Robin Good: If you are looking to understand more about Google penalizations, whether "algorithmic" (like Google Panda) or "manual", here is a great guide by David Harry to dive into.
Key sections in this guide include:
- Have You Been Penalized?
- What Can You Get Penalized For?
- Diagnosing a Google Penalty
- How to Deal With a Google Penalty
- Dealing with Algorithm Changes
- What Data to Keep for the SEO Doctor
Recommended. 8/10
Full article: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2141098/Google-Penalty-or-Algorithm-Change-Dealing-With-Lost-Traffic
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Antonino Militello thanks Robin Good for this. (January 27, 5:42 AM) |
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Google Farmer Panda Update
From the official press release: "This special Panda and Penguin report fully examines this issue with examples, videos, links and helpful information on the topic. A whole range of sources were used in gathering data for the report, including some YouTube videos released by Matt Cutts, a Google spokesperson.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/special-report-entitled-marketing-google-panda-penguin-added-074743204.html Informative. Resourceful. 7/10
Robin Good: If you have ever been wondering whether Google ever makes algo decisions based on its own economic benefits, what Google Fellow Amit Singhal said at the recent opening keynote at SMX London should put your doubts to rest. "Singhal was adamant: “no revenue measurement is included in our evaluation of a rankings change.” Listening to him explain how excites he gets about search improvements and how changes are evaluated, you realize there’s no spin here. He’s absolutely telling the truth." (Source: SearchEngineLand) In addition, Dr Singhal illustrated in detail what is the process that each new additional algorithm goes through, before being adopted. Interesting. Informative. 7/10 
From WebProNews: "...“We’ve been wanting to work on this for a long time, but our data scientist was previously tied up on other items (and we’ve just hired a research assistant for the project),” Fishkin tells us. “The original catalyst was the vast quantity of emails and questions we get about whether a page/site is ‘safe’ to acquire links from, or whether certain offers (you know the kind – ‘$100 for 50 permanent text links guaranteed to boost your Google rankings!’) were worthwhile.” “Tragically, there’s a lot of money flowing from people who can barely afford it, but don’t know better to spammers who know that what they’re building could hurt their customers, and Google refuses to take action to show which spam they know about,” he continues. “Our eventual goal is to build a metric marketers and site owners can use to get a rough sense of a site’s potential spamminess in comparison to others.” “A score (or scores) of some kind would (eventually, assuming the project goes well) be included in Mozscape/OSE showing the spamminess of inlinks/outlinks,” he explained in the Google+ announcement." Rand Fishkin announcement: https://plus.google.com/u/1/111294201325870406922/posts/gbeKneoTDh8
Robin Good: Basic guide to the tools you can use to identify all of the backlinks and the keywords used by other sites to link to your web site, and to the few simple steps you need to "It was until Google’s penguin update while all SEOs were busy in building links. Now, they are busy in removing those spam links, is not it funny. At list not funny for those who were became a victim of that update." For novices. 6/10 Full article: http://cashinghub.com/how-to-remove-spam-links-pointing-to-your-site 
From the WebProNews article: "Another thing on the quality guidelines list is: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” Of course, like the rest of the guidelines, this is nothing new, but in light of the Penguin update, it seems worth examining the guidelines again, if for no other reason than to provide reminders or educate those who are unfamiliar. Duplicate content seems like one of those that could get sites into trouble, even when they aren’t intentionally trying to spam Google. Even Google says in its help center article on the topic, “Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.” “However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic,” Google says. “Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.” Google lists the following as steps you can take to address any duplicate content issues you may have:" Useful. Important. 8/10 Check them all out in the original article here: http://www.webpronews.com/google-penguin-update-dont-forget-about-duplicate-content-2012-05 
From the article: "Today the Google Analytics team announced that we will start seeing backlink URLs in their newly released Social Reports. According to the announcement post, written by Ilya Grigorik, Software Engineering Manager, Google Analytics (and PostRank Founder): “These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but we see it as another important feature for holistic social media reports. When you know what your most linked content is, it is then also much easier to replicate the success and ensure that you are building relationships with those users who actively link to you the most.” Where To Find The Backlink URLs Report The Backlink information is not easy to find." Useful. 7/10 Here all of the information to find out more: http://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-backlink-report-120235 
Robin Good: a good friend just emailed me saying:"...this is by far the BEST analysis on what Google Penguin did and how to "seo" through it. ...They talk about anchor text density, themed linking and have the data to back it up." There is indeed some very interesting data in this article, showing exactly what Google Penguin is paying attention to and why. Great value is also to be found in the final five recommended solutions to steer clear of the Penguin. Highly recommended. 9/10 
Robin Good: If you are curious to see which sites have been badly hit by the new Penguin Google filtering algorithm, here is interesting information. "The official goal was “to take care” over-optimized websites, containing too many unnatural links, automated content (spinning), keyword stuffing etc. Google tries to kill webspam altogether. The impact on all keywords queries is about 3.1%, which compared to Panda (with around 12%) is much less. But Google said more short-head/visible keywords should be affected." Interestingly web sites that were most negatively impacted, included above all three specific categories: "a) Database-driven websites – they mainly aggregate information and use large database systems to create as many pages as possible. Sites such as songlyrics.com, great-quotes.com, cubestat.com or lotsofjokes.com fall into this pattern. b) Press portals and feed aggregators such as pressabout.us, newsalloy.com and bloglines.com were also affected, which makes sense from a Google point of view since these are the website types that are very often created by very aggressive (possibly overly aggressive) SEOs and often contain similar content. c) A couple of heavily template-based websites were also affected – ticketnetwork.com/ticketcity.com, hotelscombined.com and customerservicenumbers.com fit Google’s anti-SEO bill perfectly when it comes automatically (possibly also spun) content. d) Furthermore, a lot of sites that copy or rehash other peoples’ content (or are used by their users to do that) were demoted – examples include mayor sites such as digg.com, folkd.com and pastebin.com." Must read. 8/10 Full article and data: http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2012/04/25/google-bad-seo-update-a-first-earthquake-on-the-short-head/ 
Robin Good: Google is about to release globally and for all languages a new algorithm change that will significantly penalize web sites utilizing "black hat" SEO techniques, to rank inside Google search engine result pages. From the article: "In the next few days, Google will be launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. This algorithm represents another improvement in Google efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content. ... Sites affected by this change might not be easily recognizable as spamming without deep analysis or expertise, but the common thread is that these sites are doing much more than white hat SEO; we believe they are engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings. The change will go live for all languages at the same time. For context, the initial Panda change affected about 12% of queries to a significant degree; this algorithm affects about 3.1% of queries in English to a degree that a regular user might notice. The change affects roughly 3% of queries in languages such as German, Chinese, and Arabic, but the impact is higher in more heavily-spammed languages. For example, 5% of Polish queries change to a degree that a regular user might notice." Read the full article: http://insidesearch.blogspot.it/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html "Did you know that hundreds of Googlers work around the clock to make sure the ads you see on Google are safe? David Baker, Engineering Director at Google, explains more about our fight against scam ads and our process for keeping you safe." (from Google) From Search Engine Roundtable: "Google has uncovered a bit on how they manage ad safety with a new blog post yesterday afternoon. They have come a long way in this regard and it is a constant battle between Google and rogue advertisers. Google has documented some of the general steps they take to detect bad ads and advertisers. (1) They monitor ad and landing page content to detect scams, malware and such. (2) Manual reviews of ads after being flagged by an algorithm (3) User generated spam reports" Full article: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-ad-safety-14879.html 
From the article: "Since the Panda update, more and more people are trying to control their Google index and prune out low-quality pages. I’m a firm believer in aggressively managing your own index, but it’s not always easy, and I’m seeing a couple of common mistakes pop up. One mistake is thinking that to de-index a page, you should block the crawl paths. Makes sense, right? If you don’t want a page indexed, why would you want it crawled? Unfortunately, while it sounds logical, it’s also completely wrong." Informative. 7/10 Full article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/logic-meet-google-crawling-to-deindex 
From the original article: "Understanding the way that search engines like Google and Bing crawl your sites for duplicate content is not always easy to follow. Google Panda evaluates the quantity and quality of the content housed on your site and assigns a value to your website or section of your website. It’s important to note that just because you’ve updated your content, changes will not necessarily be reflected by Google until they update your Panda rank." Informative. Useful. 8/10 Full article: http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/03/google-bringing-you-down-tips-for-avoiding-duplicate-content-multiple-site-issues-sesny/ 
Robin Good: Andy Atkins-Krüger at Search Engine Land has written a very interesting and insightful report directed both at Google and at owners of multilingual websites which may have been affected by Google Panda. According to the reasoning put forward in this article, there is a possibility that Google recent emphasis in requiring webmasters to adopt the canonical and hreflang tags for multilingual websites may be a rather clumsy Panda fix. "Canonicals and Hreflang tags are visible on the page to Panda and say “Please leave me in – I’m not just a duplicate and have a specific local market purpose and this is the market.” "Many large websites rely on machine translation (not a good solution for SEO at any time) and they are particularly affected by Panda. Google, if you disagree with me, please explain why all of this extra coding is suddenly needed." Insightful. 9/10 Full article: http://searchengineland.com/cutting-through-the-confusion-of-googles-guidance-to-multilingual-website-owners-113586 |
From the original article by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land: "Duane Forrester, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, wrote a blog post on the Bing Search blog named Penguins & Pandas Poetry. The post is about Google’s latest Penguin update and how SEOs and webmasters need to be better prepared for such updates. The basic advice is simple, SEOs and webmasters need to do one thing – diversify. Duane is not just saying, focus on Bing and make sure your site does well there too. Yes, if you lose all your Google traffic, ranking well in Bing is nice but since Bing only has about 30% marketshare, you are still missing out on a lot of traffic." Interesting. 6/10 Full article: http://searchengineland.com/bing-offers-advise-on-googles-penguin-update-diversify-121940 
Robin Good: If you have been wondering whether you have been hit by one of Google recent algorithm updates (Google Panda and Google Penguin), this in-depth article by Glenn Gabe provides lots of valuable insight and specific advice on how to verify whether your site has been hit by an algo update and specifically by which one.
"Based on how Google rolled out Penguin and Panda recently, I’m finding it’s common for webmasters to be confused about which algorithm update hit their websites. Penguin 1.0 and the latest Panda updates were so close that it’s easy to believe you were hit by one, when in fact, it could have been the other. Use the techniques I listed in this post to help you determine which update really hit your site..." Must-read. 9/10 
From the article intro: "There some discussion going on in the webmaster/SEO community that Google may have de-indexed some free web directories. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld forum thread on the subject. The thread begins with a post from user Sunnyujjawal, who says: "While checking some sites links I found 50% free submission directories are out of G now. Will Google count such links in negative SEO or unnatural linking? Schwartz concurs that about 50% of the ones he searched for did not have listings." Interesting. 7/10 Full article: http://www.webpronews.com/some-free-directories-go-missing-from-google-some-paid-directories-doing-well-2012-05 
"It’s been about two weeks since Google launched its Penguin Update. Google’s happy the new spam-fighting algorithm is improving things as intended." From the original article by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land some key points I extracted: "...Penguin, like Panda, is a filter that gets refreshed from time-to-time. Penguin is not constantly running but rather is used to tag things as spam above-and-beyond Google’s regular spam filtering on a periodic basis. ...To further confuse matters, some who lost traffic because of Penguin might not be victims of a penalty at all. Rather, Google may have stopped allowing some links to pass credit, if they were deemed to be part of some attempt to just manipulate rankings. If sites were heavily dependent on these artificial links, they’d see a drop just because the link credit was pulled, not because they were hit with a penalty. ...if you know that you were hit by Penguin (because your traffic dropped on April 24): -> Clean up on-page spam you know you’ve done -> Clean up bad links you know you’re been involved with, as best you can -> Wait for news of a future Penguin Update and see if you recover after it happens -> If it doesn’t, try further cleaning or consider starting over with a fresh site -> If you really believe you were a false positive, file a report as explained here Just in, by the way, a list of WordPress plug-ins that apparently insert hidden links. If you use some of these, and they have inserted hidden links, that could have caused a penalty." Informative. 8/10 Full article: http://searchengineland.com/google-talks-penguin-update-recover-negative-seo-120463 (Suggested by Giuseppe Mauriello) 
From the original article on WebProNews: "Google has already launched another Panda update. By already, I mean since the Penguin update. After the Penguin update was announced, and Searchmetrics put out its lists of winners and losers, Google revealed that there had actually been a Panda update a few days prior, and that this was strongly influencing those lists. The update reportedly hit on Friday, April 27. With all the Penguin chaos out there, one has to wonder how much the Panda update has skewed webmaster analysis. Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land reports that he has confirmed as much with Google, sharing the following statement from the company: "We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year." Full article: http://www.webpronews.com/google-panda-update-strikes-again-really-again-as-in-since-penguin-update-2012-05 
From the original article by Lisa Buyer on Search Engine Watch: "Contrary to popular belief, Google says the Penguin intent is to help the overall search experience versus put legitimate businesses in jeopardy of losing precious web traffic and bottom line sales. Unfortunately, innocent bystanders report they are taking a hit with little defense against Google, the largest search engine boasting 66.4 percent of the search market share and not to be ignored. How can a business protect itself from the potential crush of Penguin or the next Google algorithm change? There is something to be said for not putting all your SEO eggs in Google's basket. Deep SEO Inhale... Long Social Media Exhale There is life beyond Google for gaining online visibility. The opportunities are greater than ever to take part in some healthy SEO living from other organic marketing sources in places like social media networks. Read on advice from veteran online marketers." Good alternatives when Google hits and you are about to give up. Resourceful. 7/10 Full article: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172157/17-Ways-SMBs-Can-Survive-the-Google-Penguin-Update-Effect 
Robin Good: If you are looking for key answers about which triggers have unleashed the new Google Penguin on your site, here is much very good food for thought. From the original article: "One common factor thus far appears to be the signals of links that are pointing to your website, early analysis indicates." If you want to understand better what type of links are the cause of this new penalization, check whether you have at least one of these types of links pointing to your penalized web site:
If you are not too familiar with these links categories and want to find out more about each one and why it has become a problem, please read this article in full: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2171174/Google-Penguin-Update-5-Types-of-Link-Issues-Harming-Some-Affected-Websites
Robin Good: Last Tuesday Google has released a new ranking-factor algorithm update focusing on eradicating more webspam from the SERPs. and here: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-impact-poll-15081.html Reconsideration request form: http://www.webpronews.com/google-penguin-update-reconsideration-request-tips-from-google-2012-04 
From the article intro: "Having overly optimized web pages could soon get your websites in some hot water with Google and their search results. It has recently been announced that Google will start to penalize websites that engage in over-optimization practices. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be covering some changes that you should be making to your SEO practices in order to avoid this type of penalization. ... This week we've been hearing a lot of chatter in the SEO blogosphere and on Twitter and on the forums about this new potential Google penalty that's coming down the line around over-optimization. ... But before this penalty hits, for goodness sake, SEO folks, let's make these changes to our websites because we could be in real trouble if we don't impact these things beforehand. I think these are some of the most likely candidates to be hit by Google's over-optimization penalty, some of the most likely patterns they're going to try and match against in this upcoming change. So let's talk through them." Must watch: 8/10 Full video and transcription: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-changes-every-seo-should-make-before-the-over-optimization-penalty-hits-whiteboard-friday 
From the original article: "This question should interest every entrepreneur and someone who is active in one way or another on social media. These different options will give you the necessary support. [note mg]
Imagine that you’ve spent years building a business and growing a website. You launch a promotion to email a list of potential customers with exciting new opportunities to save lots of money by doing business with you. Did you email too many people, or did you email the wrong people? Did someone turn you in as a “spammer” to one of the many spammer blacklist organizations out there?
How do you know you’re on the Google List or any other database of blacklisted sites?"
Read more: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-ways-find-google-list-blacklisted-sites/ Via Martin Gysler 
From the article: "Google has announced the latest in its ongoing updates to the Panda algorithm that targets low-quality websites. And they’ve taken the somewhat novel approach of using Twitter to make this announcement: - Panda refresh rolling out now. Only ~1.6% of queries noticeably affected. Background on Panda: goo.gl/mTKCH -
Original article: http://searchengineland.com/google-says-panda-update-is-rolling-out-now-116444 
From the original article: "Google has been working on a new penalty that targets site’s that overly optimize for search engines for the past few months. Matt Cutts said the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks. The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Cutts said. To give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that have content that is not as great but do a better job with SEO." Check also out this video from Matt Cutts, dating back to 2009, and illustrating how much Google's take on this issue has profoundly changed, if not reversed altogether. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz0KQNPDUoc Must listen-to. 8/10 Here is a full text trasncription (and the audio recording) of what Matt Cutts has exactly said: http://selnd.com/FTwher |
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