The long-awaited Penguin 2.0 (also called "Penguin 4") rolled out on Wednesday, May 22nd. Rumor has been brewing for a while that the next Penguin update would be big, and include significant algorithm changes, and Matt Cutts has suggested more than once that major changes are in the works. We wanted to give the dust a day to settle, but this post will review data from our MozCast Google weather stations to see if Penguin 2.0 really lives up to the hype.
Short-Term MozCast Data
First things first - the recorded temperature (algorithm "flux") for May 22nd was 80.7°F. For reference, MozCast is tuned to an average temperature of about 70°, but the reality is that that average has slipped into the high 60s over the past few months. Here's a 7-day history, along with a couple of significant events (including Penguin 1.0):
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By our numbers, Penguin 2.0 was about on par with the 20th Panda update. Google claimed that Penguin 2.0 impacted about 2.3% of US/English queries, while they clocked Panda #20 at about 2.4% of queries (see my post on how to interpret "X% of queries"). Penguin 1.0 was measured at 3.1% of queries, the highest query impact Google has publicly reported. These three updates seem to line up pretty well between temperature and reported impact, but the reality is that we've seen big differences for other updates, so take that with a grain of salt.
Overall, the picture of Penguin 2.0 in our data confirms an update, but it doesn't seem to be as big as many people expected. Please note that we had a data collection issue on May 20th, so the temperatures for May 20-21 are unreliable. It's possible that Penguin 2.0 rolled out over two days, but we can't confirm that observation.
Temperatures by Category
In addition to the core MozCast data, we have a beta system running 10K keywords distributed across 20 industry categories (based on Google AdWords categories). The average temperature for any given category can vary quite a bit, so I looked at the difference between Penguin 2.0 and the previous 7 days for each category. Here they are, in order by most impacted (1-day/7-day temps in parentheses):
- 33.0% (80°/60°) – Retailers & General Merchandise
- 31.2% (81°/62°) – Real Estate
- 30.8% (90°/69°) – Dining & Nightlife
- 29.1% (89°/69°) – Internet & Telecom
- 26.0% (82°/65°) – Law & Government
- 24.4% (79°/64°) – Finance
- 23.5% (81°/65°) – Occasions & Gifts
- 20.8% (88°/73°) – Beauty & Personal Care
- 17.3% (70°/60°) – Travel & Tourism
- 15.7% (87°/75°) – Vehicles
- 15.5% (84°/73°) – Arts & Entertainment
- 15.4% (72°/62°) – Health
- 15.0% (83°/72°) – Home & Garden
- 14.2% (78°/69°) – Family & Community
- 13.4% (79°/70°) – Apparel
- 13.1% (78°/69°) – Hobbies & Leisure
- 12.0% (74°/66°) – Jobs & Education
- 11.5% (88°/79°) – Sports & Fitness
- 7.8% (75°/70°) – Food & Groceries
- -3.7% (70°/73°) – Computers & Consumer Electronics
Retailers and Real Estate came in at the top, with just over 30% higher than average temperatures. Consumer Electronics rounded out the bottom, with slightly lower than average flux, oddly. Of course, split 20 ways, this represents a relatively small number of data points for each category. It's useful for reference, but I wouldn't read too much into these breakdowns.
"Big 20" Sub-domains
Across the beta 10K data-set, we track the top sub-domains by overall share of SERP real-estate. Essentially, we count how many page-1 positions each sub-domain holds and divide it across the entire data set. These were the Big 20 sub-domains for the day after Penguin 2.0 hit, along with their SERP share and 1-day change:
- 5.66% (+0.29%) – en.wikipedia.org
- 2.35% (-0.75%) – www.amazon.com
- 2.22% (+3.11%) – www.youtube.com
- 1.49% (+6.05%) – www.facebook.com
- 1.35% (-8.11%) – www.yelp.com
- 0.84% (+4.77%) – twitter.com
- 0.58% (+0.37%) – www.webmd.com
- 0.58% (+1.87%) – pinterest.com
- 0.52% (+1.24%) – www.walmart.com
- 0.49% (+4.54%) – www.tripadvisor.com
- 0.47% (+0.45%) – www.foodnetwork.com
- 0.47% (-0.44%) – allrecipes.com
- 0.44% (+1.98%) – www.ebay.com
- 0.41% (-0.76%) – www.mayoclinic.com
- 0.38% (+1.72%) – www.target.com
- 0.37% (-4.37%) – www.yellowpages.com
- 0.37% (+0.58%) – popular.ebay.com
- 0.36% (+2.12%) – www.huffingtonpost.com
- 0.33% (+3.27%) – www.overstock.com
- 0.32% (-0.32%) – www.indeed.com
By percentage change, Yelp was the big day-over-day loser, at -8.11%, and Twitter picked up the highest percentage, at +4.77%. In absolute positions, YouTube picked up the most page-1 rankings, and Yelp was still the biggest loser. Overall, the Big 20 occupied 20.00% of the page-1 real estate the day after Penguin 2.0, up from 19.88% the previous day, picking up a modest number of ranking positions.
3rd-Party Analyses
Most reports yesterday showed relatively modest day-over-day changes (solid evidence of an algorithm update, but not a particularly big update). One exception was Dejan SEO's Australian flux tracker, Algoroo, which showed massive day-over-day flux. We believe that at least two other major algorithm updates have rolled out in May in the US, so it's possible that multiple updates were combined and hit other countries simultaneously. This is purely speculative, but no other reports seem to suggest changes on the scale of the Australian data.
The May 9th Update
I'd like to also call out an unconfirmed algorithm update in early May. There was a period of heavy flux for a few days at the beginning of the month, which was backed up by webmaster chatter and other 3rd-party reports. Temperatures on May 9th reached 83.3°F. The MozCast 7-day graph appears below:
The temperature spike on May 5th is unconfirmed, and may have been a test across a small number of data centers (unfortunately, our 10K data for that day was running a separate test and so we can't compare the two data sets). Reports of updates popped up across this time period, but our best guess is May 9th. Interestingly, traffic to MozCast tends to reveal when people suspect an update and are looking for confirmation, and the traffic pattern shows a similar trend:
Traffic data also suggest that May 5th was probably an anomaly. Private data from multiple SEOs shows sites gradually losing traffic over a couple of days in this period. Unfortunately, we have no clear explanation at this time, and I do not believe that this was directly related to Penguin 2.0. Google did roll out a domain crowding update at some point in the past couple of weeks, which may be connected to the early May data, but we don't have solid evidence either way. At this point, though, I strongly believe that the data indicates a significant algorithm update around May 9th.
Were You Hit by Penguin 2.0?
It's important to keep in mind that all of this is aggregate data. Algorithm updates are like unemployment rates. If the unemployment rate is 10%, the reality for any individual is still binary – you either have a job or you don't. You can weather 20% unemployment if you have a job (although you may worry more), and 5% unemployment is little comfort if you're jobless. I don't want to suggest any lack of empathy for those hit by Penguin 2.0 by suggesting that the update was relatively small, but overall the impact seems to be less jarring and jolting than many people feared. If you were hit, please share your story in the comments.
None of our major sites suffered from this update.
I stopped caring about Google's algorithms a while ago; as long as you provide value and put yourself in your website visitor's shoes - you are on the safe side. Today, one can get easily lost in the amount of data and posts and Google's updates and bloggers reviews on these updates. I just don't have time for that.
This doesn't mean that you should stop checking your Google Webmaster and Google Analytics dashboards on a daily basis though.
My 2 cents.
I could not have agreed more, except that there are always clients that have had other SEO "gurus" or "ninjas" work on their projects in the past and that my friend, can be very troublesome.
But generally, yes, that point is super valid on ones own genuine and standardized work.
Completely agree with you, what i observed is; historical link profile devalued in organic search result and this may the reason behind drop in organic search result.
I also observed that out of 10 result 3-4 are from social media profiles, micro-blogging sites like tumblr or forums. This is not at all i want when i am looking for service providers right?
My overall experience with this update is Good but i am not happy with the quality of result !
I was going to reply... but you stole the words right out of mouth. Completely agree with everything you're saying. By putting ourselves in our visitor's shoes, we focus on the metrics that matter: Time On Site and Bounce Rates. Everything will eventually solve itself.
Unfortunately, as much as I don't believe in tricking the search engines and have always championed the end-user, I no longer agree with this statement. Updates like Panda have penalized some sites for what are primarily technical issues (with no bearing on the users or the quality of the site, beyond Google's index), and Google has pushed more back into the hands of webmasters. They used to tell us not to worry about duplicate content, but now they outright penalize for it.
There are many technical SEO issues like this. It's entirely possible to build a site that's good for users, but doesn't even get indexed, let alone rank. I think that when we say "just build for users", we potentially do a disservice to a lot of business owners.
With link-building, it's often a bit more cut-and-dry, but it's still possible to just go too far with a tactic that, at small-scale, seems honest and reasonable to the average business owner (such as using exact-match anchor text too heavily).
Dr-Pete, I definitely agree with what you are saying in the 2nd passage. Of course, all the fundamental SEO things should be done for making sure the website is indexed well and is fast. "Just build for users" - is a general principle we should start from.
Those who stopped spamming, made their users their focal point, are consistently producing quality, creative & informative content in the niche stand the test of time and they need not worry about any of the search engine's major algorithm update, its data refresh etc.
So far so good with the changes. I'm seeing some better numbers for my key words. Small business owner in real estate, so I'm glad that the big companies did not take over for my numbers. Looks like some of the big box real estate agencies were high up on your list.
From what I see so far in heavy spammed industries (terms like payday loans or Canadian pharmacy) the update is a miserable failure. 90%+ of the rankings in top 50 for "Canadian pharmacy" are fake/rogues sites. "Payday loan" is full of affiliate spammers with hacked sites and link injections.
Meanwhile one major network is sharing rankings and it seems like their clients didn't suffer any drops; on the contrary, some rankings seemed improved.
I really hope the algo is not entirely rolled up. If it is, then Google isn't reliable anymore.
Same with Payday loans in the UK SERPs - although Matt Cutts specifically called out the Payday issue in this Webmaster Video in early May - https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-expect-in-seo-in-the-coming-months/ - so it may well be being treated as a separate problem to which a solution is imminent(ish).
Still, it's amazing that the level of spam that persists in the Payday loans sector is still able to flourish. If the guys carrying out the payday spam expanded into other high volume terms Google could have a much bigger problem on their hands as it seems that they aren't currently equipped to deal with it.
All you lot do is either cry, whine or bitch, since when does Google care about the average joe's site or mom and pop store? They don't give a fck, it's about their bottom line and whether shareprice goes up. Stop whining about these animal updates and stop listening to Matt Cutts, you're all slaves. And whiny ones at that. If you are a pure play in the business sphere then give a fuck about you not them. Win or die.
You sound like an Alex Jones fan.
We were hit by Google penguin 2.0 because few months ago some SEO agency called us and offered to do SEO for our company but unfortunately after 4 months, we found out that they are doing massive non quality or related business link building. On 22nd May 2013, our ranking suddenly dropped and disappear. We would like to check with the expert, does anyone know how to recover?
Ouch. It doesn't get much worse than this. Cyrus Shepard from SEOmoz claims he can recover from Penguin. The only professional SEO I know of that has made such a claim. Everyone who was hit should probably contact him.
Thank you! I will contact him!
Hi, I have recovered 2 websites from the previous big pinguin launch, and i have tested links effect on pinguin penalties for several domains of mine. I can give you some directions to help:
1. Remove bad links (keyword rich anchors, sitewide links, and especially footer links)
2. Build new genuine links (high quality) using more natural anchor texts (lsi keywords, related keywords, brand name, website url, plus some generic anchors (click here, this site, here ...)
3. Build new link assets ( the kind of content that could attract natural links from usual bloggers and influencers)
4. Go social, but do it smartly. You don't have to share each and every piece of content in your site, but try to reach out to influencers and bloggers within your niche (use twitter, linkedin etc...). So, they could help you build those genuine, natural links you need.
If needed, i'll be happy to help more.
Good luck
Thanks for sharing! How much time did it take you to recover?
About 2 months
Completely agree with all the points you have list out. I have applied similar thing for Our Website and i can see the results getting improve gradually.
It is possible to recover partially. What I mean is that you will not get back to where your rankings were, because they were artificially inflated by those spammy links built by that fake SEO company. What you can do is work on getting those links removed by contacting each site's webmaster and asking nicely. Then disavow those links which cannot be removed with Google's disavow links tool. While doing that, work on promoting your website in legitimate ways to make up for the loss of the links that are removed or are now ignored by google.The link diagnosis and removal process is time consuming. Since the first Penguin was rolled out, I have been able to help several sites clean up and restore the ability to rank. That is the important phrase here "restore the ability to rank". A thoroughly cleaned up site will be able to work on ranking well again, but will not automatically "recover" to previous rankings.
Since it is complicated, time consuming and if done improperly can cause your site to rank even lower, it is best to have someone with some experience handle all this. But here's the problem with an effective recovery plan - you have to consider if it is worth the time and cost or would it be better to start over. Many people who have gotten in trouble with Penguin 1.0 used cheap link building services, or those fake SEOs who email you and call you all the time. One of the main reasons people use those is because they are cheap. So people who were not willing to pay what they thought was the high cost of real SEO end up having to pay the much higher cost of choosing cheap scams.
With all of that said, nobody has recovered from Penguin 2.0 yet. It is too new.
Hi Chanel27,
Did you get an message from google about your link profile when your ranking dropped?
My sites ranking dropped as well but I made the mistake of timing a website change (new website, new server, all old sites pages 301 to new pages) at the same time as google's penguin update. I never received a message from google that i was being penalized so i don't know if this is just a temporary drop because of the change or because of penguin 2.0. Has anyone else had experience with a website change and noticed a dropping in ranking? If so was it temporary or permanent?
Thanks,
Steve
Odd to see that you had yelp as a big loser, I am actually seeing more yelp returns in first page serps than I ever had before. In most [city name + keyword] searches for local businesses, yelp now occupies as many as the top 3 entries. IN fact, I noticed that a lot of online directories returned to the first page of results for these types of SERPs.
Of course these are manual observations and aren't backed up by substantial data analysis. My guess, however, is that rankings were reorganized for sites like yelp and some ancillary terrms they shouldn't have been ranking for disappeared, while local business rankings improved across the board.
Keep in mind that this data set tends to be commercial in nature and it doesn't include a ton of very long-tail terms. So, it's possible that Yelp lost ranking positions on some head or mid-tail terms, but picked up something in the long-tail. I can't speak to their overall traffic. I definitely wouldn't make any wild claims about Yelp being doomed or anything :)
Yea its important to realize how big Yelp is now, in todays Big10 Domains it's the 5th! it's much larger than I used to think in terms of page one results
1)en.wikipedia.org
2)www.amazon.com
3)www.youtube.com
4)www.facebook.com
5)www.yelp.com
6)popular.ebay.com
7)www.ebay.com
8)www.webmd.com
9)www.walmart.com
10pinterest.com
Perhaps, Yelp has improved SERP in some specific markets and lost ranking for others.
I agree - all I am seeing is Yelp for days. Saw a SERP yesterday with 6/10 positions owned by Yelp and the day before it had ****2****
Robert,
In our analysis, which I have posted below, we have seen Yelp increase visibility by 0.5 % across 20k keywords. This is a significant increase and yes, I also see a lot of Yelp (sometimes all top 3 results) for local queries.
Nice job, Dr. Pete. I was a little disappointed that this wasn't as large an update as the hype would have led me to believe, but I guess it just depends on who you are and what keywords you're targeting.
I also love the irony of looking at Mozcast.com traffic as a gauge of the very thing Mozcast measures.
If collecting all this data gets too hard, maybe I'll just generate random numbers and then get all my data from GA ;)
One of my websites in the Health market has suffered greatly for some reason completely unknown to me.
It's a website I made in November 2012. It has a total of around 130 articles - every single one was written personally by me, it's very well written, averaging 1500 words per article, with many references to PubMed research, etc.
I haven't done ANY backlinking except for writing a few guest posts for high quality sites, maybe 10 or so blog comments (those weren't spam, just real comments where I put in a link to my site along the way), and maybe 1 or 2 articles that I added to EzineArticles (both original at that even though they didn't have to be). Overall I had around 10-12 domains linking to my site, and not one of them spammy. My daily visitors from Google was steadily increasing over the past few months (an average of 2-3 extra uniques per day), reaching 400 at it's peak on May 22.
May 23: 70 uniquesMay 24: 45 uniques
I basically feel sad. This website wasn't really making any money, but I really liked it and had put a lot of time into making it. Disheartening.
Yes, it is disheartening when you do your best and get hit without no apparent reason or explanation. But ezinearticles? Why would you do that?
So far so good. My own rankings have all gone up, with 12 keyword improvements with the last SEOmoz crawl. (I only track 47 keywords for my own website. The other 953 keywords in my moz account are for clients.) Unfortunately, a client that had just hired me two weeks ago- for the first time- took a giant dive in the rankings. 12 improved and 60 declined.
Lesson learned: I'm going to try not to take NEW clients just before an announced algo change. Now I have to explain why this has "nothing to do with me."
All in all, changes look good though!
Thanks Pete for sharing the data. I see in your list Yelp and Yellowpages losing, but our data (20k local keywords) shows both these sites have gained 0.5 % visibility (compared to week before Penguin 2.0 ).
The top 5 sites we currently see ranking for local keywords are -
www.yellowpages.com 4.10%
plus.google.com 3.66%
www.yelp.com 2.51%
lawyers.findlaw.com 1.57%
www.angieslist.com 1.19%
We are also seeing a trend of youtube videos ranking in top 10, and client websites being pushed to page 2, 3 etc.
When I do manual search, I see a lot of PMD and EMD on first page. But when I compare the numbers pre and post penguin 2.0, they are almost the same. I want to compare this data with last year to see if there is an increase or decrease.
I do agree with you on second point, Google started displaying youtube, social media or micro blogging website result on first page and actual service providers on 2nd and 3rd page !!
Share your experience on quality of organic search result after penguin 2.0.
Is that primarily local visibility? I heard some reports that Yelp gained on long-tail, local terms. We only track page-1 SERPs for MozCast, and the terms are pretty distributed in volume/length. There's not a ton of very long-tail keywords. So, this is just one slice of the overall pie.
Yes, Primarily local visibility for keywords with geos. I understand and like that your data is national keywords and not long tail. The data I gave is also for page 1 SERPs.
PMDs I see at 29.12 % and EMD at 0.37 %. And the top 20 sites account for 23.36 % of total top 10 results.
So if you add PMD + EMD + top 20 sites = 52.85 %.
Well its pretty much GooTube.com now, vid after vid after vid after...same old crap from Google, as long as users stay in the "google it' mindset we and you are slaves. Find your business? Sure page 123, rest is YouTube, Google Maps, and Google ads, welcome to web 3.0 and monopoly online.
Dear Pete,
simultaneously or as part of Penguin 2.0 I noted in Germany that the Domain Clustering (a domain shows up with one search query with many URLs in SERP) disappears in the travel industry I am working, so smaller websites rank again in top100. The same have occurred in USA?
One of the reason that some bigger sites loose search visibility, but not much visitors, because most people do not search more than at the first page on Google.
I think the domain clustering update hit earlier here in the US, but I'm hearing reports from more than one international SEO that they it may have been bundled with Penguin 2.0 for the rest of the world :(
In the UK, domain clustering is still apparent in the property sector. Just 2 domains in the top 20 results fir the search: 3 bed houses for sale
Regarding Penguin2: seeing many smaller local businesses drop out of page 1,to make room for big brands - even if they are from the wrong country!
E.g. Best crab
:-)
I work in the travel industry in The Netherlands and have noticed the same change.
Very useful data Pete, Thanks!!! Here is my 2 cents worth:
Personally, I have seen the most impact related to backlinks from low quality sites (de-indexed, no pr,etc) and over optimization of anchor text. Several of the higher competition markets I am in have sites in positions 1-3 with virtually NO keyword anchor text links, and very few links overall. Also, I have noticed that much high keyword density is being tolerated...I see many sites with 4-6% keyword density ranking....BUT, these sites usually have virtually no keyword anchor text links....
As always, back to testing,testing,testing.
Some of websites for which we manage SEO and SEM outperformed and some showed really bad results. Same strategy didn't work for all sites of same niche.
So we need to go back and study why it worked good for some and why it didn't work for rest.
Some times we think we are just dancing the way google wants us to dance. :(
We are more focused on getting higher ranking then improving our customer services. We are so busy to build content and links that we hardly have time to go back to our clients asking them how we can improve the services.
Hey Dr Pete! Thanks for the stats on P2. I got a question for you... did you notice there was also an unofficial update on March 6th... I can confirm that some sort of update (probably a testing pre-penguin 2) happened on March 6th for sure. I lost my site on that particular day never to return back. I also noticed several webmasters experienced the same thing.
Can you shed some light on this event?
Chetan
We got bumped up slightly, still not enough in my opinion (though I would say that!). We offer better content and advice than all the other website in our area (they're just landing pages).
'bumped up slightly'? wtf are you working on? You waiting for snow in the desert I think.
Cool SEO-moz data on Google's Penguin 2.0 update. White hat SEOs over here in München Germany were very happy that Google rolled out their search engine alogo update. We hoped that quality content henceforth will succeed. Our impression so far is that unfortunately black hat link spammers still get good rankings. We very much look forward to a Penguin 3.0, maybe we better should call it 9.0. We believe this is how much more is needed for the alogo to change and put an end to black hat SEOs.
Useful graphics, thanks Pete!
In depth analysis! Through out the net people are writing same things about the update, This analysis report is completely different. As usual Dr. Pete always does!
Thanks for sharing such a nice report.
Hi Dr. Pete - thx
Check out this new Case Study I just finished about hit hard
by Penguin 2.0.
What u think about this Penguin 2.0 Case Study
harry
Our portfolio of sites , as well as client sites did not see any extra-ordinary movement in serps or traffic. We tend to focus heavily on content quality and less so on linking. We find that this minimizes the impact of updates from the algorithm and in many cases provides our clients with a lift in rankings and traffic once the dust settles.
In France, the affected subjects are:
-Tourism-Psychics-Real Estate
Various reasons including:
- Links to low quality (Press Releases)- Anchors too optimized
In France Google Penguin 2 seems to be more important than in other countries.
I saw some slight increases in my organic search traffic on the day Penguin 2.0 was released and in the days since. Can't complain here!
Awesome post Pete, impressed how quickly you cranked it out.
Interesting thing to keep an eye on is how many clicks Matt's link to report spam sites has gotten. As of now (May 27th) it's received over 12,000! Bitly stats: https://bitly.com/penguinspamreport+
Hit by penguin 2.0 on 2 websites and identified the apparent causes. It looks like a website can't obtain more links of how many google thinks it deserves in a specific time lapse. The number of links a website deserves depends on almost other 5 signals i figured out with my team. It's a funny head to head with Google and we're working on new (and safe) link building strategies, it's getting difficult more and more but it's the real fun :)
Good Blogs, this update showing the minor change in my site ranking. ultimately it can recover in few weeks.
I tried doing. but seo is somewhat difficult for me =((
As a small business owner I seem fine with the changes and seem to have a bump up...hoping the business owners I work with did the same...thanks for the support and great info.
Awesome data by industry type! It's important for people to remember that unless they have a manual warning within Google Webmaster Tools, they haven't actually received a penalty or been 'hit' by an algorithm update - it's just that their site has been re-evaluated against the new algorithm criteria and it doesn't fit the bill as well now. In these instances it's vital that site managers look at building stronger quality links & on-page factors and not simply going mad about removing links and disavowing. For every link you remove you should be building another one!
Useful statics.. thanks!
The first Penguin update shot us all the way to the top spot.
This update is as if it were non-existent.
Yeah, There are lot of websites are affected after Penguin Update. Lot of website lost their keyword rankings..
We saw a weird flux in the results from Penguin, whilst most of our sites did superbly - Some of our clients micro-sites got hit (generally because they tended to be exact match domains) but other EMD sites saw a nice boost. We'll see over the next coming week or 2 if we see more changes.Most of our clients however saw good growth and we had a lot of alerts from our rank tracker..
I never penalized by Google or any other Google Algorithm before. But the recent update was really screwed up. I lost maximum SERP positions from first page. I'm in dilemma what to do to get the positions in first page again. I need a clear strategy to get my business again. Hope I can do that and I'll.
But still I've many questions to ask Google:
What's the wrong in my SEO strategies?How come all my keywords went down in one night?If you think I was doing negative or blakhat techniques what you did all these days?I never noticed myself or my team did spam on any site ?do you've any clear answers for each and every question from every webmaster?
:( Still. Google is a Giant search engine, so we need to promote regarding Google's algorithm. okay, we'll do as long as your market share is high.
I'm not sure yet as the update on the 22nd coincided with a bank holiday, and holidays and weekends always cause a decline in traffic in the industries I work with.
Although I am happy to see a number of brand new sites which were competing with us disappear so we have regained our rankings.
We need a couple of more things in these fancy charts to make them super-useful for us SEO folks, rather than just a confirmation of turbulence in the aircraft.
1. Similar data but segmented by SERP sections like Page1, Page2, Page3 . So, we need to see the actual turbulence across different ranking segments.
2. Turbulence by sub-niches insider each industry.
Add this to the tool, and you have a much more powerful insight into what is really happening with the algo update.
Regarding (2), there's a breakdown by industry in the post. Unfortunately, if you go to the sub-category level, there just isn't enough data. It would take a much larger data set to make that possible, and I'm not sure the benefits would be all that compelling, since these categories can be a bit arbitrary and tend to overlap.
We only track page-1 for MozCast, by design, because we decided to focus on the most high-impact changes (and most of the click-through happens on page 1). There are some other folks who track flux across pages 2+, so I tend to check multiple sources. The problem with something like Penguin is that any page 1 flux also translates into flux on deeper pages. For example, if the site at #2 gets kicked out or drops way down, then everyone at 3 and below moves up (to over-simplify). So, we end up seeing flux across the board.
Breaking it out by page can be useful in some cases, such as the recent domain crowding update (this targeted deeper pages and MozCast didn't detect it). In most cases, though, the by-page breakdown doesn't end up being quite as interesting as we'd hope.
One of our sites is a casualty of Penguin 2.0. www.JustBunkBeds.com.
After analyzing our links, we found links coming from directories and websites that we never paid for or contacted for links. Matt Cutts constantly repeats "do not worry about links" good quality links will follow, however, bad links do follow good sites too! and have to be removed otherwise you get hit. We have disavowed through Google / Bing the majority of "domains" pointing to site ( actually used a sledge hammer), now we are in wait and see mode.
We too had the same problem. Did disavow help your rankings
Hi,
I have tried disavow after the new penguin 2.0, and that helped regain most of the rankings back. The ones i didn't regain should be due to some over-disavowed links ( as most of them looked spammy). It remains to build some genuine links targeting those queries (partial matches, related keywords, LSI keywords and using some stop words queries) and the rest of ranking will get back !
regards
Dr Pete@
no doubt your information is outstanding and i always love to read your post, its a great source to me to get updates, but i just want to know one thing- where Google has descried about Panda and Penguin Updates clearly ? Is there any official website or Blog of Google where Google has mentioned about their algorithm and about latest panda and penguin updates. ? I don't need any reference site, i need Google's official declaration.
Unfortunately, Google typically refers to the original Penguin post when they do updates. Panda is sporadic - it's often confirmed by Google through back channels and the best sources are either Barry Schwartz's posts or Danny Sullivan's (they can get "official" confirmation, but Google may not put out a post). Matt Cutts' blog mentioned the Penguin 2.0 roll-out:
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/
Pete Sir,
last month some internet marketing experts discussed with me about Google updates and they told me that Google has never announced officially about their exact algorithm to rank a website as well as about the Panda and Penguin Updates. I am very thankful to you to provide me the Matt Cutt's Blog URL. I was in needd
Well, they've certainly never laid the algorithm out for us, but they have publicly announced multiple updates. The original Penguin was announced on Google's official blog (although not by that name). If someone claims Google has never confirmed an update, I'm afraid they're just incorrect.
And what about anchor text distribution in this penguin update?.
I am little bit feeling that this latest penguin has hit all those sites ranking having even 7-8% exact match anchor text backlinks.
What do you think?
Hello @Pete & All,
I am very late now to post a comment here but I have something interesting to show you all. Since most of us agree that this update came with positive results for social media and free blogs that rank higher in search results but apart from this, we also need to agree that this update has allowed spammers to rank higher. And, most of such spammers are trying to manipulate search engine rankings by doing unstoppable keywords stuffing and luckily they are winning over it. I did a search on this and found that yes...it is true and posted a blog on my website for this. Link is here: https://blog.rankingbyseoindia.com/google-search-results-suck-see-the-proof/
In this blog you will see that Youtube is ranking in top 10 on keywords like "SEO services" & "SEO service company". What do you guys have to say about this, especially Pete?
Don't you think...spammers would take a step ahead to do it and spam all the internet until Google fixes all this.
Waiting for your replies.
Thanks,
Lalit Sharma
Here's a cautionary tale of Penguin 2.0. My company recently created an ecommerce shop for for a client who sells adult toys.
Hi JoePublic, did you have many good links? Could be that the porn link you had was responsible for the rise in pagerank to get 200 visits a day.
Have you disavowed that domain yet? Worth doing if you want nothing to do with it.
Is it possible that 2.0 is filtering, dividing & re-assigning content (not devaluing) based on a newer co-citation algo? I have noticed that links will no longer show up when I Google search my brand. They do show up when I Google search my name. Perhaps Penguin is re-assigning the value of our links to a different person or subject based on the content of the article. Hyper co-citation?
I noticed a few changes with the SERP for my target keyword:
I lost blogspot from page 1, page 2 to page 20
I gained 5 spots out of the 10 SERP reulsts on page one.
I now have 8 of my websites on page one out of the 10 page one SERP results. On some days I have 9 spots out of the 10 page one results.
I just love Mozcast, it makes you stay alerted and i always check on it regularly cause it's incredibly accurate, the temperatures by category feature seems quite interesting, I wonder when will it be added to the Mozcast page.
We had a nice little lift but am still seeing a lot of obviously manipulative SEO techniques being richly rewarded.
We though we were affected by the update but we saw an immediate bounce back just a few days after a big drop. https://gerumic.com/images/google-panda-2-update.jpg Point being, if you do see a drop, don't feel the need to react too quick as your drop may only be temporary. Google did announce that there would be rolling updates so you could just as easily bounce back also.
For the title's question - partly.
You win some you lose some.
The worst case for me was a client's site we sent a disavow request but haven't yet sent the reconsideration request again for the manual penealty.
IT seems we got hit twice - once manuall and the second time by Mr. Penguin.
Good post and great comments - thanks for all of the information.
Phew! I thought my clients were getting smacked although I was doing everything whitehat. I had to wait for Memorial Day weekend to be over. My clients were not affect positively or negactively.
Seemed to have gained slight ranking boosts for my relatively new Technology Blog :-)
Thanks for the post. I quoted your post here: https://hughbanksdesign.com/thoughts/penguin-2-0-scared/
I am overall pleased so far with the Penguin 2.0 update. My website increased in rankings for several of my targeted keywords on page 1. Two of my clients slipped in rankings because of SEO that was done previously before they became my client. It sucks but they are lucky they switched who they were using when they did. The 2 clients had duplicate content that I eliminated and a spammy link profile that I'm working on fixing. It's amazing to me that on average people know more bad SEO techniques than good ones. I have to retrain most of my clients when I get them and some of them never get it.
My traffic is down almost 60%. I've benefited from all previous google updates, this is the first time I'm affected negatively.
Why I thought I would be safe from google updates:
Reasons why I've probably been hit:90% of my pages contain affiliate links to the same domain (different subpages with different products though). Maybe Google views my site as a "thin affiliate site"?Any insights to share on this?
Hi everyone,
my site, ConcertHotels.com experienced a significant dip in traffic (30%+) due to Penguin 2.0 - so much so that it's actually made SearchMetric's Penguin 2.0 biggest losers list, sitting proudly alongside a load of porn sites!!! It's definitely frustrating because I've been a keen follower of SEOmoz over the last few years and I've tried to design my website with SEO in mind, but also with a focus on providing my user's with relevant content. I do believe that in my niche (help users find hotels close to concert venues), ConcertHotels.com is one of the best sites out there - we provide accurate distances and directions from hotels to venue (many of our competitors don't offer this, providing only straight line distances), and we've collected thousands of venue and hotel reviews from genuine customers. Our previous design of the website was such that many pages were quite thin on content (since we had 5 pages associated with each concert venue - an overview page, nearby hotels page, upcoming events page, reviews page and nearby restaurants page), and because of this, the site was huge and more difficult to crawl. But strangely, that design, which is currently live on my UK site (concerthotels.co.uk), has managed to survive Penguin 2.0 unscathed. My new design, which was launched in April 2013, and is live on ConcertHotels.com, merged a lot of the content so that venue's now have only two pages - an overview page and a nearby hotels page. This has resulted in pages with much more unique, relevant content, a faster site, and a site that should be easier for Google to crawl. But this new design has resulted in a 30% drop.
Regarding links, we don't have a huge number of external sites linking in to ConcertHotels.com, but over the last couple of years the sole focus has been on encouraging venue's own sites to link to use - so only very relevant sites have been linking to us (as far as I'm aware).
So, for someone who has tried his best to adopt good SEO practices, at the same time as trying to generate unique content for the website, seeing such a damaging drop in Google's ranking is extremely frustrating. :(
Thanks
Mike
few of my sites crashed, do you think that is just because of Google dance, but I cant believe it is, because this never happend in 8 years till my sites is online, I dont know what to do, I had good links from other sites, authority sites linking to my site etc.Any help?
I work in the Telecom Industry. We lost 30+ positions for main keywords. I think the 1.5 year old spammy backlinks from low quality unrealted websites with tons of other links finally caught up with us.
Hopefully the WT disvow tool will help.
In google.co.il (Israel), penguin 2.0 pushed the big brands up, and small websites down; some kind of a vince update.
Thanks for the data and advice Pete,
1 out of all our websites were minor effected by it. However even though it's important to know every change that Google makes with Search, I'm not as paranoid or concerned as much as I was.
Like a few people are saying here, as long as you provide amazing value, and always put your customers and visitors first, then Google is your Friend not your enemy.
Some updates have had little impacts on certain pages but we have to move with the times and always staying active with content marketing which seems to do well for us.
If Google releases a new update, I just login to Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard and look at the changes as well as "Moz" to help.
We've also noticed some improvements in SERP. That is great result for us, cause the site is rather "young".
Another question: is it all about keyword links?
If you had a bunch of links like "the best blue widgets" and changed them to "boris widgets ltd" would that reverse the problem? Or is it more about placement of the links?
I was hit. Still trying to find out how Penguin 2.0/4 is different to the last ones.
I did receive about 12,000 unwanted links in Feb/March this year from one domain. I am hoping that is the problem. But really don't know. Most of my link building in the last 2 years has been guest blogging, so I am wondering if that is a problem?
Anyway, I disavowed the domain that sent me 12000 links, that was easy. Now the hard part!
Has anyone written yet a list of changes specific to the latest Penguin update? I have a friend in a similar situation - not affected previously but affected now. And I know that he does not do any guest blogging at all.
I am not too concerned with all the updates. As long as you offer good quality content you have nothing to worry about.
Thats my experience too....
A new client of mine that came on board 2 months ago received unnatural link warnings a year ago and was fairly diligent about getting links removed from the low quality sites.
As of a few weeks ago we had been in the top 5 for his targeted keyword phrase and continued to fluctuate between 5-10 over the next few weeks.
When this latest Penguin update rolled out on Wednesday he plummeted to page 8 for the same targeted keyword phrase... if I've built less than 20 links thus far - from topically relevant, quality sites - and he did his due diligence with getting most all of the unnatural links removed from his warning last year, I'm scratching my head a bit as to why his site was impacted this severely from the latest update.
Looking at the list of sites that apparently got hit hardest and considering none of my sites were noticeable hit, I have to say I'm liking this update so far.
So far so good. I'm happy with this update. We've spent some time getting rid of some links over the last few months. I've seen a few shuffles in rankings of competitors but we've remained static.
We went from first on the first page to the first on the second page and trying to figure out how to go back. Yikes. We are a lawn care and snow removal site in Calgary.
Truth be told I was still working on recovering my site from the first Penguin update. But I was not all that active about doing it since most of my traffic came from my promotions on social media networks and web 2.0 sites.
Right before the release I saw a significant drop in my rankings and impressions via webmaster tools data. But once Penguin 2.0 launched I saw a rise in that data.
I was just going to leave the site alone and not mess with trying to bring it back totally into the good graces of Google. But now I think I will take more aggressive steps to recover the site for the learning experience if nothing else.
I saw a very small site get hit on exact match anchor text, the number of total links with that keyword was <15 but in the total profile it made up around 50-60% of the anchor texts. Ratio's of bad links/exact matches seems to be as important as sheer volume in my experience
I did not see any change with any of the ecom's I monitor. If retail was hit hardest, I would have thought I would see fluctuations in rankings, and competitor rankings - but no.
Great piece of information. Thanks all for sharing about their website after Google panda update. :)I also noticed slight changes in some keywords. will work now to recover it soon :p
I like the changes. It seems like you are a lot less likely to find the same domain as often for the same keywords.
Several phrases I monitor seem to have an increase in sites doing 302 redirects from SERPs to affiliate products since the update. There are often 2-3 results on the first page that redirect to the same product.
It's disappointing to see something so spammy and simple be that effective.
Hi Gary. Funny you saying this because I though it was only me seeing this weird "redirects". Quite frankly I am puzzled not only for them showing up, but also how people are able to this kind of thing. And yeah, I am seeing it quite a lot.. See the #1 result of "best wrinkle cream".. it should probably still be there. BTW, did you notice that for certain terms, more "EMDs' are being returned?
Wow, that's still there! How does Google allow such a thing?
Maybe the data they collect about such practices isn't (yet) enough for them to take action. Most of the updates we see or hear about are centered around bigger spam issues. But they'll notice and act eventually, I'm sure of that.
We are a direct selling/ retail site and I am really excited with the new updates. All of our hard work with improving the SEO with our social sites has paid off. Our YouTube channel jumped to the top 5 for search for all of our brands and I have one brand that now has Pinterest, Facebook, Youtube Channel, Youtube Videos, and Twitter on the first page!
We had huge improvement in some high-converting key terms. However, we are not a very good case study, as we had been expecting improvement due to a recent removal of a manual penalty.
Great information. Didnt notice any important changes. Great Work!
My favourite game site is no more in search results :(
excellent! just awesome, I followed the mozcat just those days that in the forums there was much talk in the serp movements. Thanks for sharing knowledge.
Looks like I'm lucky that my site is in Computers & Consumer Electronics category.The traffic even increase a bit since the Penguin 2.0 rolled out.Hope it won't take a sudden turn and become worse rapidly.
Nice Data Dr.Pete.
Happy with Penguin 2.0 update. There were some slight changes but I don't noticed any big changes with this update. It has affected a good improvement in keyword ranking for my sites.
Will be waiting for Next Penguin update.
Thx for sharing. We saw some big bumps positively. Looking forward to seeing where our listings go in the next few weeks.
Overall we weren't affected by the update at all. There's little to no change. For the most part, parts of the site that lost traffic were reversed by other higher quality pages receiving more traffic. Great news really. No change is better than a bit dip.
Hope i will get my game site ranking soon on serp.
I see lot of spam sites coming up after May 22nd update. Some of the ecommerce sites I manage are pushed down on many keywords by Amazon affiliates.
like this search result
previously Amazon, Walmart, ebay, my client and couple of competitors used to be on first page for this keyword. There are hundreds of other keywords like these which are showing wordpress scrapper sites well into the 2nd page.
wasn't such websites already taken care of by Panda Updates?
Google went crazy, maybe a virus attacked their algorythms
Very useful info, stats & charts thanks Dr. Pete
Very awesome data! I'm glad we have some more info than just 'X% of queries' and webmasters complaining they were hit. Do you currently have any plans for tracking non-english queries? I remember Matt Cutts saying that some countries would have bigger change than others.
We were hit by Search engines penguin 2.0 update and on 22 May our position instantly decreased and vanishes. Now we are trying hard to get back our rankings and I hope we will overcome this period of crisis. Thanks for sharing such a nice report.
I manage about 50 client sites and only one of those were hit by Penguin 2.0 -- the owner went against my advice and hired someone to gather links a couple years ago who promised they would be quality links, gathered slowly, with multiple anchor text, etc., etc. This site lost 1/4th of it's traffic at time of the Penguin 2.0 pre-test on May 8, and has slowly declined ever since (it's now about 1/2 of what it was almost 3 weeks ago).
Great article. I have seen about a 20% drop in traffic after 26th. Working hard to get everything back to normal
Hi There,
I represent a UK based workwear company called www.myworkwear.co.uk and our rankings have fallen following Penguin 2.0. We are a relatively small company compared to many competitors and have noticed the arrival of large companies in the serps. Many are not even in the workwear sector and pretty irrelevant which is annoying. We have not received any correspondence from Google, but our fall from grace particularly for the word workwear has been big.Is it worth emailing Google? We have attempted to remove bad links, is it worth using disavow?
Any help would be much appreciated.
I see lot of spam sites coming up after May 22nd update. Some of the ecommerce sites I manage are pushed down on many keywords by Amazon affiliates.
for examplehttps://www.google.com/search?q=eureka+rr+cheapest
previously Amazon, Walmart, ebay and my client used to be on first page for this keyword. There are hundreds of other keywords like these which are showing wordpress scrapper sites well into the 2nd page.
Welcome the the new, "improved", Google! :)
I see lot of spam sites coming up after May 22nd update. Some of the ecommerce sites I manage are pushed down on many keywords by Amazon affiliates.
for examplehttps://www.google.com/search?q=eureka+rr+cheapest
previously Amazon, Walmart, ebay, my client and couple of competitors used to be on first page for this keyword. There are hundreds of other keywords like these which are showing wordpress scrapper sites well into the 2nd page.
I m happy with penguin 2.0 update, in starting of January I changed my plan of link building, I directed subordinates don’t go behind only do follow and anchor text and as well as do-follow, so because target mainly link spam, so concentrate on naked url back links and as well as no-follow also. And now my 72 keywords (from 5 different sites) that were on 2,3 pages are on 1st page and with in TOP 5.
Awesome data! This is quite helpful. There seems to be a common theme from a lot of the commentors that they are more spammy sites showing up in the SERPs since this recent updates. It seems that this always occurs after a major update. Any idea how long it usually takes Google to figure this out and correct it? Do you recommend that they report these issues or assume that Google will figure them out with all of their checks and balances?
Hi, I have been really hit. But i have a normal blog, with all natural links. I cant understand why. But From the change, i have lost between 30-35% of traffic (my website is in Spanish) and I have around 70.000 visit per month. In the last two years we have been growing. And I don´t know what to do if someone want to check is guarderiasalamanca(.)com
Thanks.
great post. is there any tools to masure these impact on individual site?
Check your analytics, organic search referrals, check for big changes on or around 22nd May.
Good update on Penguin. Is there any knowledge on a major Panda update soon?
Hello Dr. Pete
Thanks for sharing valuable information & data about Penguin 2.0. But We all want to know now about
1.how we can recover from this update?
2. How Google Consider the quality of website & relevancy result?
3. Which types of website links Google Consider as an spam links?
4. Is off page activities like Social bookmarking, Classified, Web 2.0, doc submission are now totally shutdown? if yes then please suggest the latest off page activities?
5. Is Google just roll out all this update to increase their PPC revenue & want to shutdown SEO?
Hi Jemi,
1,2,3) check rikano's comment in this post for top 3 questions.
4) As of OFF-Page activities Web 2.0 and SBM is dead and classifieds, doc submission are not dead as long as you do it in high PR and quality sites.
5) Google is not doing it all for PPC revenue. This updates are to kill web spam black hat and grey hat SEO.
I've seen an interesting mix of two new result types. Firstly for some local searches there is increased prominence of older authority national sites ranking there location based subpages. Secondly there appears to be greater EMD results for numerous search phrases then there previously was.
Mike,
I have noticed that Yelp, Yahoo Local and Superpages have seem to dominate the top 3-4 spots within my industry. I have 14 locations and lost ranking on 5 of them.
What do you suggest to do moving forward?
Anthony
I run an online retail company, and we were hit devastatingly hard.
Our six year old website is completely white hat and always has been.
Thanks for the overview, Pete. I particularly liked the by-industry analysis.
Basically penguin hit those websites which don't have quality content, AM I right? so, why business websites hit by Google algorithm??
Penguin is typically not directly related to content - instead it targets sites that have attempted to artificially manipulate their backlink profile to gain inflated rankings, so if you're seeing business sites that have been impacted by this latest update it's likely that they have too high a proportion of questionable links that have manipulated anchor text, and/or been placed on irrelevant or spammy sites.
The Panda update deals with a sites content.
I don't think Penguin 2.0 focuses on websites which don't have quality content. I manage about 20 client sites and unfortunatelly I have to say we got hit pretty hard. So far I'd say that the worst cases are sites where the most low quality linkbuilding was done in the past - hundreds of directory entries, hundreds of backlinks from your typical PR article directories, hundreds of direct match KW anchor texts, etc.
Because that's what we (all) did a while ago, remember? A few years ago this was a common practise and it did work for SERPs, so we did it and it simply cannot be undone.
I don't think we deserve to be penalized by Google for this. I am not talking about spam or any black hat techniques - we just followed the typical linkbuilding strategies of the past like everyone else back then.
Google and SEO experts always talk about building quality content and doing all that social networking stuff, but most of my clients are small to medium companies who produce stuff like air-conditioning systems or heavy construction equipment.
I am honestly struggling to come up with new strategies in this post Panda&Penguin world of SEO. Because how can you create interesting and original content that would other people share on social netwroking sites, when your product is something as interesting as forklifts and metallurgical equipment?
same happened to me. But I have authority links from other sites too. I also crosslinked my sites, but I have deleted that. In the last 7 days the traffic dropped for around 80%. I am afraid the site is just gone. I have few spammy links from blogs, but most are autority links.
I'm working on my own theory, & it may sound silly. Here it goes. What if Google stopped counting links from article sites? What if they stopped counting anchor text & they didn't care about where the link is pointing to? Could someone reading the article still know which website is being referenced without a link?
If you have written an article in the past for a client that sells Forklifts, what was the main subject of the article? Was it about forklifts ot a company that sells forklifts?
I believe that Penguin 2.0 is an algo that reads linked content, decides what it's about then assigns value. Of course it's a robot, & it gets a little confused.
My understanding is that Panda was all about web content and Penguin is all about SEO (external links, and some internal).
The only question of importance at the moment really is, what makes Penguin2/4 different? What specifically are the new negative factors?
For those who were not affected by previous Penguins understanding this is more important than a general discussion following on what was written last year.
I love the data Pete! This update has been excellent for our clients! Finally, a Google update I agree with :)
- Kevin W. Phelps
I'm d'ont worry anymore about algorythms changes. I think that the social signals are the new linkbuilding and I only try to get some powerfull links, only send the sites to a short list of directories and don't care about if is accepted or not. Social is the key to have peace of mind.
Of course, before 2015 Google will set up a new algorithm to detect when the twits, likes and +1 are buyed, and then we all wil be worried again.
Though I doubt if Facebook or Twitter will allow Google to manipulate their users.