First of all, thank you to everyone who emailed wondering where we have been for the past couple of months…we appreciate your thoughts. We have actually been travelling the world or at least some of it…Las Vegas, Orlando, Paris, Barcelona, Prague and Vienna. It’s been an amazing trip and we had all sorts of good intentions to write blog posts along the way but neither of us felt inspired, at least for this blog. We wrote a number of posts for our travel blog but just couldn’t generate any ideas for this one.
Anyway, it’s all good because we arrived home yesterday after a very long day of flying and are feeling good about getting back into it all again.
During the trip, we received a few emails from people talking about the latest Google update. We have been oblivious to all of this while we have been away so had no idea that an update had occurred. Mind you, we are usually oblivious to these sorts of things anyway as we stay clear of forums and blogs that discuss these sorts of things ad nauseam.
What is the Penguin Update?
For those that don’t know, the Penguin update occurred on April 24, 2012 and the consensus is that this one was all about the quality of back links. From the research I did on this, if you do any of the following to get backlinks for your sites, then the latest Google update may have affected you:
- getting links from blog networks
- leaving comments using a keyword instead of your name
- paying for backlinks
- getting links from article marketing sites
- keyword stuffing
- using link schemes
Basically it looks like Google is looking for any unnatural link building. This is what Google has to say about it:
We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.
I agree wholeheartedly. It’s something we have been pushing for a while now to our readers…focus less on SEO and more on building sites with quality content. Unfortunately however, Google can sometimes live in La La Land as they obviously have no idea what a small one person website owner has to go through to get a site ranked. Just building a site and adding great content isn’t enough when you are competing with millions of other website owners. We have some websites with some fantastic original content and they don’t generate any traffic because we haven’t actively backlinked to them. We have to generate backlinks somehow because that is what Google uses to rank a website… it’s a catch-22.
Is Guest Blogging Considered Spam?
Who knows what Google thinks of guest blogging but if they have any sense then I can only hope that they consider it to be completely above board. After all, when sending out a guest article you only want to target high quality sites and a high quality site will only want to take a quality article and link to a quality website. To me, that is natural linking so we are going to continue with it.
How far is Google going to go on this?
It seems we have had one update after another lately and it isn’t likely to stop in the near future. However, as we’ve said in the past, this is a risky business and you have to be prepared for the ups and the downs. It definitely keeps life interesting.
Have we been affected by the Penguin Update?
When these updates occur we normally steer clear of our stats and just wait to see how our sales are going. For us, this is the best indicator of how we are doing. We did notice a drop in income but nothing major for this time of year. We normally have a dip in sales anyway during these months and then it starts to increase again around August so it didn’t look like anything major.
Since arriving home however we have checked our Google Analytics account (not something we do very often) and noticed that yes, we had been hit by the Penguin update. On or around April 24 there was a drop in traffic for a number of our sites.
We had used blog networks in the past so I can only think that this is the reason. We never used them long term however for the reason that they never seemed to really work too well for us and we just weren’t happy with the quality of the sites that the links were going on. This may be the reason why we haven’t been hit as hard as we could have been.
We do have a decline in traffic but when we look more closely at the individual pages we didn’t do too badly. Sales are lower but when I compare them to last year, that isn’t too much of a difference although it’s a little difficult to tell at this point and we probably won’t know until the end of the month to get a better idea.
What are we going to do about it?
At this point, we aren’t going to do anything. We are no longer using blog networks and haven’t been for a long time so we are just going to continue guest blogging and hope it all works out. We are never going to know what Google is thinking; all we can do is continue to do the right thing and provide quality content and look for quality backlinks.
Although we are not happy with the drop in traffic, we still like this update. It is going to cause stress for a lot of website owners but I think over time these sorts of updates are going to make it easier for us to rank. All of the wannabe get-rich-quick website owners will eventually disappear because they don’t want to spend the time creating a quality website. This will reduce the competition and hopefully we won’t have to work so hard. Of course, that could all just be pie in the sky thinking but I am hoping that is where it is all heading.
Were your sites affected by the Penguin Update?
Let us know in the comments below….
My sites were hit in traffic terms and in sales so it’s a bit of a downer..although I think they were affected by the changes in the months prior to the penguin update just that the stats have only come home to roost now. I was using blog networks as some of my promotion so there are no surprises there….I’ve just been waiting for the dust to settle before I figure what to do next. More people are coming up with new linking strategies and how to beat the penguin etc. Life goes on I guess…but it can be precarious when you are totally reliant on Google. Seems like your linking strategy is pretty robust though.
I think it’s a good idea to “wait for the dust to settle”. Too many people panic and start making major changes and sometimes it’s really not necessary. We are just going to continue on and see what happens before we do anything drastic.
btw, what’s the name/url of your travel blog ? You talked about it in one of your interviews but I couldn’t find it. Thanks.
I might add it as a link in the post but here it is http://www.traveltripz.com.au/
Great to hear back from you. Enjoyed the photos (especially food photos) on FB! :) Anyway, yes I was hit just like us all. My website, a graphic design service website was #1 for a few months (not an affiliate site) getting me great business until I got pushed to page 2!
I really looked into this update and it was an update that targeted sites that “over optimized there site” or “over SEO’d it” whichever you call it. Mainly going after spamming link building as you mentioned. I can recall finding doing some blog comments with anchor text in them. Real spammy. I think this hurt me. I’ve learned to do it natural and post a normal real name :)
But that’s just one way of doing it wrong. You mentioned the others above. Affiliate marketing online is scary after this update. So much of our websites destiny is controlled by Google. A simple change in there algorithm can really effect is.
I’m done being angry about it since this update happened. What’s done is done. We have to learn to adjust to and keep going. Also not depend solely on our internet marketing sites as our main source of income. Learn to diversify for this very reason.
You’ve got the right attitude Steve. It’s so easy to get angry about it but it’s better to move forward and keep going.
And yes, diversifying is so important. That’s our focus at the moment.
Knock on wood, our traffic is picking up since the update. Nothing mind-blowing, but it’s noticeable.
I love the focus on quality content because we work really hard at that, and it was getting frustrating to not have it rank well.
My traffic was wiped out almost 50%, but like Melody, I’ve noticed that over the week my traffic is picking back up. Not back to where I was, certainly, but getting there.
I also agree with Melody about working hard on quality content and feeling frustrated with low rankings.
One thing I’m working on is internal linking, making sure my site has no keyword stuffing. I think I may have linked too often to pages within my site, multiple links to the same pages, that may have been a culprit in my devaluing.
Luckily I didn’t use blog networks although I did pay for some SEO services recently that included a few links in such blogs. That may have dinged me, but most of my links come from forums and guest blogging.
Wishing us all the best in Penguin recovery!
Nice to hear that someone has benefited from this update so that’s excellent Melody.
And we’ve had the same experience Amy, the traffic has increased. Not by much but it has gone up a little.
If my keywords are just 10% of my whole content, is this still keyword stuffing? If I have 200 word writeup and my keywords appear 2x, is that okay? Btw, I love this site. I learn a lot from it.
More power!
You should be okay with 10% but my suggestion would be not to worry about how many keywords you have on the page. Just write naturally – that is the best way to go these days.
I love how for years Google has been telling us to do SEO one way, we’ve abided by this and now its gone completely against the grain and penalised us for these practices. An example of this would be using keywords instead of name, this was always seen as white hat and good for SEO now its seen as unnatural!
I know what you mean Jason. It’s hard to keep up with it all which is probably why it’s best not to. There are many out there that are already trying to think of new ways to beat Google but at some point we have to stop trying to game the system and just go with the flow.
google are getting a bit too complicated for me these days, hopefully they´ll leave Google guest blogging alone
I hope so too Alex. I think more and more people are going to move to guest blogging because there isn’t much left, but will it trigger Googles radar?
Hi Paula and Wanda – I’m glad you had a great trip and good for you for taking the time away to enjoy some of your hard earned income.
I was hit by the update. My one small site was a steady #1 for months. I had not added a new posts for a while so thought it was time I did. On around April 15th I added a new self written unique article. A few days later I noticed my site was no longer #1 and not even on page 1. Not being aware of yet another Google update happening I thought that maybe the new article had my site bouncing about a bit wishing I hadn’t bothered, not that this usually happened when adding a new article but there doesn’t seem any rhyme or reason for a lot that happens on Google. When I checked my Analytics the traffic to this site had dropped like a stone to 0 on April 24th obviously the day my site lost its #1 spot. I haven’t seen my site in the first 5 pages since and I’m not bothering searching any further right now. However this site is still ranked #2 in BING.
To me it looks like the all of page 1 that my site was on has changed now with all different websites. The ones taking up the first spots now were not even on page 1 before.
We should be getting used to it now but it is very frustrating as there is no way that Google can realistically pick the choose without penalizing genuine sites too! We’ll see what happens next!
Unfortunately, I think a lot of genuine sites have been hit. The problem with this update is that even if a site has brilliant content and deserves to be in the number one spot, it could still be potentially deranked because at some point in the past it used a blogging network. Google is trying to improve its rankings but they don’t quite have it right yet. They are still relying too heavily on backlinks as a main determining factor for ranking a site rather than the quality of the content.
A few of my sites that I haven’t updated in a long time seem to disappear from the rankings but then several others are doing much better now.
The few sites I really still work on were affected a little. The income is the same but they did drop a little in rankings.
Good to hear Cathy. You got out relatively unscathed. We haven’t checked the sites we aren’t working on so have no idea how they went. I’ll have to check to see if any have improved.
I doubt this update had to do with just backlinks. Actually i don’t think it has anything to do with backlinks. If that was the case, anyone could get rid of their competitors easily. I believe it was a combination of social signals, lack of traffic coming from sources besides search engines (if i was google, i think this is the best indication of a quality site). Im guessing those who were hit, had 90%+ of their traffic is coming from Google.
That was my thought too Chris. I figure I could go and submit my competitors site to a blogging network and wipe them out. (Not that we would do that by the way).
I do know that backlinks from blogging networks were targeted as Matt Cutts (Google engineer) confirmed this. My thinking is that they just devalued these links and didnt actually penalise them.
Thanks for this article and for the list of things that Google is targeting, that is really useful to know. Luckily I don’t do any of those linking exercises but I was thinking about joining a blog network, I could never really get my head around how they worked! I recently purchased an ebook from one of the “gurus” on SEO. The first half was excellent about on page optimisation, the second half was totally about purchasing links – by the thousands – from his own affiliate links! I wonder how his sites are going and the sites of the people who followed his advice!
My traffic has gone up by 25% but it has not converted into sales, so I like your attitude of going by the sales and not by the traffic. It’s useless getting extra traffic if it is not targeted!
And lastly, I checked my own back links on Market Samurai some time ago and quite despaired that they are all under “jan” but now maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I never really liked the idea of leaving a comment under a key word because I think it’s nice to let people know who you are.
I must admit that I’ve never been comfortable leaving a keyword as a comment. It doesn’t seem to work anyway as most decent bloggers won’t approve those sorts of comments. Usually I’ll leave my name and my website, for example ‘Paula from Affiliate Blog Online’
Thanks Paula that is a much better idea and welcome back by the way! You have quite a few posts on your travel site for places that I want to visit one day …
Hi you two,
glad to see you around again and hear you had a nice trip! internet marketing can be a risky business BUT not if you concentrate on value for your readers. i actually saw an increase in traffic – not because i “just concentrated on value and not seo”. more likely it happened that when i first had no idea about seo i didn’t care about any optimization but adding content LOL – seems these things now pay back.
it sounds like we hear that everywhere these days… but so true than ever it is that we should focus on the needs of our readers instead of search engines.
I have to say that when we stopped focusing on SEO we did much better. We don’t write with SEO in mind anymore, we just write and then maybe when we are done we might just check the article for keywords but even the we don’t really worry too much.
And I think you have summed it up when you say we should focus on the needs of our readers first. I think that is what Google wants to see.
Hello Paula,
I didn’t realize that there was a google update that caused my website to go down for a keyword from position 3 to position 165 until I read your blog post. But nevertheless I started building good links again to now get it to position 105.Still a long way of though.
Excellent Shekhar. Most people don’t take action this quickly…they usually whinge and moan about it for ages first. You on the other hand are already getting backlinks…well done!!!!
I think a good part of the Penguin update was about backlinks. Anchor text is one of the things that can easily trigger a penalty. I think it’s important to vary the anchor text as much as possible. What do you think ?
Totally agree Ellen. I think that it is more important than ever to mix up the links.
Hi you two! Good to hear from you gals. It is nice to know you are still alive and kicking. I just have one question. You didn’t really just say that you would actually use negative SEO on a competitor did you?
I could never see you two doing something like that. So please reassure me that what you typed above was a typo! Anyway, hopefully your traffic will pick back up to where it was. You only lost a few slots for your main keywords anyway, so traffic shouldn’t have dropped to much.
LOL, sorry I didn’t realise how it read. I did mean to write that but not in the sense that I would do it but in the sense that it is a possibility for someone to do if they were so inclined….and believe me, there are many out there that would. I am sure Google wouldn’t allow that…well let’s hope so anyway.
I will reword the comment.
now that you mentioned about this update, I checked my stats and definitely noticed a decrease in my traffic which had been actually continuously growing over a couple of months :( I just hope, it gets back to what it was!!! didn’t know about the update but definitely going ot read in detail. but, if its just that backlinks are gonna be checked, I am happy because it would deifnitley give leverage to people who produce quality content than concentrating on backlinks.
That would be the ideal world if Google could simply base their ranking on the quality of the content. I think that is where they are trying to head but I guess it’s not that easy to figure out what is good and what isn’t.
Hi Paula and Wanda –
15 months ago I knew nothing about blogging, affiliate marketing, etc. and have you to thank, because your Squidoo ebook is what got me started. 15 months later, I have a blog about our rv lifestyle, 3 niche affiliate blogs with a lot of content about rving, plus scores of articles on Squidoo, Hub, Wizzley, etc. and am happy with the progress…so thank you!
As to the penguin and keeping up with Google, etc. Now that I have plenty of my own “real estate” to provide natural links when appropriate, I don’t search for unnatural links, etc. BUT, I do have a question or two.
A long time ago, I didn’t have much linking ability of my own, so I utilized sites like Redgage and Best Reviewer, to give myself a little traffic bump at the start. Out of habit today, whenever I do a new post or write an article, I still put my links on these sites which takes only seconds (plus submit url to search engines, etc).
Should I stop doing that now, in your opinion?
If so, will the 15 months of links to date put me at risk with Google in the future, in your opinion, and is there anything I can do about it to “undo” it?
At this point, I’m thinking my sites (that are all written with my personality, lots of content and not too “salesy”) and natural links of my own content MIGHT keep me safe from Google hits, but these other sites I’ve used have me concerned for the future.
Thanks so much! Robin
If you haven’t noticed a drop in traffic then it’s most likely these types of sites are okay to submit to. What you are using aren’t blog networks – they are more of a social bookmarking site if anything, which to me means they are okay and if it were me I wouldn’t be worrying too much about it. However, I can’t see into Google’s crystal ball and we all know they like to keep us on our toes so what is white hat to them today may be black hat tomorrow.
Yes, I have heard many saying about google penguin update in warrior forum and it’s time we change our seo plans.
Welcome back ladies. :0)
Bottom line,
build high quality, content rich websites and let others NATURALLY link to your pages.
The days of paying for SEO/LINK services are over. It’s all about content. I get on avg. 20 visits per day per page of content. With that being said, I add new content( I write it or have it written) about twice a week and let Google do the rest.
This method is CLEARLY the best approach. It’s paid off doing it this way. It feels great to no longer buy links and manipulate the search engines for ranking.
You’ll get found for thousands and thousands of 1 time search terms. You can even get found for hard to rank for words like “weight loss”. My pages are 500 up to as much as 2000 words each.
Ken Evoy has been saying this for YEARS!! I finally started doing it the right way and it has paid off. I no longer worry about rankings nor links.
Yep, that is the way to do it Ron. It can be a little more difficult for product review sites however as you usually don’t get people linking to you all that often. Which is why we need to have a little help with backlinking.
I guess the way to go with this is to create info sites rather than product review sites which is what we have been testing out lately. An info site tends to generate followers and naturally generate links if the quality of the content is good enough.
Hi Paula and Wanda, Welcome home. Yes, I was hit too. I’d say I lost 60% of my traffic. Great review pages that I have that were converting nicely just fell off the radar. Unfortunately, this was my main money-making site. I know that I rely on Google too much.
I’ve been trying to figure it out since so it’s reassuring (but sad) to read others experiences. I have never used blog networks. I’ve very occasionally used a keyword for a blog comment. I have used article directories. And I still do have pages from parts of my original site (that dates back to 2004) where the content is thin. I kept them on there as they made me money from adsense, but not anymore! The majority of my site is great content that is well researched. And I have some really good backlinks from high quality sites.
So what am I doing about it?
1. Trying to add new content as much as possible.
2. Either re-write of take off the thin content pages.
3. Working on my guest blogging. I have a number of articles just sitting on my computer, waiting to be placed on a great blog:-)
4. Changing my theme and layout of my site. This is something that is needed and has been in the works pre-penguin.
We’ll see if that works. Oh and I’m also ressurecting one of my niche sites that has been sitting around gathering dust. Thanks for the post gals!
Excellent plan Jacquie. I think the key is to just keep going and keep improving. Some people are just going to give up at this point but if you can set up a nice plan, like you have done. and just keep working on providing quality then it will work out in the end.
Thanks Paula, Oh, believe me, initially I just felt like throwing in the towel, expecially with the work I’ve put into my site and I think that I’ve always put an emphasis on following white-hat SEO. I’ve already noticed that some of my keywords are recovering – only a bit, but at least it’s the right direction. Looking forward to hearing your review on the AMA Suite, it looks interesting.
I’ve finished the review. You can view it here:
http://www.affiliatereviewshq.com/2012/05/12/ama-suite-review-tools-for-amazon-affiliates/
Hi Paula, glad to hear you and Wanda had a nice vacation. Hopefully, you will post some pics. Anyway, while I had been hit by previous Panda updates, I am happy to report a significant uptick in traffic with the recent Panda and Penguin updates. These were released within about a week or so of each other.
My Amazon conversions took a big hit with the Panda update in January 2012 that hasn’t really recovered yet. I do a fair amount of back linking through blog commenting and guest blogging. Do you have any tips to help improve conversions, such as best practices for anchor text links, etc?
Thanks, Ken
To improve conversions the best tip we can give is to provide exceptional reviews. Also, make your site more personal. In other words, add your photo in the sidebar or header and write a little about yourself and why you created the site. This can make a big difference.
Thanks for another great post.
It also becoming more and more important to have a Google+ profile attached with your site. Google Authorship is now coming into play, as you may have noticed in the search engines.
If you’re using a pseudonym (which Google now allows on Google+), how would you choose a suitable profile picture if you don’t want it to be a picture of yourself?
Regards
I must admit we really haven’t used Google+ much at all. Yes, we have added an icon to each of our posts so people can plus one it but that’s about it. It’s amazing that even Google struggles with this social networking thing. Not many people I know use Google+. Facebook have really cornered the market.
As for the profile pic I would browse through iStockphoto.com and look for a photo that represents what you do.
Hi Paula and Wanda,
I too have seen some of my sites go down (or disappear) since the update and some move all the way to page 1. So far, I can’t seem to figure out why some have dropped and some have risen, since I have used the same strategies on all of them. I notice you are using CommentLuv — do you think this is still a good way to generate backlinks or do you think it will be seen as comment spam?
CommentLuv is just one of many ways to generate backlinks. Our focus is mainly on guest blogging so having CommentLuv is a good way of helping to diversify those backlinks. I don’t really see it as comment spam.
It never ceases to amaze me how much effort and ‘man hours’ are put into talking about and trying to come up with new and ever more ingenious methods of increasing rank, when all that effort could go into creating what everyone wants….better content!
The better the content the more people will share it. To my mind making is super easy for readers to post your content to their own social networks is the ‘easy’ way to go.
Make it good and make it easy to share. Everything else will take care of itself.
Sounds like you guys have been having a good time abroad, good on ya!
LOL, I know what you mean about those ‘man hours’. This is why we avoid forums that talk about this stuff constantly. It is really a time waster.
‘Content is king’ as they say and more so than ever these days.
my site was hit hard regarding sales and traffic, but ya know what, i´m not panicking too much, am gonna wait for the dust to settle a bit before making a decision as to whether i change direction or not, content of good quality is the most important of all, the problem is being able to constantly put it out regularly
You’ve got the right attitude Max. After an update is never the time to panic because oftentimes things right themselves again. We have already noticed our traffic increase. It’s not back to where it was, but it is better than it was.
Hello Paula,
Thanks for your kind words. When people to tend to succeed they tend to party and when they fail they tend to ponder and sometimes pondering is good because it can lead to new breakthroughs.These words were said by the great man Anthony robbins.
I guess you are also a fan of them as I saw on your facebook fan page, you have liked anthony robbins and that’s what exactly happened for me with the google update and I worked more harder and found a better productive way to do things faster which otherwise I wouldn’t have done if not for the update. Moreover spending only 10% on the problem and 90% on the solution helps too.
Tony Robbins is a great one to follow. I agree that we tend to party when we succeed – well maybe not party, but you become more relaxed and more complacent. Sometimes a good hit in the head in the form of a Google update is a great way of getting back on track.
Hey gals. I was checking this website for new posts, as I always do, and I noticed the title of this post ended with “and other boring news.” I just felt the need to drop in and say that your news is not boring.
I enjoy reading every single post your two put on this website, and quite frankly, it would be really nice to see some new posts here more often!!
Also, do you mind sharing the percentage of search traffic you lost from the penguin update. Was it 10 percent, 20 percent, 40 percent, and finally, have you recovered any of that traffic?
Keep it up you two, and if it is in any way possible, try to post more often for us loyal readers! :)
Thanks for the lovely comments John. We do try to get as much content up here as possible but our priority is always our niche sites.
As for the traffic we lost, it’s hard to say because some pages lost more traffic than others. Some pages lost no traffic and other pages lost close to 50% of traffic.
It’s been an odd month. Some days our sales were quite good (close to normal) and we’d think that we were back on track and then other days they were low. So it’s a bit up and down at the moment.
Really the new google penguin update has bought some boring news for linkbuilders. But on the other hand it is making the great opportunity for white hat linkbuilders. So, i think it a good news.
That’s so true Callum. White hat webmasters are only going to benefit from all of this.
Hi Wanda and Paula – I’m back seeking your opinions once more (or anyone viewing this thread!)…
As stated earlier, I’ve been blogging a little over a year. When I started, I would never do a blog…post without doing a hub, squidoo lens, etc. on a relevant niche topic, then linking to the post I just did.
I’m hearing many here talk about not worrying as much about SEO anymore, but are people still creating articles and linking to posts after each post, or is the idea to just sit back, write good content on your blog, maybe some guest blog posts once in awhile…and just let it go? The part that I don’t care for with blogging has been trying to write broader niche articles to point to my blog posts (not duplicate content, I assure you…just staying in the niche).
I know SEO and backlinks are two separate things, but was just curious how people are handling the more natural, old fashioned link building these days.
Also, do you think the All In One SEO plugin, where you can place all keywords when writing on wordpress, is helpful or hurtful at this point? I’m not very “techy” and I wondered if it is somehow read by google as keyword stuffing?
Thanks so much for your input!
We’ve said for a long time not to focus so heavily on SEO. We learned that some time back when we just stopped even thinking about it. We just started to write naturally and we did a lot better doing that.
I’m not sure what everyone else is doing in terms of creating articles to link back to posts via Hubs, Squidoo, blogs etc but we’ve never really bothered to do that in a big way. We did at one point because everyone was doing it but it was a lot of work so it didn’t last long.
Our focus is guest blogging and we are more selective with guest blogging in what we link back to. So we don’t link back to every post or page we create. We just choose the pages we want to rank and focus on those.
We use the All in One SEO plugin but can’t say for sure whether it’s effective or not. I guess it would require a bit of testing to know for sure. I think Google is pretty smart these days and they know that WordPress is used by a good majority of webmasters so I am sure they have set up their system to read those blogs well. So the All in One SEO plugin may be a little redundant…who knows!
Thank you, Paula, for taking time to reply! I really appreciate it…
Hi Paula (and everyone!)
There are a couple of other reasons to use All in One SEO I think though. It enables you to write a really punchy headline or even a humourous one, but you can have a more appropriate keyword rich and descriptive title for the robot to read.
I am not sure that Google has a sense of humour!
Also on pages, you can also change the menu label and it makes the rollover title attribute and good descriptions easy etc.
I am sure that Google read descriptions and place emphasis on where the keyword is still.
Cheers
I must admit we use All in One SEO but we don’t change titles or anything. We just let it run automatically.
I think some aspects of the penguin update are very harsh. For years we were led to believe that using keywords in anchor text was a good thing and perfectly white hat. Now websites are getting penalized? That could be years of hard work down the drain. I think there is more to it than this. I believe it is a thinly veiled clampdown on SEO companies more than anything. Unfortunately, web masters have found themselves caught in the crossfire.
I tend to agree with you Hugh. I think Google have targeted what used to be white hat. They want us to do SEO so they can find relevant content for their search engine and at the same time they don’t want us to do SEO. You can’t win.
The only people that have to worry about penguin are those that had a spammy link profile to begin with. I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there that regret working with some outsourced SEO solutions now!
Actually I’ve seen a lot of people who have never done SEO or actively backlinked on their sites and they were still hit. I’m not sure Google always gets things right…in fact, I’m sure they don’t always get things right.
Also, there are still too many scraper sites that are ranked before the original content owner’s site.
Many are even saying that black hat and negative SEO is the way to go now. I really hope that it doesn’t go that way but it just shows you what this update has done.
Sorry to hear about that, hope you guys get back on track soon!
Thanks Adam, we’re getting there.
All are attacked by penguin update but those have potential attitude can get out from this update.Just do hard work or your blog or site.
How did you go with the update Pulkit? Did you get hit?
Hi Paula and Wanda,
My Amazon sites were affected by Penguin. I went from about $2000/month before the April 24th Penguin update down to about $300/month. It’s very demoralizing just as I was seeing good progress.
I know that knowledge on Penguin is rather limited at this point with many theories being thrown around, but do you recommend hiring an SEO company to help recover my sites? I know these days you need to be careful about the type of links to your site.
The backlinks to my sites were mostly social bookmarking, article directories, videos and some web directories. I think anchor text could be a causation because in backlink checker tools it says that my sites primary keyword is used for about 80% of the backlinks anchor text. Although I think backlink anchor text is probably only just one of the factors Penguin looks at before triggering.
I’ve heard some folk recommend buying new domains then transferring the content over from the penguinized sites. However, that would mean forking out for new domains and having to start back linking to the sites again from scratch.
Im stuck at this point what to do.
Mellow,
So sorry to hear about that…that’s a big drop Mellow, not good at all.
I agree that it is probably your anchor text that is the problem here – 80% with just one keyword is a bit extreme. Your answer might be to just go and actively get backlinks using other keywords to even it out. This might take a couple of months but it could work.
If you are going to go with an SEO company then you really have to do your research. Ask them exactly what they do to get your site ranked. If they don’t tell you, then don’t bother with them. Also ask them what their theory is about the Penguin and Panda updates and what they have done to get around them.
Starting a new site is an option but if it were me, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t want to start again from scratch but then again that is just me.
Hi Mello
I have been looking at SEO companies as well and for me I always look at the page rank and Alexa rating if they are not good then tney are not walking the walk. Also google some words that you think they should be ranking for and see if they come up high on page 1 of Google.
I had a few emails with a company and I got one offering me some training for stuff that I have already found for free on the Internet. They said make an offer up to $2000! When I politely emailed back and said thanks very much but I can get that for free, I never heard back. If the person had emailed me and said well best of luck then and please get in touch if we can help you, they would have been the first company that I went to when I am ready to pay for SEO! Now I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.
My sites were adversely affected, and one thing that annoys me the most is that some sites where people build backlinks using spamming links weren’t affected. It makes me wonder the kind of criteria google used.
I agree. I don’t think Google have it right at the moment.
My website is also hit by the latest penguin update…I think so. Please do let me know what to do!!
Just read this post here for help:
http://www.affiliateblogonline.com/2012/06/06/how-to-clean-your-site-after-the-google-penguin-update/
Hey,
Google is getting complicated day by day and it is creating problems for all the bloggers.
Thanks,
Mohammad
One of my websites is hit by the last penguin update. Thnx for the post above to solve the problem. I’m glad to found your website:)
Glad we could help.
Seems like everyone is getting hit by the Google update. Right now I am hesitating. Should I continue building Amazon Review Sites? Here is my personal experience. I have spend time building really good quality review sites. The review is somewhere like 3000 words with all the comparison tables etc. But it still got hit by the update. Sigh……
Yep, I know the feeling. It’s difficult to know which way to go. At the moment, we are just trying to focus on things that don’t involve Google. I just don’t trust Google anymore. They don’t seem to be getting it right at all.
Hi Paula and Wanda,
Google just released another algorithm change targeting exact match domains this time. I wanted to know if you ladies have seen any effect of this on your websites with the strategies you use.
We haven’t noticed any changes but then we don’t check stats – we only check our sales. So if the sales drop then we know that something has gone wrong and as yet the sales are pretty stable. It might be a bit early to tell yet as the update only happened a few days ago.
Its all well and good google keep doing these updates, but just look at the keyword payday loan in google search engine to see how many black hat seo websites there are listed on page one.
I know what you mean Kevin. It seems like it is easier to rank poor quality sites these days.