Penguin 2.1 Rolls Out As Website Owners Report Further SERPs Pain
Google rolled out their latest version of the Google Penguin update (since May 22nd) last Friday and it seems that once again they have turned up the heat on the battle against site owners with questionable backlink profiles as they look to clean up their organic search results.
As with almost all Google updates, the prospect of being thought to have violated Google's guidelines in a manner that is deemed enough to warrant even an algorithmic penalisation sends shudders through the spine of site owners and this release offered nothing other.
After monitoring the industry across a number of niches, we were able to see that one particular site had been offered a cruel blow to his working month, having been notified that manual actions taken against his site were being revoked, only to find that following the release of Penguin 2.1 last Friday, he had once again been placed through the mill and onto the penalised list!
Speaking with the site owner, we established that the site had been targeted with a full force negative SEO campaign, flooding misleading and inaccurate terms into his backlink profile on a wide scale, wide enough to have triggered alarm bells at Google for a manual review, in which action was taken against the site.
Looking at the reconsideration process that the site had taken, over 95% of the links that were pointing into the site were either removed completely or placed into a Google disavow list and uploaded through webmaster tools, scaling back their profile to little more than a few brand mentions here and there.
Clearly the joy of having manual actions revoked followed by the news that their site had been once again pushed out of the rankings almost completely is crushing the site, a well-established business that has done very little optimisation to their website, let alone link building.
A look at SearchMetrics shows that following the revoke of action against the site from the manual penalisation, there was a slight uplift before the crushing blow of Penguin 2.1 dragged them back into the darkest corner of organic search:
Questions now have to be asked as to whether the crawl and action rate of the Google disavow file is working fast enough for website owners as there is a possibility that the Penguin hit is based on links that are still to be seen to be within the site's list and processed accordingly.
Although we have mentioned this singular example above, we know of another site that also suffered that same fate, having a manual action revoked in time to find themselves yet another of the Google Penguin victims…
How did you fare with the update?
13 Comments
Praveen
2.1 has been quite strange and frustrating. In the niche that one of site is in, the competitor has a lot of doorway pages and pages with no real content, yet they do not seem to be affected much. I did build links, a lot of them, 2 yrs ago but most have been disavowed.
Last time the site got hit, the link profile was cleaned up and we started seeing a slow increase but now after 2.1, its back to square one.
the other site is a brand so it seems like they just need to add a page and it starts ranking immediately. Funny how G treats the small guys
Alex Graves
Hi Praveen, thanks for the comment.
Your right that the updates are becoming frustrating and that it appears that even though each new push is meant to focus on cleaning up the SERPs, so many sites are getting away with their blackhat tactics that when seen are clearly there to manipulate the search results.
We see a large volume of sites sail through these updates even though they have clearly worked hard on flooding links into their sites to increase their rankings and know that trying to highlight these to someone that has the say-so to be able to take action against them is pointless.
Brands are still held to account for their actions, but with so much authority it can seem that they have special treatment at times (such as one particular site that was in and out of a penalty in a matter of days…)
carl
Hi Alex, is the site above one for buying large, erm, domestic appliances from? I was talking to Dave about this on Tuesday, and the disavow tool ‘lag’ in particular. I’m hoping that is indeed the case. It would make perfect sense in our case.
Alex Graves
Hi Carl,
Due to wanting to keep the identity of the site in the graph out of the public domain, I can neither confirm or deny whether they would be able to supply you with domestic appliances… 🙂
What I can say is that there has been more than one instance of this happening recently and that leads me to believe that the crawl rate of the disavow file was unfortunately slower than the release of Penguin 2.1 and it appears that more and more people are laying claim to this happening to them too.
Hopefully your site returns in the predicted refresh, if that happens again this time…
You know where we are if you need a chat 🙂
Tom
I have seen the same thing, had a site that had manual action revoked about a month prior to this update, after the update site dropped from top of p2 to p5. Also have 2 separate sites that were no.1 that dropped to 15th after this update. I think these 2 suffered a link devaluation of some sort instead of a total wipe out.
carl
The latter drop is similar to ours Tom. What makes you think it’s a devaluing rather than Penguin?
Tom
I think that this is a devaluation of a portion of links that google does now not trust, these links were helping the site rank in positions before the update, now google has changed the dials a bit these sites are not helping the site rank anymore, thus a drop in rankings. The fact that the sites have not (like previous sites) been smashed way back to page 45 seems its a link devaluation rather than a severe whole site drop.Im guessing google turned the notch up on what it now considers ‘low quality’. I think if your link profile contained above a certain threshold of these new low quality links then you got wiped out, if however your site had a few of these links but not the majority of the profile then you got a devaluation.
carl
Interesting thought – I’d wondered why our drop hadn’t been as severe as some I’d read about. So it seems Penguin isn’t black and white after all.
See what I did there? 🙂
carl
Also, at it’s fundamental level – if the above site is the one I think it is, and the disavow tool is not lagging, then surely it proves that disavowing links or domains isn’t effective – if it WAS, there wouldn’t be much of a case for the site to be Penguinslapped.
Alex Graves
The issues arise in that once again we are having to take into account what Google tell us about how they actually treat links that are placed into the disavow file, but why wouldn’t we with it being their tool to instruct us how to use.
The fact that they have now prevented contact to Google directly through the WMT platform because you have no manual action seems extreme and will be sure to drastically reduce their contact forms that come through about their automatic penalisations.
Google have previously told us that the upload of the file does not force a re-crawl of those links, instead it marks the placement for action to be taken during their next natural crawl of that page, something that if you were to have historic links buried deep in a large website, could potentially take longer to process.
Hopefully Google will be cleaning up their mess in the near future and they realise the error of their ways 🙂
carl
Indeed. Something else I read alarmed me (may be taken with a pinch of salt however) – with this update, even nofollow links are look at unfavorably (depending on the circumstances, masses of blog comment spam for example). If this is the case, and we are to believe the Google treats the disavowed links as effectively nofollowed, then disavowing is no defence against Penguin.
I’m hoping this is purely post-update speculation, obviously. I wish I could remember where I’d read it.
Tom
I had a site in gambling niche that got wiped out by penguin 1.0, i removed as many links as possible and dissavowed the rest. So that was %100 links either removed or on disavow file. Site was lurking around page 49 for its keyword (it is exact match). After latest penguin update it is now on page 4 and sub pages have started popping up. So i think its fully out of penguin, it just doesnt have any links to it’s name so these positions are where it should be.
DonnaFontenot - from twitter
http://t.co/cvROsxiDp7 (Note: disavowed links may still hurt until page is recrawled, which may not happen through several Penguin updates)