Google Webspam Update a.k.a. Penguin Update

[caspernick]

Having read the original article, I went to my analytics and did a quick search of traffic over the period from April 23-27 and saw my stats go up after Penguin. More traffic, coming from more places. My ranking in Google is stagnant at #4, but has gone up in Yahoo, Aol etc. Has anyone else seen positive signs from this Penguin update?

[stephengfm]

Originally Posted by Natural Elements

Fines are nothing in US for these corporations because most gov entities are bought by the lobbystes aka corporations.

I remember that Microsoft paid a fine of $1.5 billion in Europe, perhaps they should do the same with Google.

Microsoft has yet to pay 1 penny to the EU on that case.

You can see that for yourself on their attorney's website Sullivan and Cromwell.

[seoexpertrizwan]

More natural link building more powerful use alternate techniques are helpful for saving with web spams.

[Brave7]

Originally Posted by seoexpertrizwan

More natural link building more powerful use alternate techniques are helpful for saving with web spams.

How natural is link building? Looks like manipulation to me and nothing natural

[jjmcd82]

Originally Posted by caspernick

Having read the original article, I went to my analytics and did a quick search of traffic over the period from April 23-27 and saw my stats go up after Penguin. More traffic, coming from more places. My ranking in Google is stagnant at #4, but has gone up in Yahoo, Aol etc. Has anyone else seen positive signs from this Penguin update?

Well, one of my sites is up 20-30%... but I haven't really updated it or promoted it in a year because the advertising programs aren't as good as they used to be.

The main site I've been working on since then? Traffic down, and the hits I do get are less relevant than ever.

[jeresteem99]

How can I get my old keyword rank back to the 1st page of Google now??

[Marksns]

3 of my sites got hit by penguin. Went from page 1 to page 4. So much hard work down the drain. But strange enough not all my sites got hit. As Google is looking at over 200 different factors i think if some of the other factors are very strong maybe you didn't get hit so hard. Would love to hear your view on this.

So what i mean is if you had really relevant links that had great page rank but some really bad links. Maybe they took those good factors in to consideration more. Rather than if you had just really spam links and nothing elts maybe you where hit hard.

[sundancerz]

Y'all need to fix it or hire someone and get it back in the SERPs.
Look for Little, poor or duplicate content, Hidden text, Keyword stuffing, Clocking, Link spam and schemes.
Once you fix it you can request Google to re-include your site through Google Tools.

[snakeair]

Another view on this Penguin update.

It was only a matter of time before proverbial Saturn, The Google, would devour its own children, the spammy websites seeking to fully leverage search engines to get free business. That time arrived last week with the Penguin update, which aimed to knock the web spam out of Google's search results.

Those who do SEO are constantly trying to keep ahead of algorithms controlled by data engineers at a search engine. It's similar to staying healthy, you get flu shots today, but it’s not any good for next year’s bug – nor is there any way of knowing for sure what next year’s bug or algorithm is going to be.

But search engine results are like a boat full of holes. Google is trying to constantly patch theirs. And when Google rolls out their repairs, many people who are heavily invested in SEO get upset, as this infographic shows, while some petition Google to kill the Penguin update or offer some “colorful” Penguin feedback.

The Rules Have Changed (Yet Again)

Those in charge of SEO for websites or brands impacted by the Penguin update are...

Continued at: http://searchenginewatch.com/article...Penguin-Update

Any thoughts?

[voyage09]

Oh my god! I just knew about this Penguin update. Hm... I do think some of my websites have many ads above the fold. :-( I have to make some changes. Good luck to all.

[Turkey Property]

Originally Posted by sundancerz

Once you fix it you can request Google to re-include your site through Google Tools.

Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be an option that will work in this case.
I submitted for reconsideration after Penguin and part of the reply I received was:

"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team."

Which is saying that no manual action from webspam means no manual review.
So unless a site has been given an actual penalty (rather than being hit by a change in the algorithm) reconsideration is not going to happen.

[Brave7]

Originally Posted by snakeair

Another view on this Penguin update.



Continued at: http://searchenginewatch.com/article...Penguin-Update

Any thoughts?

They are talking about the external link profile penalty, but really real natural links are the most difficult way to acquire and if you are not constantly on the top of ranking how people really can discover you site and link to it.

I saw in my statistics, spammers crawling my site and fragment my urls, guess what Google pick up these fragmented links and hit my 404 page all the time.

Who know what vicious competitors can do to you by linking your site in the bad neighborhood. You cannot control people linking to you. Link building is not natural, small sites will never have a external link sheme profile like corporations, so forget about the competition.

I guess Google wants to be a Sam club for corporations and multinational companies, and they should be honest about that.

[stephengfm]

This anchor text issue being discussed means that Google is pretty much disregarding or lower the value of the anchor text and just looking at the page rank of the site with the link?

[Brave7]

Google's Penguin Update Creates Havoc Amongst Many Webmasters

As quoted verbatim from comments below Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan's blog this comes as an alarm to innumerous webmasters around the web world badly hit by the Penguin update.

Lake Garda says, "5 out of 11 of my sites have dropped into oblivion today. Funny thing is 3 of them have not been optimized since the last update. Just added some fresh content to the sites. I'm looking for a new job, fed up now!"

Annonymous says, "I just had a website that ranked on the first page for numerous rankings.... completely tank. One of the only websites that didn't do comment spam in my SERPS. Didn't do link exchanges. Now it's gone. Funny thing is the top two websites have tons of blog comment spam."

Mike Chaleff has this huge and frustrated comment as long as Sullivan's blog itself that concludes saying, "...a business owner who was having trouble with his business, was also affected by this new google algorithm change..leaving him with zero business left. truly a sad day..". Do not know how genuine this comment is, but it really does show that you are not alone if you're website was badly hit by mistake.

While Danny empathizes with some and is curious to know more from others whose online business is adversely affected post-Penguin update says, "I would say that if it just disappeared today, that's a pretty good sign it's gone. It's not an over-SEO penalty, as a reminder. It's a new way of tackling existing search spam that Google has warned against. I'd check Google Webmaster Central and file a reinclusion request, which might get Google to take a second look and see if there's some false positive hitting your site."

http://news.submitinme.com/newsdetails-188.aspx

[HTMLBasicTutor]

...But some not-so-innocent webmasters are stating that Google doesn’t “play fair” and blame Google for the possibility that they may have to seek offline employment or go on government assistance.

Oh, too bad, so sad.

Forgive my lack of empathy, but give me a break.

I’m sick of the whining and moaning that ensues when Google dumps ******, make money online, and diabetes web spam over-optimized sites. Google stated that only 3.1% of English language sites would be affected by this update, yet there’s way too much emphasis placed on spammers’ reactions to such changes.

Instead of living in fear of Google algorithm changes, online business owners should seek out positive reports — and there are plenty of positive reports related to the Penguin update, including...

...After almost 15 years online, I must conclude that’s because I’ve consistently played by the rules. I do NOT do SEO other than naturally including important keywords in my post titles and text, i.e. I do NOT use silly formulas that may work today, won’t work tomorrow and will get me bounced from the index.

It’s Google’s game, therefore Google makes the rules.

Webmasters who want to rely primarily on free traffic from Google should know and follow Google’s webmaster guidelines....

Pandas, Penguins and Why I Don’t Do SEO - Rosalind Gardner, Internet Marketer

[Brave7]

Originally Posted by HTMLBasicTutor

Pandas, Penguins and Why I Don’t Do SEO - Rosalind Gardner, Internet Marketer

I guess the author is making an amalgame between "not-so-innocent webmasters" and "online business owners".

and

"Webmasters who want to rely primarily on free traffic from Google should know and follow Google’s webmaster guidelines...."

Ok let's take a look at the Google quality guidelines because that's what it seems to be about:

Quality guidelines - basic principles

•Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

First of all we don't think we trick search engines. We spend since Penda more than $4000 in articles and re-written articles for our customers and visitors, and I market myself my business and the products we sell the best of my abilities.

•Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Please define what is the meaning of "trick search engines" because we don't have a site to trash if we get caught like a black hat SEO. Also we saw many other people that didn't get hit by Panda and Penguin updates using and owning a ring of domains with little contents and spam link schemas. Or some other sites using many duplicated pages on different domains with the same contents and similar link schema.

My knowledge of SEO is basic and if I made some mistakes it is not intended. Now How Google consider marketing is another story, for example we use often 2 different titles similar for our product pages. In my knowledge I call that marketing, but with google many things are subjective.

•Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

We don't participate in link schemes to increase my site ranking or pagerank. I don't use the Google toolbar to check PR for years. Again define the meaning of "avoid links to web spammers". Do you really think that we are going to link to spammers when we have invested in our ecommerce thousands dollars????

We have very few oubound links but we check for bad neighborhoods link.

•Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

We don't use computer programs, period.


Going back to the Rosalind blog.

When she says:

2.Don’t allow links from low-quality sites and networks

Well I started 7 years ago and like any ecommerce owners there are a lot of try and errors, most of the time you learn from your own experience.

Links bought from directories before Google changed their policy are still there for years and I am not going to contact thousands of link directories owners to remove all my links because google decided 7 years later to go after "low quality network links"

I guess we can talk hours about that, and if you are not a online business owner you may have some very hard time to understand, because SEO is a tiny part of a small business if you do everything yourself in a very competitive market that do not let enough profit to hire a SEO pro (I mean a real SEO pro), or you can blame the whining without an open mind.

[stephengfm]

Were the articles original?

Could someone have copied them many times?

[Brave7]

Originally Posted by stephengfm

Were the articles original?

Could someone have copied them many times?

As far as I know they are created ofr us and are original articles. We use like many webmasters Copyscape to check for duplicates.

I am glad you ask this question because we are copied all the time, they take paragraphs, sentences, fragments. The problem is that Google Panda or now Google Penguin updates do not caught infringers. Today we still have some articles indexed by Google from infringers.

The problem when filling a DMCA is the chilling effect page that show that you reported the infringer. I think it is very negative for your business, because some people could think that you are a business having problems. So this people steal your content that you pay for and you have a bad reputation because you defend your work, that's the concept of Google. After all it is the Google duty to secure the quality contents they use in their index and if in case you think about blocking Google bot, the spammers will become the legitimate contents holders, and for Google if is not on your site, they will do nothing about your copyright infringements.

Last year we had a problem with a blogger we caught with Copyscape because she made a review of another company with our contents. She wasn't happy and thought that we were the copyright infringer, she made a page of complaint and she posted everywhere that we were a fraud site, etc To find out that the site she reviewed had framed our contents in a specific code so the search engines and copyscape couldn't caught it. Google blogger was excessively unhelpful and careless for our issue with this blogger.

Anyway, you cannot imagine how much time we are wasting for work we shouldn't do.

[snakeair]

This is good news to hear.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently tweeted that people should fill out a form to report post-Penguin spam. “We’re reading feedback,” he said.

Cutts indicated in a Twitter conversation today, that Google has read and processed almost all of the Penguin spam reports:

Continued at: http://www.webpronews.com/google-pen...eports-2012-05

[Brave7]

I just check this morning what people said in several forums, and it is very funny that some black hat SEO mentionned that they weren't affected by the last Panda and Penguin updates.

What Google is going to do? Created another small business killer algorithm with the name of White Tiger?