The dust is finally beginning to settle after the long-awaited rollout of Penguin 4.0. Now that our aquatic avian friend is a real-time part of the core Google algorithm, we've got some changes to get used to. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains Penguin's past, present, and future, offers his analysis of the rollout so far, and gives advice for going forward (hint: never link spam).
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, it is all about Google Penguin. So Google Penguin is an algorithm that's been with us for a few years now, designed to combat link spam specifically. After many, many years of saying this was coming, Penguin 4.0 rolled out on Friday, September 23rd. It is now real-time in Google's algorithm, Google's core algorithm, which means that it's constantly updating.
So there are a bunch of changes. What we're going to talk about today is what Penguin 1.0 to 3.x looked like and how that's changed as we've moved to the Penguin 4.0 model. Then we'll cover a little bit of what the rollout has looked like and how it's affecting folks' sites and specifically some recommendations. Thankfully, we don't have a ton.
Penguin 1.0-3x
But important to understand, if people ask you about Penguin, people ask you about the penalties that used to come from Penguin, you've got to know that, back in the day...
- Penguin 1.0 to 3.x, it used to run intermittently. So every few months, Google would collect a bunch of information, they'd run the algorithm, and then they'd release it out in the wild. It would now be in the search results. When that rollout happened, that was the only time, pretty much the only time that penalties from Penguin specifically would be given to websites or removed.
This meant that a lot of the time, you had this slow process, where if you got penalized by Penguin, you did something bad, you did some sketchy link building, you went through all the process, you went through all the processes of getting that penalty lifted, Google said, "Fine, you're in good shape. The next time Penguin comes out, your penalty is lifted." You could wait months. You could wait six months or more before that penalty got lifted. So a lot of fear here and a lot of slowness on Google's side.
- Penguin also penalized, much like Panda, where it looks at a portion of the site, these pages maybe are the only ones on this whole domain that got bad links to them, but old Penguin did not care. Penguin would hit the entire website.
It would basically say, "No, you're spamming to those pages, I'm burying your whole domain. Every page on your site is penalized and will not be able to rank well." Those sorts of penalties are very, very tough for a lot of websites. That, in fact, might be changing a little bit with the new Penguin algorithm.
- Old Penguin did not require a reconsideration request process, though manual penalties and, some SEOs believed, Penguin penalties, too, did lift often in conjunction with disavowing old links, proving to Google that you had gone through the process of trying to get those links removed.
It wasn't often enough to just say, "I've disavowed them." You had to tell Google, "Hey, I tried to contact the site where I bought the links or I tried to contact the private blog network, but I couldn't get them to take it down or I did get them to take it down or they blackmailed me and forced me to pay them to take it down." Sometimes people did pay and Google said that was bad, but then sometimes would lift the penalties and sometimes they told them, "Okay, you don't have to pay the extortionist and we'll lift the penalty anyway." Very manual process here.
- Penguin 1.0 to 3.x was really designed to remove the impact of link spam on search results, but doing it in a somewhat weird way. They were doing it basically through penalties that affected entire websites that had tried to manipulate the results and by creating this fear that if I got bad links, I would be potentially subject to Penguin for a long period.
I have a theory here. It's a personal theory. I don't want you to hold me to it. I believe that Google specifically went through this process in order to collect a tremendous amount of information on sketchy links and bad links through the disavow file process. Once they had a ginormous database of what sketchy and spammy bad links looked like, that they knew webmasters had manually reviewed and had submitted through the disavowal file and thought could harm their sites and were paid for or just links that were not editorially acquired, they could then machine learn against that giant database. Once they've acquired enough disavowals, great. Everything else is gravy. But they needed to get that huge sample set. They needed it not to just be things that they, Google, could identify but things that all of us distributed across the hundreds of millions of websites on the planet could identify. Using those disavowal files, Google can now make Penguin more real-time.
Penguin 4.0+
So challenges here, this is too slow. It hurt too much to have that long process. So in the new Penguin 4.0 and going forward, this runs as part of the core algorithm, meaning...
- As soon as Google crawls and indexes a site and is able to update that in their databases, that site's penalty is either lifted or incurred. So this means that if you get sketchy links, you don't have to wait for Penguin to come out. You could get hurt tomorrow.
- Penguin does not necessarily any longer penalize an entire domain. It still might. It could be the case that if lots of pages on a domain are getting sketchy links or some substantive portion or Google thinks you're just too sketchy, they could penalize you.
- It is also the case — and this is not 100% confirmed yet — but some early discussion between Google's representatives and folks in the webmaster and SEO community has revealed to us that it may not be the case that Penguin 4.0 and moving forward still requires the full disavow and whole reconsideration request process.
That's not to say that if you incur a penalty, you should not go through this. But it may not be the case that's the only way to get a penalty lifted, especially in two cases — no fault cases, meaning you did not get those links, they just happened to come to you, or specifically negative SEO cases.
I want to bring up Marie Haynes, who does phenomenally good work around spam penalties, along with folks like Sha Menz and Alan Bleiweiss, all three of them have been concentrating on Google penalties along with many, many other SEOs and webmasters. But Marie wrote an excellent blog post detailing a number of case studies, including a negative SEO case study where the link penalty had been lifted on the domain. You can see her results of that. She's got some nice visual graphs showing the keyword rankings changing after Penguin's rollout. I urge you to do that, and we'll make sure to link to it in the transcript of this video.
- Penguin 4.0 is a little bit different from Penguin 1.0 to 3 in that it's still designed to remove the impact of spam links on search results, but it's doing it by not counting those links in the core algo and/or by less strongly weighting links in search results where many folks are earning spammy links.
So, for example, your PPC, your porn, your pills, your casino searches, those types of queries may be places where Google says, "You know what? We don't want to interpret, because all these folks have nasty links pointing to them, we are going to weight links less. We're going to weight other signals higher." Maybe it's engagement and content and query interpretation models and non-link signals that are offsite, all those kinds of things, clickstream data, whatever they've got. "We're going to push down the value of either these specific links or all links in the algo as we weight them on these types of results."
Penguin 4.0 rollout
So this is what we know so far. We definitely will keep learning more about Penguin as we have more experience with it. We also have some information on the rollout.
- Started on Friday, September 23rd, few people noticed any changes.
In fact, the first few days were pretty slow, which makes sense. It fits with what Google said about the rollout being real-time and them needing time to crawl and index and then refresh all this data. So until it rolls out across the full web and Google's crawled and indexed all the pages, gone through processing, we're not going to get there. So little effect that same day, but...
- More SERP flux started three to five days after, that next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We saw very hot temperatures starting that next week in MozCast, and Dr. Pete has been detailing those on Twitter.
- As far as SEOs noticing, yes, a little bit.
So I asked the same poll on Twitter twice, once on September 27th and once on October 3rd, so about a week apart. Here is the data we got. "Nope, nothing yet." "Went from 76% to 72%," so a little more than a quarter of SEOs have noticed some changes.
A lot of folks noticing rankings went up. Moz itself, in fact, benefitted from this. Why is that the case? Well, any time a penalty rolls out to a lot of other websites, bad stuff gets pushed down and those of us who have not been spamming move up in the rankings. Of course, in the SEO world, which is where Moz operates, there are plenty of folks getting sketchy links and trying things out. So they were higher in the rankings, they moved down, and Moz moved up. We saw a very nice traffic boost. Thank you, Google, for rolling out Penguin. That makes our Audience Development team's metrics look real good.
Four percent and then six percent said they saw a site or page get penalized in their control, and two percent and then one percent said they saw a penalty lifted. So a penalty lifted is still pretty light, but there are some penalties coming in. There are a few of those. Then there's the nice benefit of if you don't link spam, you do not get penalized. Every time Google improves on the Penguin algorithm, every time they improve on any link spam algorithm, those of us who don't spam benefit.
It's an awesome thing, right? Instead of cheering against Google, which you do if you're a link spammer and you're very nervous, you get to cheer for Google. Certainly Penguin 4.0 is a good time to cheer for Google. It's brought a lot of traffic to a lot of good websites and pushed a lot of sketchy links down. We will see happens as far as disavows and reconsideration requests for the future.
All right, everyone, thanks for joining. Look forward to hearing about your experiences with Penguin. We'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Thank you so much for mentioning me and my case studies Rand. This rollout of Penguin has been like Christmas for me...except the type of Christmas that you have to wait almost two years or longer for! I'm seeing sites that were suppressed by Penguin even back in 2012 that are now improving nicely in rankings.
I know it's been mentioned in the text above, but I think it's worth pointing out that the process of going through manual link removal and filing a reconsideration request really is a separate thing as compared to Penguin. It's confusing. In fact, the confusion this brings up is actually part of what launched my career in SEO and my fascination for Penguin. I was in an SEO forum and told someone who had been hit by Penguin that they should file for reconsideration. A senior member of the forum corrected me and said that that was just for manual actions. I realized that the whole area of Penguin and manual actions and link spam in general was so muddy and there were very few people who understood it, so I made it a challenge of mine to be as knowledgable as possible in regards to Penguin. I had no idea that that fascination would launch me into an amazing career that would have me traveling the world and speaking and consulting with hundreds of businesses.
One of my earlier articles on Moz was this one: The difference between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty. It talks about the whole issue of whether or not you needed to file for reconsideration if you were hit by Penguin and also whether you need to manually remove links and prove to the webspam team that you worked hard to clean things up. (Spoiler alert - for Penguin, you don't.)
These days, it is not possible for you to file for reconsideration unless you actually have a manual action on your site. You'll see the button to "request a review" in the manual actions viewer in Google Search Console under Search Traffic --> Manual actions. If there's no manual action there, you can't request reconsideration. If you have a Penguin issue, but no manual action, then you can't request reconsideration. However, from the launch of Penguin in April of 2012 until the launch of the manual actions viewer in August of 2013, anyone could file for reconsideration. If your site was hit by Penguin and you filed for reconsideration (but didn't have a manual action), you'd get a response that said that there was no manual action on your site. It looked like this.
For this reason, I'd love to move away from calling Penguin a penalty as it makes it easy to confuse Penguin with an unnatural links manual action. Gary Illyes has confirmed that previous iterations of Penguin worked to demote a site for which it had distrust in regards to webspam. And sure, a demotion sure sounds like a penalty. But, given that it's an algorithmic demotion that could change without having any person from the webspam team involved, in my mind it's a different thing than a penalty. It may just be semantics, but I think it's easier for everyone to understand if we avoid using the word penalty in regards to Penguin.
It will be interesting to see how things go as Penguin continues to roll!
Really nice response Marie. I second the motion to start referring to Penguin repressions as "algorithmic demotions" instead of penalties.
Marie,
Your work is so valuable! Years ago I had some questions regarding algorithmic vs. manual link penalties and some specifics around a client who came to us looking to recover from a link penalty, and you took the time to write me back with some specifics, sharing research and expertise. Thanks for being such a valuable member of the SEO community and keeping it TAGFEE!
Trying to explain an "algorithmic demotion" to a BoD / ELT sounds like a nightmare. I think it's a good step forward as an insider term, but I'm OK with the blanket "penalty" term in the wild.
I suppose you could also go with / try ...
Thanks so much Marie - your explanations are always so clear and helpful.
I agree we should consider, for the future, whether the links and sites/pages Penguin affects are truly "penalized" or are merely "devalued." I kinda believe Google when they say they're doing the latter, but would sure like to see the evidence for a few months before feeling confident. So often the engineering teams roll out some big shift like this and the communication from the webmaster representatives changes over time.
This is something that troubles me (because I want to know). If you historically look at negative SEO you almost always find cases of spam bots creating low quality links automatically (in fact I haven't seen any other cases) like blog comments, profile creation and so on...
Assuming Google can identify those kinds of links extremely well, it would make sense to just devalue them. By doing so you sort of fix the negative SEO as it is today.
But on the other hand Penguin have also been looking at anchor texts and if Google could exclude all cheap spam links like that and the anchor text diversity still is way off in an unnatural way from "better" content like real blog posts and other higher quality sources. Would it still make sense to just devalue them?
It is a much higher chance that those links are actually created by the site owner themselves. In this case a page penalty or maybe even site penalty (in extreme cases) makes more sense.
Time will tell I guess :)
uuuuf :( all this seems too complicated
Thanks Marie for sharing your older post of "difference between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty". Many doubts of mine are now after reading that post.
Thanks for checking out WB Friday this week. My big questions:
If you have any experiences to share since the late September launch, please share them!
p.s. Correction on the video -- I said Penguin required a reconsideration "most of the time" when in fact, Google said Penguin didn't require a reconsideration most of the time (or maybe all of the time/none of the time; as in, reconsiderations weren't used in concert with Penguin). Folks definitely saw Penguin-like issues lift after reconsiderations + Penguin updates, but whether those were related was impossible to know. I've updated this in the transcript.
Hello Rand,
Another great WBF! Thank ypu.
Rand there is a local filter thats going around and hurting allot of local rankings for clients. So far i have noticed this on a couple clients who have totally dissapeared off maps. You can only find them if you zoom in on the map where their office is located and then they show up. Otherwise, google is only allowing one listing at that address (samec category) to rank. But now it seems my cleint is no longer showing up at all unless you zoom in.
Obviously theres more to it. My client shares an office with another attorney and they are in the same suite #. Pre update my client was ranking top 3 (local and organic) for many competitive terms and his partner was not ranking top 3 but top 10. Once the update came out he disappeared from local and only shows up in organic. This is for major terms. When you type in long tail (which trigger local listings) he shows up top two often.
Obviously the duplicate suite number is causing an issue, but there is a new local filter in effect here as well.
1. I cannot figure out why google all of a sudden decided to let the other guy rank. He is not visilbe in organic page 1. He actualy got penalized for buildilng some horrid links. Well his new SEO company built them, not him. He literally has dozens of pages of spun content. This hurt his organic rankings but not his local. Why!!!!!!!
2. Why is he ranking and not my client. Our client has clean citations and only the address + suite match his partners. But his backlink profile is clean.
3. Any experience as to why google might choose one over the other. I just cannot come up with a solution. I know allot of this is wait and see. Maybe until googles algo turbulance dies down.
Thanks
Hey Rand, I have seen slight ups and downs in ranking not for whole site but for some specific pages. It seems there is nothing new in Penguin 4.0, the same kinds of spam techniques they are using but the only difference is that now they are not focusing on whole site webspam.
Thanks for a great session of WBF. People have been waiting for your inputs Rand, and it's good to know that you didn't turn them down.
All of our clients had a very positive impact from the penguin 4.0 update, as our focus is on slow and steady but only Quality links.
We have seen a rapid increase in leads related to Penguin 4.0 related audits and penalty removal, people with spammy links built between periods of Penguin updates have been hit hard. It is good that Penguin would real-time, so moving forward instead of getting knee jerk reactions from Google, we will see impact of link building in real-time.
Regards,
Vijay
Thanks for providing these insights Rad, having penguin as a real-time factor will now change the game completely. I'm interested in the negative SEO side of everything - will it be easier to penalise a site?
So just to give glimpse, Since the Penguin been released, we have seen some of our keywords has been pushed back but slightly, some of them massively ( up to 30 positions). However, at the same time many other keywords gain good ranking to top (up to 70 positions) and those keywords were ranking 100+.
Thanks for another wonderful WBF Rand. I found this Penguin update helpful for me, for all those who believes in quality work, quality content rather then linkspam cos I have seen a huge improvement in ranking for those keywords who have least backlinks.
I am very tempted to get a deeper understanding of how Penguin works in a practical way. If what defines a spam link changes over time, it makes sense that when Google find links that this part of the algorithm is executed. But at that point it does not make sense to lift penalties but rather when the actually target page/site that has the links is crawled.
It's interesting to hear about Penguin treating different niches in a different way based on how much spam there is. This could theoretically mean that old sites with brand and good links can fall if their content and bounce rate is bad enough (assuming those signals would be treated more important).
So far I have seen a lot of changes in the SERP where many sites can make big jumps in SERP in both directions, multiple times. Also the actually SERP differs a lot between data centers right now. Very often when new changes our found by the system I might not see it myself until a day later.
Thanks for a good WBF. It will be interesting to follow the real impact of this over time and I expect some nice blog posts by Pete and others.
Hello Rand,
As usual interesting content, nice one.
Actually, I am facing a lot of problems since Sept month. My client's keyword has very high search volume (6000+) and it was out of the 100 since a long time. Recently, it jumped on second page (Google UK), but it got fluctuated so much, so it's really hard to explain my client about fluctuation (you know non technical clients).
My question is - Penguin is real time now, so will this fluctuation keep happening (not for my client only, for every SERP results) ? Because good websites getting ranked high and bad will kicked off due to "real time update", so how this gonna be fixed ? Any idea ?
PS: This is happening specially in UK..
Thanks in advance !!
Hello Shubham,
The same happens to my with several websites in Spain.
As an example Keywords with very high search volume (+45.000) where I was #12 - #16 suddenly jumped to #1 - #4 where stayed for a couple of days and then returned to previous positions. I was glad for a while with lots of visitors these days.
In other cases I've observed the opposite. About 10-15 positions falling suddenly or day by day and right now recovering.
Good and very interesting post, Rand.
Wow - if Google did really use the disavow files for their machine learning dataset, that's both really smart on their part, and also slightly evil. If people were actually spamming then I don't feel bad for the work they did disavowing, but for those who didn't really know if it would help or not and spent hours working on a disavow, essentially Google's getting free labor!
In the end let's hope it just makes the results better and cleaner!
Hopefully it is working out good. I have a really big site with tens of thousands of outgoing links. All are nofollow but I have lost count of how many requests for link removal I have gotten since 2012. I have always ignored them since they are nofollow so it's not a real problem for the site owners but I imagine my domain is included in plenty of disavow files :)
We are going to need to be 24 hours close to the computer´s screen to see any variation of positions, thanks for the post
Rand, your theory on Google using the Disavow process to scale their spam database is a great observation.
They've had a long history of enacting changes or using comments and directives to put webmasters to work for them such as the mobile UX test and HTTPS.
Rand, I've been watching you for years and couldn't help but laugh at your hair and mustache. Love how you just let it all hang out and do whatever these days.
I had a site hit by the first Penguin in 2012. One bad fiver gig ruined about 6 months of work. I was always so jelly of those who got messages in webmaster tools. They got to file for reconsideration and I did not. I tried to clean up for a few months but eventually just decided to cut ties, sell on Flippa, and start over. Wonder how it's faring now... Oh well.
I feel like this new Penguin is an invitation to spam again. If you go too aggressive your whole site won't tank and the links will just get devalued. Not saying you should, but that's just kind of how I interpret it. I predict a "fear of god" propaganda announcement coming from Google soon to circumvent this. Like something completely different than anything we've ever seen before. I really don't have any idea what it could be, but the idea of allowing people to push their sites hard without fear of having to start 100% over is really opening up the spam battlefield.
To answer your question about if Google is catching the same kinds of spam, I don't think so. The original penguin was all about anchor text. From what I've seen, sites with hundreds of exact match anchor text links are still going strong. Only time will tell.
Hello Rand,
First of all to thanks for this important WB Friday. This is really more informative that's why we visit here at Moz. I want to ask you that is there happen a google dancing when any major update come?
Finally algo change that lots of normal SEO's will be happy with. Great news regarding negative SEO!
To me it was disturbing me the arrival of this algorithm because most SEO consultants worried. My sopreesa that my website has increased two points in two days doing nothing. I guess what I'll be doing well to this algorithm. Of course I do not do any spam (some told me that in some blog post links could be spam). So I think I should not worry. This being a rookie is something that creates insecurity, but seeing that you're not doing bad, you reshapes move on.
Hi Rand, To understand whether there is a link will need to reject harmful link connection. So we'll see how long it takes effect deny the connection?
Rand, I must say I'm quite disappointed with your shirt... Anyway I liked the video. It's very good news that now we don't need to wait so long to see our pages back to normal after a penalty. I believe now the spam link building strategy will slow down since they will be caught quicker than before. I'll keep an eye on how this affects our webs and see if we can get some useful conclusions ;) Thank you for the video ;)
Thanks Rand for the great information for penguin 4.0 rolls out. I have website with .CASINO extension (A Game Website) and my keywords are started drop after 23rd September. I have checked my backlinks they are looking fine and didn’t get any penalization message. Is it due to .CASINO extension? Can you please guide me? Why this is happening? Anyone please share your views….
Good approach you first went through the history of Penguin, Rand! I just have to add that I hope that this 4.0 version will help us get rid of all those spammy sites...
If it is already updating in real-time / every time Google indexing, then the weather in Mozcast will never be around 60° anymore. Am I correct or wrong?
Good day! First of all, thank you Rand for sharing this video. Yes I learned many things today about google's update, Penguin 4.0. Btw every time I visit this site I'm learning many stuffs about SEO. So the reason why I'm here, I want to know if link spamming is still an advantage in SEO? I mean do you still recommend to use Profile Linking/ Link spamming to get a higher rank in google?
Thank you
Anton
Hello friends!,
Thanks for this interesting post!
I think everything related to positioning is a real headache, but I appreciate all this information. If there is any seo here who wants to help position me I appreciate it :)
I think the change of the algorith was:
- Linkbuilding bad done works --> Linkbuilding bad done penalize --> Linkbuilding bad done not works
Brilliant Google!
Penguin I think will be very good for all. The possibility to rectify before a penalty is much higher. It was not fair that you had to wait out again.
Thank you for sharing this awesome piece of information through WBF. Cheers!
I think your personal opinion on why/how Google used the disavow files is spot on. That process of having others flag bought/artificial links for you and then using machine learning against it entirely makes sense. If that wasn't the original goal, hopefully they have since used it because that data is invaluable. (If they haven't used it in that way, then I think they owe you some equity for coming up with the idea. :p )
Good info. With all of the 100% compliant and high quality links available to those who do SEO, I wouldnt think anyone in the SEO game would still be using spammy links at this point, especially with social backlinking being heavy in the mix. BTW I tried to listen to what you had to say in the video but I couldn't hear you, your shirt was too loud.
Thanks Rand! Love the concept of dynamically changing algo based on the individual website's situation. Therefore, if bad links are coming in Google could quite possibly reduce the weight of links and replace it with content or something else to better reflect the value of the site or page.
Also with the spammers always being worried about the latest algorithm updates and roll outs. Just another good reason for spammers to understand that if you simply try your best to do the right thing all the time, you never have to look in the rear view mirror.
I had very little knowledge about Google Penguin and had a few queries but what an article man. Everything is so comprehensively described. All doubts cleared and knowledge gained. I even know about its recent version now.
Thanks Rand for this really helpful post on Penguin 4. I have a couple of questions on Penguin Penalties
1. Isn't it unfair for a site to receive penalties if they received bad links through means that were not entirely their doing ? If a spamming linking site, adds your site to their database, isn't it unfair that google penalises our site. Why doesn't google just remove that spammy site from its whole database consideration ?
2. The whole concept of penalising a site for bad backlinks seemed flawed to me - Instead of just listing and filtering out these listing, article directories, spam listing sites etc, google decides to instead penalise the sites for getting links from them in the first place.
I suspect google is somewhere getting to the line, i have mentioned above. They will slowly stop penalising sites and start ignoring source of bad backlinks. Hence traffic will fall for old sites, but i doubt for a new site deindexing will occur in the future because of this. It will just be that those links don't exist for you.
Will be glad to hear your thoughts.
Thank you for posting this, very helpful. Is it possible that some sites could just now be receiving penalties from Penguin 4.0, even though it was released in September?
Thanks,
Todd
Hi Rand, what about this links from free press portals? Do you think they are are spammy and could they get penalties from penguin 4.0?
Some SEO folks use this free press portals to send press releases there with bakclinks to theis sites or customer sites.
Thanks and a very successfull year 2017!
Martin
Wanted to let the dust settle a bit but we're seeing almost identical ranking trends across our entire client portfolio that looks something like this: https://image.prntscr.com/image/5833d1f06bfb47aeba4dddbdd23ff884.png
Penguin 4.0 has been great for us but also makes me worry a little bit about how the use of EMAs in content that we get published might pose more immediate, short-term risk.
My websites have seen ranking fluctuations after the update due to the real-time algorithm update. Although site has not been penalised there are still drastic changes with the rankings and meta tags in the SERP.
Big jumps since October, 7th in France for several websites I managed, and see some big fluctuations for others on semrush.
BUT I don't understand these jumps because none of these websites had been penalized previously by Penguin, even by first one (but by Panda and Phantom). There are the biggest movements since I started tracking kw 8 years ago !
Here are some screenshots between October 6th and 7th:
https://i65.tinypic.com/jt81w0.png
https://i67.tinypic.com/w2ljj7.png
https://i67.tinypic.com/qo9l60.jpg
https://i68.tinypic.com/4g6ixs.png
https://i66.tinypic.com/308e1sp.png
I think one of the greatest implications of this new real-time penguin algorithm is the data that will come from it. After a while there will be even more data regarding what types of links work for different sites which will only help SEOs in the long run. It might be a bit painful in the beginning but I think it will have a largely positive impact.
"So, for example, your PPC, your porn, your pills, your casino searches, those types of queries may be places where Google says, "You know what? We don't want to interpret, because all these folks have nasty links pointing to them, we are going to weight links less. We're going to weight other signals higher." Maybe it's engagement and content and query interpretation models and non-link signals that are offsite, all those kinds of things, clickstream data, whatever they've got. "We're going to push down the value of either these specific links or all links in the algo as we weight them on these types of results."
I have two questions regarding this quoute:
1. What do you mean with PPC?
2. Are incoming links less important for e.g., porn websites (either negatively or positively)?
You, Rand Fishkin, continue to provide more detail surrounding the timely topics presented in "Whiteboard Fridays" than any other followed.
Your share of views concerning Penguin were enlightening.
Thank You!
Great stuff Rand. I think time will tell when we get definitive case studies on various 'commonly spammed' niches like you mentioned. Will there be a massive movement in rankings among these typically blackhat, spammy websites? If not...then maybe we're missing something about this update or the blackhat links are pretty dang good...haha.
One question, is it Moz profile link to our site a good link in all cases?? it´s should be good if the link is to a web with similar information (SEO...) but if you link the profile to a hotel or other king of blog website, is it good?
I'm seeing some minor movement in search. And one larger move of a long forgotten competitor resurfacing at #2. Will be keeping an eye on that one
Is that possible, we hit badly for mobile related keywords because of above 2 issues
Hi :)
Remember that it can also be because of how other websites were hit - not only yours. And... a jump from page 4 to page 3 still translates very little to actual results (compared to jumping to the first page of the SERPS). Keep on improving your landing pages and on-page ranking details - the results will follow.
Best,
Thanks for adding speed button on video!
Favorite series on Moz. Thanks as always!
It looks like Josh Bachynski's theory about Google using the disavow tool to machine learning is getting popular :)
Any idea how do we know if our website is penalties? Do we depend only on our search console to know about this?
For Penguin no, you won't get a notification, traffic will just rock bottom.
I hope that the 4.0 have a good impact because it is simple to be victim of a "negative SEO" if you have not knoledge in this sector. Great video :)
Hi Rand,
Firstly, I want to say thanks for this awesome WB Friday.
I'm facing huge problems in 3rd and 4th week of Sept. My keywords ranking was gone down. but the last 2-3 days, it's fluctuate at a very high level and most of keyword jumps up upto 30 to 150.
but I'm waiting when it fixes.
Great WBF Rand,
Very good information. It looks like there is still a lot left in the air and will all be cleared up in the months to come. I'm looking forward to another Penguin 4.0 WBF assessment in the months to come. Keep up the good work!
Hai Rand,
thank you for your posting.
Happy a nice weekend
Thanks for Sharing such an worthy content to the Community!!
Some interesting things to note for an SEO client pre/post penguin. It has taken some time to see the changes roll out. Fairly small sample size here.
I'm comparing 9/10-9/22 with 9/24-10/6 to control for day of the week variations. Organic traffic is up 18.86%. With that said, if we break things down a bit further:
9/10-9/16 Vs 9/24-9/30: Up 1.91% Basically within the margin of error.
9/17-9/22 Vs 10/1-10/6 Up 42.42%
After the update my major kw jumped to #1 but not stable. It keeps jumping between 1 and 2. Other kws keep changing everyday. But I didn't notice any big change in serps with any of my kws of my websites.
Also, whensuring I checked the serps thru proxies and vpn I see different rankings for each different US ip. May I know why?
Thanks a lot for this clear and concise rundown. Many of my rankings moved up quite a bit last weeks, though I'm not sure whether it's because of Penguin 4.0 or not as they do jump from time to time, this one was quite significant though so I suspect it's related. Anyway, thanks for the great article. Will use it as a reference when people ask about the Penguin update. :-)
One thing I loved about penguin 4.0 is, now the whole website won't get penalized if your one page is bad and ranks due to spammy backlinks, bad contents, or black hat..So only that landing page get dropped from SERP results, not whole website get penalized, this is something very interesting.
Anyways, outstanding work done Rand, thank you...!!
Yep, it's done at page-level rather than domain.
The good thing is that as i have read before you can change things without having to wait for months.
How ever they are also some bad points on this.
Thanks for the insight Rand. We have seen some client results increase over the first few days of October and some minor fluctuations from end of September. Things seem to be settling down now.
Havent seen any recent developments in my webmaster or analytics yet
Thanks for this detailed explanation about penguin 4.0 After this update my blog ranking go high. The keyword where my page rank on 4 to 5 th page are come to 1st or 2nd. I am really happy with the result.
Hi Rand
If Penguin is able to apply sanctions in real time, also raise penalties immediately when someone disavow links with disavow. This has many interpretations regarding the possible implications: Will we hear that of "Run, which is an upgrade from Penguin!"? Will the link building safer to take the temperature to the seeker in real time with each maneuver and penalties resolve more quickly? There are many unknowns
Good Weekend
Rand!
Thank you very much for this. I've been doing SEO for a number of years now. I too have seen major fluctuations on sites that are now going the wrong way in the SERPs. I have a question with one client in mind..
When you say "link spamming," how do you mean it? Outbound links, inbound links, ...or (in my client's case) having a lot of high level URLs, each covering a long-tailed keyword (all about the medical field). Is it possible to cover too many long-tailed keywords (as though it were spammy)? It's optimized for Adwords which is the primary conversion source.
Through optimizing the design and a few backend changes, the site began an upward swing. Once 4.0 hit, the site started going back down in the SERPs. The content has not changed except for a few design elements.
Is it possible to have too many long-tailed keywords pages?
Hey Rand, Great Whiteboard!
If you have a site penalized, does Google (or something) inform you or do you rankings just mysteriously drop?
Same(ish) question, if a ban is lifted.
You won't be informed if it's done by an algorithmic penalty, in this case, Penguin. However, if it's a mnual action it will appear in WMT.
Thanks Rand,
We were wondering what the early after math might look like.. But you did affirm some of our hopes. I'm anxious to take a deeper look into any keyword fluctuations our clients may have experienced early next week.
On a side note, these WBFs have become somewhat of a Friday tradition for the folks at our agency - Our calendars are marked "White Board Friday + Beers" @ 5:30 sharp. Tonight Green Port Harbor Ale is on tap. Cheers!
Thank you Rand! It seems that the world never states quite, and Google is not the exception. I like your comparative list between last Penguin and Penguin 4.0. I'm agree with the news of this new tool, it makes the things fasters and fair. I didn't know too much about negative SEO, but thank you I'm now searching it. It's curious because since september 23rd, more less, I started to see some fluctuations in SERP, but I think that things are now calmed down, because positions have returned to normal, even I reach a position above! :)
That was a great post with detailed explanation.
I think that my website was infected I have lost tens of position
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