As a starting point, I think we need a degree of caution in separating what has been a pretty intensive month of changes at Google. To my mind there is:

- The "unnatural link" devaluation [webmasterworld.com]
- Panda 3.5 (April 19th)
- Penguin [webmasterworld.com] (April 24th)

And of course, there are always other changes at Google happening at the same time.

One important aspect is to understand which update has affected you, and make sure that it is a "Penguin problem". The threads above contain various discussion of possible fixes.

Once you know which problem you have, the next step is to make a decision on whether you have an algorithmic issue (i.e. one you can fix by making changes), a manual one (i.e. someone has decided your site should be demoted) which will require a reconsideration request, or an algorithmic problem that can only be fixed by a reconsideration request.

In each case, I think a dispassionate look at the affected sites is a good starting point. If your goal is to get back Google traffic, it's important to try to look at the site from Google's point of view, although it can be tempting to feel "wronged" when Google makes changes that directly affect you. But let's keep this thread focused on possible solutions.

I was affected by Penguin... 24th of april...
Seems this is overoptimization penalty... my website/s are still in the index... but the traffic has gone to zero and the place in serps has gone to 110 from 3rd... on a very competitive keyword...

I plan to totally on page deoptimize the website... because I can do nothing about link profile... it is quite a mixed one...

I Puzzled over this and then the answer was pretty easy, (well i think it is)

Its Google that has taken this stance, so check the links Google show you in their WMT. I have been totally de indexed for one of my biggest search terms not even in their serps for my keyword so now i kind of know what they are looking at

Take a subscription at majestic, look up that keyword, and reference with the Google list and i am sure you will find your answer a lot easier than guessing what was the problem

I had 11,000 Links pointing to my site I had no chance to go through them all, but now i only have 340 to check out, still a large amount of data but still this is achievable.

Ill report back later once my re inclusion request has been read and see how i got on..

As a starting point, I think we need a degree of caution in separating what has been a pretty intensive month of changes at Google. To my mind there is:

- The "unnatural link" devaluation [webmasterworld.com]
- Panda 3.5 (April 19th)
- Penguin [webmasterworld.com] (April 24th)

And of course, there are always other changes at Google happening at the same time.

And to think Google made these changes to help the smaller sites by 'leveling the playing field'. When the little guy has no clue what's going on and can't adapt it actually helps the deeply funded and heavily SEO'd companies now doesn't it.

I hope 2013 ushers in a search engine change that focuses on STABILITY and not these wild changes we keep seeing.

Sgt_Kickaxe wrote:
I hope 2013 ushers in a search engine change that focuses on STABILITY and not these wild changes we keep seeing.

A stable index of the World Wide Web? That's like hoping for a stable seismograph. I don't see it happening.

--
Ryan

One way I think that people could fix this is to buy another domain to use in Google results and deindex the old domain in google. The old domain could then be used for other search engines and the new one could be used in google. See were im going here.

@snickles121 I appreciate your creative thinking but I think a big reason why certain webmasters were negatively impacted is because they have been taking too many shortcuts. I'm not sure your suggestion is the best long term solution.

Have any of you affected by Penguin filed a re-inclusion request via the Google Docs document that Google has set up?

I don't got the link on this computer, but if you look at my post history, I linked to it in another thread yesterday.

It basically asks you for the keyword query, the affected page and a "comment" section.

That isn't a "re-inclusion" request form.
It is a "Feedback on our recent algorithm update ("Penguin")"
[docs.google.com...]

Submitting info via that form will not change your ranking or "recover "lost positions..it- will let Google take a look at the page(s) and they will see if "in their opinion" it was a"false positive"..if they decide it was, they'll tweak the part of the algo that "hit it" next time, to not affect similar pages..but if you lost a #1 slot ..they are not going to put you back in #1 because you sent the form in..

"re-inclusion" request forms are a totally different animal..to be used for totally different circumstances..

[edited by: Leosghost at 3:43 pm (utc) on Apr 30, 2012]

Your probably right goodroi.

Heres a legit question. Is having directory links now out of the question or would it be acceptable to still do those as long as you keep the title as the name of your website and not target keywords.

As I mentioned initially, a site I recently purchased was hit for its money term. When Penguin first hit, the site dropped to position # 9. Later that day I saw it at #4. As of yesterday the site is now settled in at #2. So overall it looks like a 1 position loss which is not so bad, the site needs a lot of work anyway.

brinked,
seems there are several types of penalties...
1st which you have mentioned -website was in top 3 and gone to top 20 (sometimes it recovers itself)...

2nd - website was in top 3 and gone to top 100(as usual internal pages are seen in the mentioned top 100)... homepage is not seen...
seems the remedy is total on page deoptimizing of website, especially the first page...

3rd - website was in top 3 and is totally removed from index... this is the worst situation and don't have an idea of what to do...

what do you think about these levels of penalties and suggested remedies?... especially in interested in the 2nd case...

i don't think the update is over yet. for 2 word keywords in the major index, yes, but the longtails are still a mess - probably not incorporated yet? if they are, then the user metrics will tell the google engineers soon enough what we already see - bad longtails.

If your IBL contain anchor text above a certain threshold I believe it will trigger a penalty.

Exact match domains have this problem and seem to be getting hammered. Has anyone else seen this?

Solution list:

1. Anchor text analysis - go more natural with variations. Link cleaning should be done in extreme cases.
2. Site structure - kw density, content type + style and locations
3. Site issues - 301 etc as per Seer Example.

Devil's advocate:

Instead of "link cleaning" which is near to impossible....what about diluting the negative links with good links?

Could that strategy work?

Exact match domains have this problem and seem to be getting hammered. Has anyone else seen this?

Yes, I believe some of my sites are in this situation. The majority of the links are completely organic and there's nothing I can do, but I am considering whether to diversify the anchor text on links from my own sites, or to simply hope Google will reassess these in a future update.

exact match domains tend to have other factors. I dont think its a factor or otherwise "Toyota.com" is stuffed.

exact match domains tend to have other factors. I dont think its a factor or otherwise "Toyota.com" is stuffed.

I've read in a few places that "brands" are a big part of Penguin. I'm sure Google can recognise Toyota as a brand, whereas it would recognise that TownNameHotels.com is not; perhaps exact keyword matches that are not brands only are falling out of favour.

Curious about what people think about this. I seem to have a lot of links to a couple of my sites from scraper sites. I have a few pages on these sites that are linked to from Wikipedia and lots of scraper sites are scraping that wiki content with links to my sites embedded in them. I also have quite a few scraper sites that scrape snippets of my content directly and link to me as well.

Now these sites of mine aren't huge, so these unnatural links make up a decent little chunk of inbound links for them. Does Google see these for what they are or could they be hurting me? These sites of mine have all been hit recently in the latest updates.

.what about diluting the negative links with good links?

All site's can have bad links pointing to them. When the level of bad exceeds a good threshold then you have a problem. Without a doubt, increase the good links and you dilute the bad.

Also go more social with your links and vary the anchor text to make it look more natural. When reverse engineering a heavily SEO'ed site it's so obvious which sites have abused anchor text and which sites have grown organically.

exact match domains tend to have other factors. I don't think its a factor or otherwise "Toyota.com" is stuffed.

True, ,maybe I should of said more generic keywords or more commerce related like buywidgets or onlinewidgets ... those were hammered.

or to simply hope Google will reassess these in a future update

The Penguin update is shocking, just look @ <snip> related searches and you will see 3/10 sites in top 10 with notices that "this site may harm your computer" and hijacked EDU sites OR sites with no mention of the word <snip> EVER and having nothing to do with topic or subject, yet they rank. Google needs to tweak this algo as the results are shocking. I dont want to see how stuff works or read wiki articles :)

[edited by: goodroi at 7:42 pm (utc) on Apr 30, 2012]
[edit reason] Please no specific keywords [/edit]

Penguin is not finished...

the websites which I monitor and were affected by mentioned update and had some internal pages where ranking(even on 110th place) have totally lost...

this may be a bad and a good sign as well...

but definitely the update is not finished!

I have a few sites of which one has been hit for certain terms (not all). As I worked on all of the sites in a similar fashion, now I wonder about best way to compare them and see how/if the one that has been hit stands out.

What would you pay attention to and which tools would you use?

Thanks

For what it's worth, I saw a small drop last week that I assumed was the penguin update. Over the weekend, traffic went up quite a bit getting my site back to January levels before all of this years' algo updates started to trend my site downward. The site has roughly 300k visitors per day and is mostly long tail, to help give perspective.

Anyway, I thought I would throw that date (April 28) out there as a day when something definitely changed with my Google traffic.

Penguin is not finished

I'd agree there, or at least Google is pretty jumpy from where I'm sitting. If you're experiencing "jumpy" rankings, then you'd be advised to sit tight. But if you've fallen off a cliff, then you may well be on a borderline and need to take stock. It's a similar situation with any major update.

What would you pay attention to and which tools would you use?

Penguin seems pretty content-focused to me, but in very basic terms, to diagnose ranking problems you need to spider to understand your site and how it's presented (you can't rely on drip-fed data from the likes of Webmaster Tools) and look at your link profile (again, you need a good data source). The more data the better IMO.

This isn't the thread for a tool discussion, though. You'll find various members' favourite tools here [webmasterworld.com]