Penquin 2.0 hit today. Anyone get hit in the Google Local 7 Pack?

[Dave]

Well Penquin 2.0 hit today. Anyone see changes? One of my sites got hit. It had avoided hits before. I thought this could occur.

The site often shows in the pac with blended results. Our pac rankings are worse. It wasn't devastating in terms of rankings but its not good and will cause a loss of traffic.

Sort of anticipated this one. I knew this site was overloaded with anchor text...

got some content and changes going out to see if we can change this little issue...along with looking at disavowing links etc.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hey Dave, thanks for reporting and sorry for your ranking loss.

I'm not hearing rumblings about ranking losses in local yet. There may be but I'm just not hearing about it yet. I just spot checked 3 of my #1 Dentists and they are all still #1 but I don't do link building and I don't think they do either.

You sure it was Penguin and not some other penalty or dance?
How much of a drop?

Will Tweet and see if we can get any other feedback.

 

[Dave]

Linda:

Matt Cutts announced Penquin today. nothing else.

Glad your clients weren't hit.

I do a lot of link building along with local citations, on site, etc.

This smb had escaped previous hits....but they are overloaded with anchor text. I glanced at them..I glanced at a competitor....oooof...gotta admit we have a relative overload of anchor text.

I'll be going through steps to correct it.

The ranking hit didn't knock them out of the box but it did push them down in the pac.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Dave,

I guess I meant correlation is not causation.

There are tons of different organic penalties rolling constantly for all different types of things.
Many of which relate to local.

A couple months ago I discovered an internal anchor link penalty that many local sites are guilty of. An attorney contracted me who had dropped from #3 to #36. I told him to remove that link on his site to see if it would help. That's the only change he made. 2 days later he popped right back to #3.

However if that Atty's drop just happened today, most consultants would write it off as Penguin, just cuz Matt announced it yesterday. But it would have been a coincidence and not the real reason or actual penalty that caused the drop.

So not saying your drop isn't Penguin, you'd know what's up with that client better than I, just saying (more for the benefit of newer consultants or SMBs) you can't always assume a drop is due to the latest penalty announced, because there are likely hundreds of penalties floating around at any given time.

 

[dorothea]

I believe it's far to early to pull any solid conclusions on the last Penguin update. As I woke up this morning I re-updated all reports and noticed that one of my favorite projects had hit the jackpot: a fairly new website (a tea portal created 100% out of passion; with no business or SEO plans behind it), had jumped from TOP200 straight to the TOP10 for some pretty competitive keywords. I was so happy, I was thinking about throwing a party. Few hours later I rechecked the rankings and my site was gone. Now, in the evening, it's back to the TOP50-TOP100s.

My other websites have been going through the same ups and downs. SERP pages are like a spiking volcano right now, I think we need to wait at least 1-2 days till we'll be able to gather the first solid facts about Penguing 2.0.

 

[Linda Buquet]

So true! I read advice elsewhere that you should wait a week, read all the webmaster and SEO forums to try to take a pulse on what everyone is experiencing.

Wait, eval and don't make any reactionary changes.

 

[Dave]

heh, Linda...I'm quick to come up with nifty ideas. more than half stink!!

uh...btw, Linda, I think I need to follow up with you re: a suggestion in the g places forum. do you recall the details?? If not I'll direct mail you.

 

[Linda Buquet]

So true! I read advice elsewhere that you should wait a week, read all the webmaster and SEO forums to try to take a pulse on what everyone is experiencing.

Wait, eval and don't make any reactionary changes.

Here's the main discussion at WebmasterWorld: Penguin 2.0 is upon us

heh, Linda...I'm quick to come up with nifty ideas. more than half stink!!

uh...btw, Linda, I think I need to follow up with you re: a suggestion in the g places forum. do you recall the details?? If not I'll direct mail you.

No I'm still sick and my brain is mush. Don't remember. Please remind me.

 

[MatthewMagicMan]

Curious Linda, what was the internal anchor penalty for the attorney client? Was he linking many times to homepage with keyword anchor?

 

[djbaxter]

As I understand it, Penguin is about unnatural or low quality links.

One indicator of an unnatural link is numerous links with exactly the same (usually keyword) anchor text. In the wild (i.e., organic links), links tend to have a variety of different and not necessarily keyword rich words or phrases, often as simple as "click here" or "see this link" or "source" or "read more".

This is an evolution of Google's reaction to google bombs: remember "miserable failure" linked to George W. Bush in the White House?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Curious Linda, what was the internal anchor penalty for the attorney client? Was he linking many times to homepage with keyword anchor?

Hi Matt, yes exactly. He had a bad footer link, so it was on every page of site.

The anchor text instead of being "home" was:
"City Personal Injury Attorney - Personal Injury Attorney in City"

He only dropped for his primary KW other KWs were OK.
And of course his primary KW that dropped was "City Personal Injury Attorney"

 

[Andrew Sawyer]

As I understand it, Penguin is about unnatural or low quality links.

One indicator of an unnatural link is numerous links with exactly the same (usually keyword) anchor text. In the wild (i.e., organic links), links tend to have a variety of different and not necessarily keyword rich words or phrases, often as simple as "click here" or "see this link" or "source" or "read more".

This is an evolution of Google's reaction to google bombs: remember "miserable failure" linked to George W. Bush in the White House?

Matt said on This Week in Google that they were going to be going deeper into websites and looking at pages other than the index/main page. Google Penguin 2.0 Update is Live - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

 

[Tony]

The biggest hit I've seen, beyond those listed in the SEL "Penguin 2.0 Losers" article, is a well known, local home services company ( 500ish franchisees, $100m/yr). I track them in about a dozen cities due to competitive overlap with my clients. They've gone from a consistent top 3 organic rank to 8-12 pages deep. The only city I've found them to exist on, or anywhere near, page 1, is their 7 Pack listing in the city they're headquartered. Their backlinks appear to be the issue. It's as if they had Fiverr provide them 5,000 for $5 and they finally got slapped.

I've reached out to a couple of franchisees to see if they've been given any official word or plan. I'd guess thousands of leads per day just instantly vanished. So far, I do not see a (pricey) Adwords campaign scrambled to be put in to place.

Ouch.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Interesting Tony, thanks for that info.

Also here's a quote from the SEL article, wish there were more details on this part.

"In addition, some small business sites were hit because they haven?t taken SEO serious enough."

 

[Dave]

Linda:

Just to be clear on one thing, I've used consistent navigation links which do have some anchor text application. They typically don't include city name/service. They do represent often searched on keyword phrases. They are fine. In fact in previous video's Matt Cutts has okayed them. They are prevalent around the web.

They are clear navigation if and when we use them...and they do sit on all or virtually all pages of web sites. It is helpful to a certain degree.

I'm delving into the one site that got hit. It does stick out with serious anchor text abundance on its own and relative to competitors.

This site is going to need work.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Linda:

Just to be clear on one thing, I've used consistent navigation links which do have some anchor text application. They typically don't include city name/service. They do represent often searched on keyword phrases. They are fine. In fact in previous video's Matt Cutts has okayed them. They are prevalent around the web.

Yes it's fine to have a nav link on every page of site that goes to the green widgets page and has anchor text "green widgets". That's natural site nav designed to help the visitor find the content they are looking for.

What I think is penalized is UNnatural nav links - mainly to home. Home should go to home. Having home link with "city keyword" in the anchor would not be natural nav for the user, it would only be added to help rank on Google.

 

[djbaxter]

Also here's a quote from the SEL article, wish there were more details on this part.

"In addition, some small business sites were hit because they haven’t taken SEO serious enough."

I saw that and wondered about it too. Not sure what "haven't taken SEO serious enough" means, when you consider that the main penalties were to people who have taken it seriously but in a way that attempted to play the algorithms.

 

[djbaxter]

Matt said on This Week in Google that they were going to be going deeper into websites and looking at pages other than the index/main page. Google Penguin 2.0 Update is Live - Search Engine Watch (#SEW)

See http://localsearchforum.catalystema...eo/7397-google-penguin-2-0-goes-deep-but.html

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks for the 'deeper' insight David!

 

[dorothea]

The biggest hit I've seen, beyond those listed in the SEL "Penguin 2.0 Losers" article, is a well known, local home services company ( 500ish franchisees, $100m/yr). I track them in about a dozen cities due to competitive overlap with my clients. They've gone from a consistent top 3 organic rank to 8-12 pages deep. The only city I've found them to exist on, or anywhere near, page 1, is their 7 Pack listing in the city they're headquartered. Their backlinks appear to be the issue. It's as if they had Fiverr provide them 5,000 for $5 and they finally got slapped.

I've reached out to a couple of franchisees to see if they've been given any official word or plan. I'd guess thousands of leads per day just instantly vanished. So far, I do not see a (pricey) Adwords campaign scrambled to be put in to place.

Ouch.

Boy, how I'd love to hear more of these stories. It's high time Google figured out how to get rid of all the spammers!