Penguin Update - Anyone Affected?
- Thread starter ElliotStephens90
- Start date
We had this summary from an SEO expert at opace:
The list below shows the “anatomy” of winning and losing websites post Penguin 4.0:
Relevancy:
The list below shows the “anatomy” of winning and losing websites post Penguin 4.0:
Relevancy:
- Winning sites will obtain backlinks relevant to their genre, with relevant content and relevant anchor text
- Losing sites will post anywhere and not concern themselves with the relevance of the site, the content, anchor text and where the link is to
- Winning sites will have diverse and natural anchor text, not heavily keyword optimised and will be entirely organic
- Losing sites will have Anchor text that is too often similar and heavily keyword optimised. Looking through backlink portfolios anchor text will appear unnatural
- Winning sites will manually review their backlinks for quality, probably on a regular basis and request removal of any bad links from the sites in question. Where needed they will disavow poor quality links
- Losing sites will not have a “grip” of their backlinks and will have neither asked for the removal or disavowment of bad links
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Penguin 4.0 has brought us a 50% increase in traffic, globally and 50% more terms in the top 20 rankings (roughly speaking), thus far.
We are continuing to push positive signals such as fixing speeling errors, replacing internal links that have to 301 with links that go directly to the final destination, replacing contextual http with https links, adding image alt tags and a number of other basics.
This week, with kids off school in the UK (or at least some of the UK), things are a bit softer than last, but only slightly. The expectation is that October will be up 50% over month prior and year prior (both sessions and users).
The gains have been global, with our core market of UK seeing some of the biggest gains. The gains have been almost site-wide, with 20% more landing pages drawing organic traffic.
Search console is showing a 60% increase in landing pages drawing clicks and a 60% increase in the number of organic terms drawing traffic.
The number of countries with organic visitors is up 40% as well.
This appears to be a broad benefit, with expanded geographical coverage, additional impressions and clicks globally and improved rankings for a majority of keywords tracked.
Bottom Line: Penguin 4 has not been a bad thing for us.
We are continuing to push positive signals such as fixing speeling errors, replacing internal links that have to 301 with links that go directly to the final destination, replacing contextual http with https links, adding image alt tags and a number of other basics.
This week, with kids off school in the UK (or at least some of the UK), things are a bit softer than last, but only slightly. The expectation is that October will be up 50% over month prior and year prior (both sessions and users).
The gains have been global, with our core market of UK seeing some of the biggest gains. The gains have been almost site-wide, with 20% more landing pages drawing organic traffic.
Search console is showing a 60% increase in landing pages drawing clicks and a 60% increase in the number of organic terms drawing traffic.
The number of countries with organic visitors is up 40% as well.
This appears to be a broad benefit, with expanded geographical coverage, additional impressions and clicks globally and improved rankings for a majority of keywords tracked.
Bottom Line: Penguin 4 has not been a bad thing for us.
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My site visibility has definitely gone down since the last Penguin update. The above applies to me. The site/URL is over 10 years old so there are a lot of bad sites linking to us. How do I find a competent person to clean these up for me?
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Easier said that done. I have loads of poor quality backlinks from ten to twelve years ago when I got involved in a link exchange farm and getting rid of them is nigh on impossible as many of the websites have been abandoned and emailing webmasters brought not one response.
In the end I disavowed the lot
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@deniser @ChrisGoodfellow My agency has performed plenty of link clean-ups previously and recovered many sites from penalties caused by bad link profiles.
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Spend about 35 bux over on fiverr and get the full LinkResearchTools Detox report.
From there, you just need to spend some time sorting through the sites to identify ones that are toxic and not. Usually, if they report it as toxic, it is. The ones to worry about are the ones they misidentify as not toxic, when in fact they are very low quality and high risk, such as directories, etc.
Plan on spending 250 quid to get someone to do a decent backlink audit and identify the links needing removed. From there it's just a matter of a bulk whois lookup to get the email addresses and then filing the disavow after you try and fail to get people to respond. That disavow could take an hour or a day (30 - 250 quid more) from many decent SEO practitioners.
Food for thought...
FYI - I am not accepting any such work - this is not a self-promoting advert.
From there, you just need to spend some time sorting through the sites to identify ones that are toxic and not. Usually, if they report it as toxic, it is. The ones to worry about are the ones they misidentify as not toxic, when in fact they are very low quality and high risk, such as directories, etc.
Plan on spending 250 quid to get someone to do a decent backlink audit and identify the links needing removed. From there it's just a matter of a bulk whois lookup to get the email addresses and then filing the disavow after you try and fail to get people to respond. That disavow could take an hour or a day (30 - 250 quid more) from many decent SEO practitioners.
Food for thought...
FYI - I am not accepting any such work - this is not a self-promoting advert.
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Some input from elsewhere
"If penguin sees signs of manipulation, they can algorithmically decide to discount all links –this is something we suspect they have done for a long term, although I haven’t heard this directly from Google before – so it’s interesting to confirm. Gary Illyes also stated that he has seen no signs of negative SEO working, and that in some cases it actually helps more than it hinders…"
from https://www.blueglass.co.uk/blog/84-things-learned-at-pubcon-2016/
"There’s been some mixed messages at Pubcon this week on if Google’s disavow file is now redundant. This is mainly because penguin is now baked into the core algorithm, and the theory is that SEOs may now just be giving Google data, but it’s no longer necessary in order to impact rank."
From https://www.blueglass.co.uk/blog/happens-remove-disavow-file/
"If penguin sees signs of manipulation, they can algorithmically decide to discount all links –this is something we suspect they have done for a long term, although I haven’t heard this directly from Google before – so it’s interesting to confirm. Gary Illyes also stated that he has seen no signs of negative SEO working, and that in some cases it actually helps more than it hinders…"
from https://www.blueglass.co.uk/blog/84-things-learned-at-pubcon-2016/
"There’s been some mixed messages at Pubcon this week on if Google’s disavow file is now redundant. This is mainly because penguin is now baked into the core algorithm, and the theory is that SEOs may now just be giving Google data, but it’s no longer necessary in order to impact rank."
From https://www.blueglass.co.uk/blog/happens-remove-disavow-file/
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Statistics eh lovely, but you have to be careful is that 89% of sites of businesses that are still in business. As 75% of businesses don't last 10 years.
But I certainly can believe it, when I left 'corporate world ' 8 years ago and ventured into websites / seo etc I could see seo was just about to go through a major shift where automated trickery and 'guaranteed' results would change to something more natural.
But I certainly can believe it, when I left 'corporate world ' 8 years ago and ventured into websites / seo etc I could see seo was just about to go through a major shift where automated trickery and 'guaranteed' results would change to something more natural.
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This is true but it's a bit chicken and egg because, had the sites still been visible in Google and therefore successful, they could have stayed in business.
We started our website in 2006 which was relatively early in our particular sector and I can only think of 5 (including us) of the originals that are still in existence online. There were few high street stores in our sector online then. There were a lot of small businesses doing quite well out of online shopping until 2012 when the chain stores took over the top rankings. It's been a constant fight to stay visible since then.
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- Original Poster
- #14
See what I've experienced is that with some of our clients, the site has taken a hit in wise of their site quality. This has, by association, affected the trust flow of our clients. No penalties yet, touch wood, so I haven't needed to panic. Just need to clean up the backlinks.
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