Google Penguin 2.1 Released

[talhaawan]

Hi Guys,

Any one's or there clients website got affected by the new update?

Its been three days, i was waiting for the dust to settle down. I do not really see any changes for local seo. Though there are some dropped rankings for organic seo.

Here is the official tweet from MATT CUTTS.

https://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/386231794883780609


Reading out all the threads on this topic on the weekend i find out that, people who were using tiered link building techniques were hit greatly. And this was going to happen someday, because there were a lot of threads and blog posts claiming that tiered link building works the best google picks that up and launched a new update just like they did for private blog networks.

Would love to get some feedback from the community about this. I found some sites browsing those threads on the weekend and i am going to perform some reverse engineering and going to do some link building analysis as penguin always targets link building techniques. So if you have any website that is hit by penguin 2.1 feel free to share so that we all can know what really should we avoid while doing link building.

Thanks,

 

[Tyson Downs]

Yes I had a number of client sites hit. But then some weren't as well. Not completely sure why.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Had many clients hit.

The suspect, for me, was our blogging technique I believe. All of our clients with a blog got it. All of our clients without one? Not hit.

In our blogs, we link out 3-5 times per post, dofollow links. It helps readers have more information at their fingertips and why not reward people with great content?

I also had the same WordPress template for all of them (it's a "build-it-yourself" template that can make a variety of different sites). I also had them on the same hosting IP.

Guess who links out a lot, has WordPress templates, the same WordPress templates, and hosts on the same hosting IP?

Ding, ding Johnny, you win. Blog networks.

So, I'm pretty sure my clients were flagged as a blog network. Pretty awesome job on Google's part. Guess what the best part is? Allegedly, you can't recover until the next Penguin update. Historically, that's 4-7 months past the last update.

Moral of the story? Google is silly. But seriously, nofollow your links people.

Pretty frustrated with Google. They do this quite a bit and there's no reason to NOT run the update more often so that people who were negatively impacted that weren't supposed to be can get out. Sure, it also allows spammers out but if you follow Matt Cutts ever, he talks about erring on the side of letting a few black hatters live so the white hatters on the margin can survive. If you really feel that way, run the filter more often.

Anyways, that's just my rant.

Anyone else affected? What are you seeing?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Sorry your clients got hit Joshua. That must suck big time!

Did the whole site get hit or just the blog?

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Whole site unfortunately.

Google keeps catching the wrong people in the crosshairs.

 

[Laustin1878]

Yet, those websites who still spam title tags and practice keyword density as gospel keep soaring to the top.... go figure.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Their high PR links are what is keeping them at the top. If you have strong links, you can do pretty much anything and survive apparently. Not that their 10% keyword density helps at all, but it won't hurt them either because of their strong link portfolio.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

By the way, I have an update to this thread.

I got all of my clients out of the penalty in about 1-2 weeks. I changed our hosting IP's so that each website had a different, dedicated IP and also no followed all of our blog links.

Also survived the most recent update. Cutts announced Panda 4.0 & Payday Loan 2.0 but many people think they did a Penguin update as well, aka Penguin 3.0, about 2-3 weeks ago. I found that strange considering Cutts normally will broadcast an algorithm update, like Penguin. Also, historically, Penguin 3.0 was due in May as they seem to be on a May/October cycle with Penguin.

So, a lot of the chatter I'm hearing is Penguin 3.0 went live. However, I think it could have just been a refresh of the filter. OR people are just completely mistaken.

No matter what, all of my clients did fine and I just wanted to update this thread for anyone else having issues.

 

[aarontaylor]

Google penguin is the most dangerous algorithm update for any website.. Once the site is affected the penguin recovery is very difficult.. The website ranking goes down by this penguins attack..

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Another update:

It seems like maybe Penguin 3 didn't go live, it was just a filter refresh.

Also, bump for this reply above. Nuke the spam!