Full story on Penguin Update

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  • SEO
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Hi there, looking through the forum I see many discussions on Google Penguin update. Personally, I don't like because many of my sites that were bringing me some money went down in rankings from number 1 to 4-9, which is not too bad compared to some people but still, my earning went down.
I got an email from Matt Carter about the update with a link to his blog:
The Google Penguin Update | Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I'm sure lots of you got this email or read it somewhere already but this is for those who missed it or still wondering what it's all about or why their website went down.

I know for sure why my sites went down, my content is quality and unique but not the backlinks. One thing I noticed is that sites that bumped me down search results are all Authority sites like MSN, Yahoo and big corporation sites.

On one hand it makes me think that Google changed their algorithm to get rid of all small sites

On the other hand, my sites didn't get wiped out completely (and yes they are all small niche sites), the just got bumped down and I know for a fact that I build some junk links to them.

My conclusion: niche sites still work but you need to have absolutely quality content and very quality backlinks. What do you guys think?
#full #google #niche sites #penguin #story #update
  • Profile picture of the author johnben1444
    Nice post buddy.
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    • Profile picture of the author clean99
      Originally Posted by johnben1444 View Post

      Nice post buddy.
      Thank you
      I saw many threads about this topic, so I thought that Matt Carter`s post makes a nice summary of what this update is
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      • Profile picture of the author pwtmike
        Its a good read...

        In summary linking building is always going to be an important factor, but now varied link building is more important. He talks about the obvious like blog comments and forum profiles... but public sites... in my opinion is a good place to start for syndicating your blog posts and article content. In addition to this, social networking profile activity is becoming more of a factor in determining quality as well over the next few years...
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  • Profile picture of the author cooler1
    I don't think quality content has got anything to do with Penguin. That was what Panda was meant to sort out. A lot of content on page 1 now is total rubbish and far from quality. Poor grammar, even low relevancy to the search term in many cases.

    Penguin clearly hasn't done it's intended job. Google need to get back to the white board or maybe they are too busy rubbing their hands at the increased number of Adwords users.

    I don't think the intention was to get rid of small sites. My guess is that the bigger sites have a more diverse backlinking profile and a higher trust factor so they faired well. After all Google ranks pages not sites.

    What is considered as quality backlinks? High PR backlinks? A few of my sites were not affected by Penguin, but they use the exact same backlinking as my sites which were affected so this update is not making sense to me.
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    • Profile picture of the author nik0
      Banned
      It almost seems like there are not so many real quality sites available for many topics.

      I mean first they filter it based on quality content, so a lot of sites that offered good quality but perhaps used bad grammar and/or spelling mistakes dropped in the rankings.

      Then they filter it on poor link profiles, which are a lot of sites, especially for informational keywords cause there are not many sites that deliver information for free, there is always some Adsense or affiliate deals attached to it.

      So yeah, what's left then, like one of the previous posters said: authority sites that don't have very much to do with the keyword anymore except for mentioning it a few times or some short not much saying stories about it.

      I think Google should put more weight in the pages that surround the page that ranks and the amount of relevant content (more weight into LSI). It makes not much sense to rank Yahoo Answers high cause there is one question asked on a site with millions of questions about all kind of topics and at the same time devalue an Adsense site that is targetting a medical niche for example but that isn't ranking anywhere anymore cause of a poor linkprofile.

      I mean, like the searchers care about a site having bad backlinks.

      Guess Google has a long road to go to offer true value to their searchers.

      To add: If content ranked on it's own I wouldn't spend so much money on SEO / Linkbuilding and thus would have more money left to outsource high quality articles instead of semi-crappy $5/500 word posts. So although I offer SEO services it would've been better if content started to rank without links. I don't see that anywhere yet (yeah maybe for kw's with 100 exact searches) but it's not worth it to pay $30 for a high quality piece of content to target such kw's as it would take years to regain profit from that.
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  • Profile picture of the author boxoun
    All he said was same thing cutts said.
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  • Profile picture of the author clean99
    Yeah, I agree to you guys or maybe it's just post update mess. Perhaps after some time everything will get to normal. It's really becoming way harder now even since the time I started which was almost 1 year ago. Now it's really time for many to think of IM as a serious business not just a hobby, built quick sites and links to them.
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