disappeared entirely).

Click to expand...

What tool is producing these graphs?

I removed a few of my own sitewide links a month back which helped a bit. Good share bud

If you have too many sitewide links it can hurt.

Over optimized anchors is a major factor but so is not having enough branded links. So for this site you need a variety like

http://www.blackhatworld.com
www.blackhatworld.com
blackhatworld.com
blackhatworld
Black Hat World
And so on.

These branded links (I do 75% like this now) and your on page content are a big ranking factor.

Having a good none spammy link graph also helps which is why Press releases and guest post are good.

This is pretty cool, props to OP on this

Good post.

In general, if you get hit...

1. Study the top competitors in the niche. Study top 3 (exclusing wikipedia listings etc.) This is because Google has different filters for different niches and keywords. So, what is holding in one nmiche / keyword - may not in another with the same proportion. The factors can change across niches.

2. The best way is to reverse engineer what is working. If you see good Social Signals in a high niche - then go down the path of trying to build your social signals (organically of course). Its not important that Social Signals = good rankings. Thats not correct.

3. So, study each of the top sites and see what kind of backlink profile they have AND on-page factors. If they have plenty of links coming from .org sites ... then that's a signal for you.

4. Examine their link diversity, anchor text, rel=auth tags, editorial content, etc etc. I could go on.... I am release a report shortly which is a 100 page report with case studies etc. PM me if you want it.

5. Just want to add one thing to this... the Link Disavow Tool will start to shake up rankings as we move along. As google get access to crowdsourced bad backlink neighborhoods and data ... and starts de-indexing URLs and entire sites... you will see things shifting. I guess we will see this when data refresh / updates take place... as more and more panicking webmasters and SEO folks start admitting and submitting bad URLs. SEO is not going to be about link building any more. Content, Relevance and Visitor Signals will be important... page rank etc will all start getting diluted... other factors will come into play. Much of this will cause randomness in the system... which is good for Google.

PauloPaul said:

If you have too many sitewide links it can hurt.

Over optimized anchors is a major factor but so is not having enough branded links. So for this site you need a variety like

http://www.blackhatworld.com
http://www.blackhatworld.com
blackhatworld.com
blackhatworld
Black Hat World
And so on.

These branded links (I do 75% like this now) and your on page content are a big ranking factor.

Having a good none spammy link graph also helps which is why Press releases and guest post are good.

Click to expand...

I read something about using the same words in anchor text sort of counts as non-diverse anchors. For example, "blackhatworld", "hat world that is black" and http://www.blackhatworld.com are 3 very similar anchors, and using too many anchors with this method can trigger a link penalty.