Major Google update?! Penguin 2.1

Penguin 5, or 2.1 as Google is calling it, just went live today.

Penguin 5, With The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, Is Now Live

Yep, Penguin 2.1. https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/386231794883780609

It also affects foreign keywords, etc. at the same time, I think.

oh noo one of my sites dropped out of top 100 from #3.
too many exact match and similar anchors to keywords...all other sites' anchors are mostly "click" here etc. and they are not affected.

I checked a couple of my main keywords, nothing has changed.

I have noticed the same thing for one of my test sites in the last 24 hours. A 3 or 4 page drop across the board. I'm just going to sit tight for a few days and see what happens. I've seen this sort of drop before and a day or so later, most pages come back stronger than ever.

yeah..according to Matt, only 1% total search..many of my sites got hit as well..this Sucks

I haven't seen a dip in any of my rankings whatsoever. Actually had a push on one that's super competitive, up to #4 now

Doggonit I got myself a penalty on one of my websites. This website though had been heavily spammed. I am surprised it took Google so long to do anything. I hadnt touched the site in ages and it had blog comment spam only.

My main business site got hit with an unnatural link penalty ages ago and that site is now back to pre-penalty rankings. Difference is that I had linkdelete do a major link removal campaign a few months ago and had the penalty fully removed. At first I saw a slight recovery and now its back to pre-warning rankings with the latest algo.

So win one lose one.

Penguin 5.0 just went live on the 4th of October.

Penguin 5, With The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, Is Now Live

Threads at Google forum, every few minute a new person that tanked:

http://productforums.google.com/foru...exing--ranking

Penguin 2.1 update was released yesterday and my blog traffic reduced 57%.

But today the traffic increased and it's back to normal again.

Is there anything I should worry about?

Best white hat SEO for $5 - LOL

Good luck with all the upcoming updates.

I have not seen any change in traffic. I need to check every keywords to ensure they are in the previous position. So far, no change.

You hardcore 'white hat' guys can continue to sit back and create your 'quality content' and hope everything works out in the end because thats what Google tells you...while us SEOs who actually know how to build links AND rank fast AND not get hit by updates make money at will

Just checked a local term, every result on the 1st page is different now.
Somehow a zillow and yelp page are ranking above all the real business sites, lol
1% my a$$

With the Penguin 2.0 update Google said like 4% would be affected, most people on this forum hardly saw any change in rankings.

Now they claim 1% and everyone is going totally crazy on Google's Webmasters forums so indeed 1% my @ss.

My main site has been murdered, I was on page 1 for 11 keywords, now im down and out on every one, not on the first page for anything anymore

11 places
6 places
78 places
7 places
5 places
6 places
14 places
9 places
8 places
23 places
15 places

Bit of a worry as it's a real commerce site that sells physical goods and makes me a very tidy sum of money, it needs to be on the first page for everything.

Hopefully it's just dancing and will settle back down to where they all were.

I run a flight booking site. Unfortunately I am too small to have my own agency so I make use of affiliates sites. Google has hammered me for this and I have now dropped out of sight. My content is good, my service offering is good so why should I suffer? I think the monopoly that Google has needs to be challenged.

I still think your missing the point slightly.

Funny its the people with services that are coming out to defend themselves.

Now my argument isn't with them per se, like the sites i have ranking now that are not white hat sites, are basically sites where i have purchased PR links of some or another, within body content, looking semi natural, with non spun content.

The stuff that has tanked is stuff where spun content is used for the majority of links. Also stuff like web 2.0's and "pillowing" of various links.

Don't forget, a lot of webmasters are pillowing and using tiered link building. Its been popularized in virtually every SEO blog that reccomends grey hat practices. Now dont get me wrong, they work in short term and Google doesn't get them every time. But there days are numbered now.

The serps i check are mostly iGaming (Casino, poker, slots type of thing). This is where a lot of aggresive SEO goes on and let me tell you this, there has been a LOT of movement with this update.

That said, people who offer services where, they are sticking say content related to losing weight, next to stuff about finance. Those days are numbered and those sites will tank. Spun content will tank eventually, even if readable. The net is getting smaller and smaller, and the requirements to get away with stuff are getting stricter and stricter. I dont see how any of you can sit there, (who offer services) and say that you can be confident that this will protect your site and you will be safe in 12 months time. The risk factor is massive right now, denying it and not being upfront about risks is quite unethical imo.

Its not greed. Its cause and effect.

3 years ago, all it took was some high PR links and you were good to go. You could rank crap first page and it would stay ranked.

Over the last 3 years, the net has gradually gotten smaller and the requirements to stay ranked have increased. This update is the latest in a long string of updates that are targetting your business model and the business model of your clients that are ranking.

I am not saying its impossible to rank these sites (its not). In fact, i still make several thousands of dollars per month with EMD sites, simply designed to exploit algorithm loopholes and bring in the cash quickly.

These sites wont last. Purchased PR links wont last. In some form or another they will continue to work for several years to come. But in the end, they will all die a rather slow death.

Lots of people will be having awkward conversations and changing their business model. Not because Google have told them too (this stuff has been outlawed since the start) but because the profitability of such ventures is being reduced with each and every update. Its no longer a case of Google says one thing, then the opposite works. Slowly but surely, what Google is preaching (create sites people love, dont game the algorithm) is working.

In short, in a few years time, this industry will be dead and the only way to rank will be to create websites which people love.

Go look at the mom bloggers who are creating sites for their audiences and are in tune with what they want. These people will look at you funny if you ask them about panda or penguin. Most of them don't even know what it is and just go on with tending to their sites, creating content and dealing with their audience.

90% of the people effected by this stuff are SEO's or affiliate marketers. The new optimization will be no optimization. Creating sites you can be proud of. Its obvious the direction things are going.

Am i stopping my EMD's? No, im still hedging my bets with white hat/grey hat.. but at the same time, its getting harder for the sites that exploit loopholes to stay around, and its getting easier for my high quality white hat sites to rank.

This is cause and effect. And because the model is changing. Best practices will change. And you guys selling services will be screwed.

You probably have a few years left, but you will be gone.

MMN a lot of the things you're saying is true, however I believe no matter how advanced Google gets, there will always be people who will find ways to "cheat" the rankings and get their viagra sites ranked #1 for whatever terms they want.

Sure, they will have to constantly monitor those sites and keep replacing them every now and then, but that's another story...

I feel pity for small businesses who are dependent on Google organic entirely.

Here is one example:
Google Groups

The person speaks about going bankrupt due to this. :-(

yes the update seems to have caused a big problem for small business dependent on organic rankings

Well, organic traffic is the best thing ever, but sure as hell, I would like to depend on it. Thanks for the link RandySwanston, it reminds me why I dont like google and organic.

Dmreed4311, I see your PBN backlinks - I think it's nothing new Google devaluing links from those kinds of site, there is a clear footprint: very bland site with mostly text, each article around 320-380 words long. Even though you have added pictures, the anchor links are quite unnaturally placed and follow a typical blog network pattern. It doesn't even matter whether the owner of the site can be ascertained, I think Google has been working on ways of identifying this sort of thing for quite some time and you have to get even smarter about creating these feeder sites...

(Just to qualify this, if a site won't pass a Panda update then is it a major stretch of the imagination to think that Google will begin disqualifying links from such sites?)

My site also got penalized by this update.

From last 5-6 months I had not focused on link building, I had created all quality links, but then also I got penalized. My all ranking went from 1st page to 3,4,5,6, even my brand keyword also slipped down to 2nd page.

My stuff moves up in ranking with every update, so I'm good. :-)

Read 5 Things You Can Do Today About Penguin 2.1 | SundaySEO

Don't afraid to the Penguin.

Same condition for me and one of my site ranking is totally down due to penguin update. Google's head of search spam announced it on twitter.Google Penguin 2.1 Now Live

The update has really stroke more while equating the former update. But then, following Google's guidelines and White hat SEO why does the ranking been thrown off, not to the position of #100 to the least?
It's quite unlikely to look through the search results for the sites that had ranked in the first page of Google.

Got to read a statement in one of the articles saying that "Prefer a 301 redirect and make the old site to be redirected to the new domain. This would rather make the website been looked for a betterment..." How could this be a possible thing? Looks like its be an effete statement...

I think so this update is all about Long tail anchor variation. Google want to tell webmaster to stick with generic phrases and try to target some long tail phrases also.

My penalty has to be about the anchor text because my site still ranks well for "carpet cleaning" "carpet Cleaners" in my area but anything with "Tampa" in it has dropped off of the face of the earth. Luckily I have control of my backlinks and fixed the anchor text, I hope that will help me.

Lost a few places(around 5) on all terms when Penguin 2.0 happened 22 May


Did a link clean up and sent the remainder by way of the disavow method on 13 August


Seemed to drop a bit more on most terms after this so about 10 places down now on most terms.


As we didn't have a manual penalty and it was an Algo one I was really hoping that a Penguin refresh ie Penguin 2.1 may get us back on track.


This has happened though!


Site is all unique content with twice weekly blog posts and pretty good social media interaction.


Any ideas folks, could we still bounce back with Penguin 2.1?

I also hit by Google and my website ranking is down page 1 to page 9. We all know this is penguin update.

Google seem to be guessing a lot with these algo's lately, my sites seem to have been randomly effected, some have completely vanished from the serps and others havent budged...Very weird, i use the same strategies on all of them.

@MarkKapoor, you might wanna look at the anchor in your sig - unless you're still going for the 'ole misspellings' thing that doesn't work any more. Or maybe it's to keep your anchors varied to the correct degree - ya know, 32.7% keyword, 32.7% click here, 30.1% straight URL and 4.5% misspelled on purpose keyword.

No one knows what's really going on... hmmm it's a guessing at this point.

Some of my article posting sites went down from 4 to 0. And some of them increased the PR by 1. Can you believe it.

Keep doing white hat SEO and you will save.

Google is a horse's ass. I could give several analogies but I don't want to waste too much breath on them. Here's the deal: They are a dog chasing its tail. They are trying to perfect something that can not be perfected. In their attempt to correct things that they deem to be broken, there will continue to be A LOT of collateral damage. There are hundreds of businesses that are now out of business thanks to Google. Some of them are my friends. They did nothing wrong. They are only guilty of trying to optimize their site to make Google happy. They were not the bad guys. But then Google pulls the rug out from underneath them and they died. It's like having a crowd of people and there are a few bad guys in that crowd, so they take out their machine guns and try to only hit the bad guys. But they're using MACHINE GUNS... so a lot of people are hurt and even killed in the process.

Still think that it's all the bad guys and not Google? Still think Google knows what they're doing or has any integrity at all? Then why do unrelated Adwords ads still show up on pages where there is no relevance to that subject? Why would Google allow that if integrity was at the forefront of their actions? Why is re-targeting not controlled so that relevancy is still important in the page its on? Do you see the Google hypocrisy? Do you see the greed?

And look who is showing up "most" of the time now at the top of natural SERPs. It is mostly deep-pocketed mega-corporations that have more money than most of us will ever see in our lifetime. Now where is the Google integrity? Did you believe all along this was simply about relevancy? No, it is about trying to get you through their paid channels. And anyone that's doing Adwords effectively knows that, in most cases, it is now a rich man's game.

There is a well-written article on this from a top source. When I find it, I'll post the link.

If keywords' rankings have dropped, then try using best,cheapest,affordable,cheap,low cost,how,what etc with detailed search phrases, you may be ranking on top of Google search for which you are not ranking before or trying for..Google search have become more detailed..

If you lost rankings it means you had poor quality links. I am not against black hat, but you really need to establish some quality that will survive deletion. Press releases, decent blog, squidoo lens, strong social media etc. I don't know why people complain about updates, you know how Google is operating now, don't try to work against them.

Foreign language sites are definitely hit.

I had a French site doing 250+ uniques a day with a few keywords top of page 1. After the update they dropped a few positions, and down to 100-150 visitors. Have lost another couple of rankings (still page 1 though) of 1 of those keywords, and now down to 40-50 visitors per day.

The site wasn't converting fantastically anyway, so I don't care too much.

Just because your site/s drop doesn't mean the rest of the world has the same problem.

I'm almost willing to bet most folks around here that took a hit in the SERPs have crappy link profiles, obviously they'll never admit they had a part in dropping their pages in the SERPs.

[edit]
Mike A. posted the long version while I was posting, lol.

There will always be naysayers and there's always a risk of speaking out because a lot of people will simply think that you don't know what you're doing or that you didn't follow the rules. Sorry but it's not quite that simple. I've been doing this for 14 years and even consulted large businesses on IM and SEO. One of my sites received upwards of 20,000 visitors a day and it was only a small niche site.

But many of those that did play by the rules and/or couldn't adjust in time took big hits that they could not recover from or at least not recover from in time. Anyone that denies what's going on with Google either has their head in the sand or their pride is bigger than what's good for them.

There's a lot people don't know. A friend of mine sent me some stats on one of our competitors that we share (name withheld intentionally). This company is huge. You've even seen their commercials on television. Well, guess what? Their traffic dropped over 35% after Penquin. You'll never hear about this, I believe because it's embarrassing to some of these companies. They no more want to admit that they lost that much traffic than they'd want to admit to getting a virus that exposed their customer's private information. Can you blame them? It would be a black eye on their otherwise trusted service. They're being paid to be the best and this would make it appear they're not the best.

I've been studying as time permits. There are several examples of people that got hit HARD to no fault of their own really. Of course smaller sites can often adjust, especially if they only have a few pages on their site. But many of us have sites with thousands of pages and they were built over a course of many years based on the accepted norm in the seo industry. Not spam but things like copied and pasted content and so on. You can't just undo thousands of pages to meet the new Google expectations. You take a huge hit and suck it up. If there's any good news, one of those companies that is now gone was a direct competitor of ours. They are literally out of business like hundreds of others. If Google could be sued, you'd see it in the headlines right now, but I think you'd have better luck suing the government. Google has gotten too big. They've got way too much power.

The argument of course is that, "Well, where would you be without Google?" and I think it's a valid argument. I've often said, "The Lord (Google) giveth and the Lord taketh away." and Google has done exactly that. But is it considered acceptable or either ethical to allow someone a vehicle to build a livelihood off of your platform and then pull the rug out from under them with few roads to recovery? With so many MILLIONS of businesses out there, simply telling them to redo their seo and change the way they've been doing things does not work. That's a one-size-fits-all solution and the problem is much, much bigger than that. And good luck trying to get anyone on the phone at Google to help you or contacting someone there. You might as well be trying to break into Fort Knox or trying to speak to the president.

Here are the some solutions for many of you that are scratching your head trying to figure out how to please Google:

1. Diversify or Die
2. Stop feeding the enemy.
3. Speak up about injustices. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

LOL... the only thing you're blowing up is your meth lab.

And please lets stay on topic people.
Topic being, I need someone to rank my new site.

But not just any bozo, at minimum you must meet the
following criteria:

1) phd in spamming
2) #1 rankings in less than 6 weeks
3) rankings warrantied for a minimum of 12 months.

If rankings drop on month 11 I get my money back or you
get locked in a room with my vicious min pin.

Whos down?

1% ? Really? Most polls on the web are putting it at over 60%...

Oh maybe they mean it only benefited the 1%

Mike, you know nothing about me. You know nothing about my success nor what's working for me and what's not with my many websites and ventures. You do seem to know a lot about bullying though.

Funny enough...

1) RedShifted goes and buys blackhat services to rank his site (combination of fiverr?)
2) Google cracks them down (no wonder...)
3) RedShifted calls SEO dead and whitehat BS (wtf? )

Well, it's not a rocket science. If you use shitty links to rank your site then your site WILL dance, disappear, vanish, get tanked or whatever. And there's no need to think why. Just look your link profile.

I'm on board with Giftys and Redshifted.

There are LOTS of people suffering on many different boards I read all with different personalities, sites and philosophies about SEO from pure white hat to blackhat extreme. All have been hit. How do you explain that?

Also, building ANY kind of link can be considered black hat. Google wants 'natural' links and of course, all the top results in the serps right now have never done any link building right?

...

Somehow I knew you would have all the answers. :p

Yawn. SSDGU

Same. Sh*t. Different. Google. Update.

Thanks for the read, ya'll.