Algo Update: Found a possible indication

I had a few sites that just recovered from a manual penalty 3 weeks ago. have done absolutely nothing onpage and off page. They were hammered. Only one that wasn't was the one that DIDN'T use analytics or webmaster tools. :confused:

All of our sites have analytics and webmaster tools. Only one took a hit and it was where I was doing something different in terms of linkbuilding.

If your site is spammy, then perhaps GA and GWT are bad to install, but if your site is a real website designed for real people then I see no need to be ultra paranoid about Google.

You are saying that syndicated content got your client penalized (even though it was done manually by yourself). So what about press releases? They are seen as a white hat method that work and are recommended and that's the same thing no?

UPDATE:

So I kneejerked and removed all of those repostings of the client blogs. Today, many of his lost rankings are returning - just at a much lower rank than before.

Not enough to draw any conclusions, but I'll get back to building links to try and repair the damage.

He also has GA for your conspiracy theorists out there, but so do the rest of our clients and none of those websites lost rankings.

Very interesting news. I'm curious, was the backlink diversity the same for this client as others? I wouldn't be surprised if 2.0s were hit hard on this update, in my mind it would be the easiest thing for Google to go after. I don't know if syndicated content would be the #1 metric since most large brands use press releases all the time, and press releases seem to have done fine.

Syndication is in the webs nature. How could they penalize you for that? Maybe it was a coincidence or possibly a certain web property or properties you backlinked from was on G's list.. It is interesting that unpublishing those helped rankings.

I think the lesson here is to not distribute your own sites articles across the internet. Just produce a new article. Manually spin it. Then distribute that. It takes about two hours but that's a much better option than syndicating content to sites with higher domain authority.

OneManSEO:
What did your client have to say about the changes?

I'm also curious if you had any google WMT errors/notices prior to deleting those articles.

If republished syndicated articles could damage your site, could you imagine the kind of fallout one guy could bring from just scraping RSS feeds & republishing?

I have created many different links and all of my websites have the same results. This is crazy.

Never had a problem with the new algorithm since I don't patronized black hat.

Staying away from Black hat techniques and spammy software is the answer.

Interesting topic this. I might have something that either gives more clues or just blows this out of the water though. My partner and I write a lot of original articles. We post them on Ezinearticles mainly and I always put put 2 links in the resource box. One link goes to our main ASApiano site and then one goes to any of around 10 other blogs. The articles are also syndicated through these blogs (I try not to link the same article to the blog containing that article).

None of the articles are on our main ASApiano sales website. This is just a long sales page and is designed this way so that the sales content flows.

The main ASAPiano sales page was Google page 1 for over a year for many keyphrases. As of the Penguin update it shows up for no search terms that I can find and has pretty much disappeared off the radar.

The odd thing however is that from what I can see the blogs are pretty much as they were and still rank well. They are all EMD's, each with around 10 article posts and I'd guess anything up to 30 backlinks mainly from Ezine but some through Social Monkee bookmarking.

Obviously there is a reason for all this mess...but it's hard to put any logic to it at the moment?

Shayman