A lot of people have seen some crazy movements in the serp's are putting it down to penguin 2.0 which is meant to be an absolute *******.

 

Anyone seen any huge jumps? My portfolio of sites have been steady and nothing major has changed. Ive sewb competitors sites drop like a stone over the last few weeks but I'm not sure if the data center I'm connected to has been updated.

 

Would be interesting to see if anyone else has seen anything

Nothing worthy of reporting here mate. Will update if I see anything..

Oddly enough, I have - I've dropped out completely.

 

Edit: not completely. Gone from 11th to somewhere in the 200s for "web design south wales".

Edited September 30, 201213 yr by Renaissance-Design

Yeah we were talking about this on the irc earlier. Seems ol' RD above has seen a significant drop off.

My stuff doesn't rank higher than the 5 millionth page anyway so I'd never notice the difference!

Heh. Coincidentally, I just got an Adwords leaflet through the door.

 

They wouldn't, surely..?

Do no evil...

Erm I've seen a quite big jump regarding that term 'web design Essex'.

 

As some of you know I was on page 5, position 1 and I've seen a jump to page 3, position 4.

 

I didn't push that through either.

 

One thing I do a lot is support any keyword with heavy amounts of content, so if you have seen a drop whats the level of content you got on page? Is it a thin page.

Link in sig. Not a huge amount of content on the homepage, but it's not completely anaemic either.

How long were you ranking there for? If it was a solid amount of time, then I wouldn't think it was a content issue no something on your home. A drop to ~200 usually suggests a penguin/panda penalty. It's one of the larger penalty's they dish out and you can usually figure out what the problem is, by where you've dropped to.

 

Have you seen any movement since it's been down there? To be honest, I'd suggest nothing more other than doing some guest blogging on a solid domain, using your brand name as the achor text. The last thing you want to do is to start trying to build links for that keyword. Once you start to see some good movement, keep going with it. Go for a 1 in 8 ratio I think

 

That's how I'd do it.

 

Back to the topic, still nothing here other than a few exact match domains slipping, but thats because Google is giving a lot less weight to them now and it's rolling out. Big things happen

Just had a response back from the webspam team saying they've not manually penalized it for anything, so it's clearly an algo thing.

 

I just don't get how they can slap me so badly for a site with unique content with no shady activity going on, it's insane.

 

Edit: I've just reverted a very small change I made right about when the problem occurred. If this turns out to be the cause I'll be gobsmacked, but...

Edited October 5, 201213 yr by Renaissance-Design

Who and why is it supposed to penalise?

 

I've not seen much change for the directory, maybe slightly better!

Google are saying Keyword Stuffing and placing links with no relevance to your content of website. Penguin 3 was released yesterday. I have not noticed anything. Which is good as my site doesn't fall into this. But back linking now I am very cautious and also any guest bloggers I am venting more.

 

Has anyone else noticed that searching now is worse before Panda and Penguin. I.e getting old websites and old content positioned in the top spaces?

You know I always hear about Google doing some sort of update involving a panda, tiger, lemming, baboon etc. But I never see any dramatic changes!

Hi,

After the Panda update, Penguin update has announced that sites having duplicate backlinks will also be penalized.

So we should make a conscious effort to create relevant and natural back links.

penalized? Where is it written?

It's like people trying to interpret the bible....

Seo seems to be getting more confusing the more i learn about it

I had a site take a hit mainly on panda 'duplicate content' slap, a slap which swiped 50% traffic in a week. This was due to duplicate content and someone in their company buying 'off the shelf seo packages' from a salesman without asking the web designer what they thought first

 

The site in question is a large specialist geo search directory, think something like zoopla.co.uk or yell.com, pretty big. How I fixed this was canonical and a clean up of how breadcrumbs were made as they were self populating from user input (bad idea fyi). Then with the old paths i set up one massive 404 to purge the weak as I was worried these duplicate pages could 'damage' the real ones if i used 301 redirect. Then through analytics I saw it went from 7 - 8 404 over the course of a month to around 38,000! Man that's a lot of dead weight. 8 months on and now 404 is down to around 1,700 which means there are still more getting dropped from the index ... I think maybe back to norm in the next few months. The plus point is that the site traffic is back, a wider spread of search terms, 10% less bounce and 50% more traffic than before the panda or penguin hit so back into growth.

 

With the dodgy SEO package from a 'get to the top of google' company (barf) sold them 'satellite sites'. Basically they make a naff one page of text keywords all linking to your site hosted on a 'keyword heavy' domain name. I hadn't thought much of it as it had no positive or negative effects before penguin, but penguin slapped the real site hard across the knuckles. The way I got round this was going mental at the client for buying such tat and told them to cancel and get those satellites offline asap. No gone, a few months later and the sections they were linking to came back up.

 

Do I like the Panda or Penguin? Not really, but the good thing is that when they do something like this it flushes out site problems, although a little dramatic. Would we have known of the 38,000 indexed trash pages had this not happened? No idea, it might have got worse and been oblivious to the problem.

 

Hope some of this helps someone somehow.