Some observations after getting Penguined

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One of my sites on a 5 year old exact match domain took a big hit after the Penguin update.

Ironically, I'd all but abandoned this site around 8 months back and hadn't updated or built any backlinks in this period. But somehow, it had found its way to the top of the page, fluctuating between positions #3 to #1.

I thought this was due to the strength of my content and backlinks. I hadn't engaged in any spammy backlinking tactics. My backlinks were all from EZA, GoArticles, ArticleBase, and around 4-5 high quality guest posts from authority sites in the niche.

This lasted for about a month. After the 24th, traffic dropped 50%. After the 28th, it dropped completely to just 1 or 2 uniques per day.

I'm not complaining. My main business is on a respected industry blog that has continued to chirp along merrily after the update.

But I couldn't help but notice a few things when I looked up my keyword on Google:

1. The top ranking sites all have a lot of content on the homepage. Each article is more than 1000 words long. My home page article was scarcely 400 words.

2. The keyword is related to a hair growth supplement. The top ranking sites included additional information such as ingredients list, YouTube videos, etc. on the home page. IMO, this is better for consumers. Better also for Google, perhaps.

3. All top ranking sites have more than 20-30 pages of content, some even more.

4. The top ranking site has a mere 23 backlinks from just 2 domain names. OSE puts the DA at just 30/100. Significantly, none of the links from article directories or spammy sites.

In contrast, my site had a DA of 40/100, 273 backlinks from 41 different domains. But some of these links were from social bookmarking sites, some from article directories, and some from manual blog comments. I had also generously sprinkled my anchor text throughout these links.

I had used no spun content, by the way.


Conclusions


1. Before you denounce the top results as sub-par, take a good, long, hard objective look at your sites. We tend to view our sites a bit too fondly - they are our creations, after all. I thought my site provided good content, but the site outranking me is better for actual users any day (it is an affiliate site still) because it offers video reviews, ingredients lists, and a lot of content.

This has quelled my anger at Google somewhat.

2. Backlinks are becoming a little irrelevant. Sure, my opinion is based on just a few results, but from the looks of it, Google is trying to promote sites with deep content but not the backlinks. I can get behind that.

3. Sites with clean link profiles benefited a lot from this update. The top ranking site had no links to start with. Mine was tainted by social bookmarking submissions and article directory links, as well as links from dubious sites that had copied my content from article directories.

4. On that note - stay away from article directories and mass social bookmarking submissions. Social bookmarking is fine if done naturally. My main business site gets a lot of traffic from Hacker News and Reddit, but these links are submitted manually, and never more than 1 link per day.

5. Focus on the content.

6. Guest post.

7. Be very careful when you select your keywords. Even with #1 rankings in my keyword, I wasn't making more than $200/month off the site. That's decent money, but makes you wonder if it is worth spending $300 just to get 20 articles written (yes, $15/article is fair game now.)

8. Spun content = website poison. Avoid it.
#observations #penguined

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