I personally think a big factor in why quality sites got hit by Penguin has to do with low anchor text variation, or over use of keywords in anchor text. Your review on this is refreshing after reading the other Google drone "SEO editors" rehashing Google's propaganda, they forget who they represent in this industry. They are now clearly an advertising company in hot pursuit of as much cash as they can get, because they apparently need it so much.
These new results are clearly not relevant or quality to the user, they are just from authority sites. This of course is a problem to the webmasters of these quality relevant targeted sites.
It would have been in the old relevant SERP, user first business model days but in the advertising business model Is this the end of it? Google will not stop their relentless pursuit for billions while the vast majority are left in their wake.
I think that elukew nailed it. Google obviously plans its work carefully, and one can be sure that they will err on the side of ad-driven-revenues whenever they make changes to their search algo. Google pollutes trusted organic search by placing ads in essentially unmarked 'yellow'-ish barely visible boxes at the top of the results, and even in the middle of organic results sometimes.
I can see a point in the future where Google search produces a page one of pure ads. Google is a marketing company now. Seling ads is their primary business, and the search algo is their 'special expertise' or profession which brings customers in the door.
Google will continue to water down the organic search results until they reach a threshold where Bing or some other smart company equals them in percent of searchers. The best thing SEO developers can do for our future is to promote other search engines, the ones that produce clean organic results that most accurately satisfy the needs of the searchers. We should always promote about three engines other than Google, to force them to compete for quality.
Public awareness of Google alternatives is important for our profession, although I only optimize for Google. They will fix their Penguin mods. Obviously they overshot and will detune to eliminate the blank pages Stupid, Google. But those ads in the mix with organic search results is worse.
Google needs to maintain the purity of organic search in order to maintain its hold on search. It's something that I have always believed - it does not pay for google to produce what the searcher really wants.
Getting people to advertise and getting people to click on those ads is what pays. Adwords and Adsense are killing the web IMO. The point and bottom line SEO aside just briefly is that G is responsible and accountable to shareholders And admittedly strictly antecdotal, since G's IPO it's been headed this way. The company is expanding its mobile reach, helped by its Android operating system, and has been tweaking its search algorithm to produce better mobile ad results, Page says.
Analysts on Friday said they see Google's investment in mobile winning in the end, even though ads for that market aren't yet valued as highly as desktop ads. In the end, G's focus or stakeholder financial pressure excerted on them isn't really on quality organic results anyway. Google aren't rewarding quality content and punishing poor content, they're rewarding and punishing sites based on their link profiles.
Google have "lost it" over the years in becoming WAY too obsessed with links. Now their new obsession is using links to punish sites. It doesn't matter if a site is truly useful to humans if that site has "dirty links" - those links turn a genuinely useful site into "webspam" purely because of those links.
Now it seems punishments - not rewards - determine the SERPs. You rise up merely because the sites that were above you got punished - you don't rise up on merit. Perhaps these measures will drive up their CPC though - or maybe this is a defining moment with Google where they've just gone too far and webmasters will seek more "grass roots" methods of driving traffic to their sites and Google suddenly stops becoming THE focal point for driving traffic - perhaps that is a healthy thing in the long run.
Penguin is actually a very poor algorithm and doesn't even approach what human editing of a directory could achieve. It was also not tested thoroughly on sufficiently large datasets or the mess would not be so evident They would be better off killing free SERPS and making their model completely based on adsense or at least have a manual submission and qualification process.
As it stands, they are likely to find themselves in hot water with many complaining of a 'bait' and 'switch' strategy. Petitons are being filled out and they will get sent to the FCC and the European Information commissioner. Even if Google areinnocent it just looks like a strategy that many are saying is designed to improve CTR on adwords. And an increase in CTR on adwords will be a metric which they may get judged by. Google should not even be using links really as anything outside of a website can lead to external abuse.
For example, the idea that negative SEO has not been happening in many markets like real estate is just naive. My own site has been dumped. Regardless that I have always spent lots of time getting links taken down and requesting DMCA notices most of which have been successfully applied.
My only real crime that I can think of is I had two blogspots, a posterous micro blog and a Tumbr micoblog linking to me several times from each. The blogspots were hardly ever touched or updated given my own preference for Tumblr. There was one hubpage and one squiddo page from yeas ago too.
It hardly makes me spammer of the century. These have now all been deleted. Still I find spamming by their definition that I am not responsible for. Getting it removed is not easy. What I really want to say is where did the quality control go and the lack of puvblic relations is astounding. As an ex senior exec in a major corporation It is nothing less than a shambles. On Google. The first 3 pages are splattered with Viagra sites from position 4 downwards.
Now I think offering Paypal a few free adword discount vouchers is not going to be sufficient. If I were in Paypal, the lawyers would be ringing Google right now for associating my company's good name with what are clearly spammy sites. Thanks Aaron, I found your post a bit more helpful than the regurgitated crud they're peddling on Search Engine Watch at least so far.
But I need real insight into how to recover from this. How did this update actually work And one more thing Ha friggin ha! If we were to be fully transparent publicly about such updates this site probably wouldn't have a legitimate business model.
I'm actually surprised at all the negative comments. I was hit hard by the Panda in April of and unfairly so. I have a website which I have loadable over for 10 years.
I have gone crazy redesigning the entire site so the "new" Google would like it again. Never changed my original content mind you, just repackaged it. Well with every new panda update things just kept getting worse. It's been a horrible nightmare, until the Penguin. As of April 19th, when the Penguin hit my traffic doubled. Finally a positive effect from a Google algorithm change.
I'm jumping for joy and loving the Penguin! I finally feel Google is properly reading my content as being quality. Very happy with this latest change. Very happy indeed! That was supposed to say "Labored over for 10 years".
Still working on first cup of coffee. All still foggy. Thanks Aaron for your insightful post. I have been developing quality sites for over 10 years. We have excellent teams for writing useful and original content and our sites are liked by users - a fact that can be verified by bounce rate and other rankings like Alexa. We had never employed any blackhat link-building techniques. Panda updates did not harm our sites.
All the sites affected were the sites with high demand high paying keywords. The sites that were not affected were the new sites or sites with keywords that are not of any significant value. And strangely the one page lenses we had made on web 2. What's this happening? When I worked as a software project manager, before releasing any product we would thoroughly test the software and look for possible bugs and fix those bugs before releasing the software.
It's a shame on Google engineers and its top management who has become blind in the pursuit of money. So far Google had its success because of people who used their search engines.
However, with such poor quality of SERPs which only favor the so called high authority domains - users are going to drift away from Google. Headers H1 tags should be used primarily for navigational purposes, rather than as an opportunity to get keywords in. The key will be to get the right keyword strategy in the keyword sitemap. The URL should explain what the page is and where it is in the navigation. Important pages should still be at the top level.
We believe pages two or three levels deep are still considered less important. Optimized Internal Links The strategy we previously employed to optimize internal links is now being devalued by the Google algorithm. We should no longer make our primary keywords into links that point to the home page or other sub-page. Optimized links should only be used for navigational purposes.
Click here to see the slow flow yoga classes that Brett teaches. Our exercise machines include treadmills , elliptical machines , exercise bikes and home gyms. Categories and optimized links should still appear on the home page or a section page, or in sidebars. The bottom line is that links should be optimized for people first, to help them navigate the site and should only include the keyword if it makes sense.
Vary anchor text naturally. Keyword Tag Include only the primary keyword in the keyword tag. Include brand keywords if you want, but not the secondary keywords. Page Content The content on each page is still important. But it should no longer be so highly optimized. Make the SEO invisible. In addition, consistently putting the keyword at the front of every title tag is now considered over-optimization.
I've been not sleeping wondering about why. Johns is referencing the growing concern in the worldwide search marketing community about how Google seems to be indexing less content. His community has thousands of members and countless discussions every day.
Some went up and some down. About 5 of the 7 that dropped fell ranking positions lower. Two of those seven had bigger drops. Overall, this is just another algo update… there will always be winners and losers each time… I just try to keep making the sites better and stress doing that to those who were negatively effected.
Bill Hartzer bhartzer. Bill Hartzer, another search marketer with over 20 years of experience concurred with the observation that this update had a small impact. This update is generally regarded by many in the search industry to have been relatively mild. That in itself is interesting because it could suggest a shift in the underlying algorithm architecture where it still does the same thing, relatively speaking, but does so more efficiently.
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