Penguin Refresh!

[harris411]

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Anyone seeing movement? Been dreading this!

[kamikaze]

I'd say those loose Pandas are more of a threat. It's easier to recover from a Penguin update

[harris411]

Really? Not so sure about that, or have you seen some recoveries tonight?

[kamikaze]

To recover from either type of update you have to identify where you've gone wrong and then make the necessary changes. From what I've seen so far, sites hit by the Penguin update can be reinstated within weeks of being fixed whereas those hit by the Panda updates can take much longer (if at all).

It's also easier to identify where you've gone wrong with Penguin hit sites (usually internal links/content).

[lauriebred]

Google has announced a whole raft of updates. The seismic shock has been considerable.

Making changes to a site so soon may be a grave error because when this sort of thing happens there are usually algo tweaks afterwards to iron out any perceived anomalies which may, and then may not, cause you some recovery. They don't like to see sites twisting and turning to claw back rankings so you could find a knee-jerk reaction pushing your site(s) even further down. In particular deleting links is not a good idea, it shows that you have some control over them so you risk any other sites in a WMT account becoming suspect too. However the long term aims of Google mean that this the beginning of a new set of problems for affiliates so hold on to your hats, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

[kamikaze]

Google has announced a whole raft of updates. The seismic shock has been considerable.

Making changes to a site so soon may be a grave error because when this sort of thing happens there are usually algo tweaks afterwards to iron out any perceived anomalies which may, and then may not, cause you some recovery. They don't like to see sites twisting and turning to claw back rankings so you could find a knee-jerk reaction pushing your site(s) even further down. In particular deleting links is not a good idea, it shows that you have some control over them so you risk any other sites in a WMT account becoming suspect too. However the long term aims of Google mean that this the beginning of a new set of problems for affiliates so hold on to your hats, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

I agree you shouldn't make any knee-jerk reactions to any Google update as they usually take a few weeks to settle down again.

I've not been hit one of these updates myself (yet) but having helped others recover, I've not seen any evidence that removing links can actually harm your other sites. Do you have any other suggestions from being bit by a penguin ?

[lauriebred]

I agree you shouldn't make any knee-jerk reactions to any Google update as they usually take a few weeks to settle down again.

I've not been hit one of these updates myself (yet) but having helped others recover, I've not seen any evidence that removing links can actually harm your other sites. Do you have any other suggestions from being bit by a penguin ?

The problem is that there is no way of being sure that a drop in ranking was caused by Penguin, Panda, Parrot, Platypus, Pixie or any other smelly creature beginning with P because Google has issued so many updates at once. The ones that I suspect have caused the greatest damage recently have been the EMD mess and a little-noticed update which improved rankings for, according to Google, "high quality content from trusted sources" in other words brandspam (big brands pushing every search term they can think of and being rewarded with top spots for rubbish content about products they don't even produce).

How to recover from this? The guy who finds a foolproof way could become richer than Bill Gates. My answer and the one I have followed for the last two years is to keep pushing out new sites and constantly improve these sites, with fresh pages, completely unique content, new graphics, videos etc in the sure and certain knowledge that some will fail and some will survive, only to be inevitably slapped by Google sooner or later. In other words, hard work and lots of it. Google is determined to destroy what it sees as manipulative SEO so anything that even smells faintly of it is something to avoid.

In the meanwhile do everything you can to persuade other people to switch to a real search engine instead of Google.

[kamikaze]

How to recover from this? The guy who finds a foolproof way could become richer than Bill Gates. My answer and the one I have followed for the last two years is to keep pushing out new sites and constantly improve these sites, with fresh pages, completely unique content, new graphics, videos etc in the sure and certain knowledge that some will fail and some will survive, only to be inevitably slapped by Google sooner or later. In other words, hard work and lots of it. Google is determined to destroy what it sees as manipulative SEO so anything that even smells faintly of it is something to avoid.

In the meanwhile do everything you can to persuade other people to switch to a real search engine instead of Google.

So what you're saying is, once you've been hit by Google you should leave it and move on. Isn't that a bit of a defeatist attitude ? If you have a profitable website surely you'd want to recover it and more importantly discover what caused the hit ?

[lauriebred]

So what you're saying is, once you've been hit by Google you should leave it and move on. Isn't that a bit of a defeatist attitude ? If you have a profitable website surely you'd want to recover it and more importantly discover what caused the hit ?

Defeatist? Me? You obviously don't know me <BWG>

The problem is that there have been so many updates that it is pretty well impossible to say just which one caused a drop. Just because Google announce a Panda or Penguin update doesn't mean that they aren't making continuous changes to the core algo at the same time - this is a company that loves to create FUD. Plus it's pretty well accepted that Google's algos can detect when webmasters are trying to wriggle out of a problem and they seem to be penalising further when this happens. I've heard of a number of people who claim to have recovered sites but with so many algo changes it simply isn't possible to say for certain whether their efforts were successful or whether it was a change on a dial at The Plex that caused the improvement.

We also have to bear in mind that, going on past form, the factors that give a high ranking today are likely to be the ones that Google will penalise tomorrow.

So; build a 'Big Brand' site and and become an affiliate of every company offering a product that is even romotely associated with your key product then target every keyphrase that you can think of with a page of anodyne copy. Or bang out as many websites as you can, packing them with proper data and no 'fluff' about the product or service you are promoting in a way that is easy to follow for visitors , but bear in mind that any success may well be short-lived. Or find a product to promote that the big sites haven't latched onto yet (they will eventually, if there's money in it), or find a new use for an existing one.

All of this means hard work, sustained analytical thought and investment in time and money. Just like any other business.

The alternative is facing death by a thousand cuts. Or waiting for government action to curb the beast, assuming that the millions of dollars Google spend on 'lobbying' fails to have their desired result. One thing is certain though. Bog-standard affiliate sites pushing the same products as thousands of other sites have no future. Adapt or die.

[MKJones]

I haven't done a thing really to my sites after the Google bomb (s) struck, apart from removing my Amazon and Ebay affiliate search links off my product pages. I run around 50 affiliate window datafeed sites and everyone of them died a complete death at first. 2 sites started to get visitors again after about 5 days or so and are now getting much more traffic than they ever did. At this moment in time another 4-5 sites have also returned much stronger than before and others sites are starting to get visitors too.

I still think the full impact of the changes are yet to be seen. Could well be site indexing is still taking place which will take some time in my case with so many sites and products.

When you consider my sites are totally devoid of any original content and backlinks I have no idea what conclusion you can come to about it all, except that with the sheer number of products my sites have then no doubt many don't have much competition regarding keywords. Strangely enough though certain sites have risen to first page on some searches with a few million results. God knows what is going on.

[kamikaze]

Defeatist? Me? You obviously don't know me <BWG>

The problem is that there have been so many updates that it is pretty well impossible to say just which one caused a drop. Just because Google announce a Panda or Penguin update doesn't mean that they aren't making continuous changes to the core algo at the same time - this is a company that loves to create FUD. Plus it's pretty well accepted that Google's algos can detect when webmasters are trying to wriggle out of a problem and they seem to be penalising further when this happens. I've heard of a number of people who claim to have recovered sites but with so many algo changes it simply isn't possible to say for certain whether their efforts were successful or whether it was a change on a dial at The Plex that caused the improvement.

We also have to bear in mind that, going on past form, the factors that give a high ranking today are likely to be the ones that Google will penalise tomorrow.

So; build a 'Big Brand' site and and become an affiliate of every company offering a product that is even romotely associated with your key product then target every keyphrase that you can think of with a page of anodyne copy. Or bang out as many websites as you can, packing them with proper data and no 'fluff' about the product or service you are promoting in a way that is easy to follow for visitors , but bear in mind that any success may well be short-lived. Or find a product to promote that the big sites haven't latched onto yet (they will eventually, if there's money in it), or find a new use for an existing one.

All of this means hard work, sustained analytical thought and investment in time and money. Just like any other business.

The alternative is facing death by a thousand cuts. Or waiting for government action to curb the beast, assuming that the millions of dollars Google spend on 'lobbying' fails to have their desired result. One thing is certain though. Bog-standard affiliate sites pushing the same products as thousands of other sites have no future. Adapt or die.

I'd agree that you should continue to build strong websites, but I think its fairly obvious which type of Google update you've been slapped by as its usually only the big ones that wipe you out. The smaller algo changes don't have such an impact.

I've rather attempt to fix the problem rather than let the site rot away in the Google wasteland. Well it's worked for those I've helped so far

[lauriebred]

I'd agree that you should continue to build strong websites, but I think its fairly obvious which type of Google update you've been slapped by as its usually only the big ones that wipe you out. The smaller algo changes don't have such an impact.

I've rather attempt to fix the problem rather than let the site rot away in the Google wasteland. Well it's worked for those I've helped so far

Good luck with that, I hope your success continues, not least of all because you might be able to tell the rest of us how you did it

A point I think worth making though; I would never trust Google to tell the whole truth. The main reason most sites I've been watching have fallen is because 'The Brands' have been promoted to the top spots, rather than the watched sites being demoted IMO. It may be coincidental that they announced a Panda update at the same time as slipping out 65 'search quality' changes but I'm not convinced. The more they keep us guessing with half-information the less chance of us cracking the algo.

[kamikaze]

Too true, we can only go on what Google tells us (and what others have discovered). I'll let you know how we get on but so far we've helped recover 6 out of 9 websites hit by the penguin updates.

Going forward, the trick is to find a niche and become one of those "big brands" that Google heavily favors

[stilettolimited]

I haven't done a thing really to my sites after the Google bomb (s) struck, apart from removing my Amazon and Ebay affiliate search links off my product pages. I run around 50 affiliate window datafeed sites and everyone of them died a complete death at first. 2 sites started to get visitors again after about 5 days or so and are now getting much more traffic than they ever did. At this moment in time another 4-5 sites have also returned much stronger than before and others sites are starting to get visitors too.

I still think the full impact of the changes are yet to be seen. Could well be site indexing is still taking place which will take some time in my case with so many sites and products.

When you consider my sites are totally devoid of any original content and backlinks I have no idea what conclusion you can come to about it all, except that with the sheer number of products my sites have then no doubt many don't have much competition regarding keywords. Strangely enough though certain sites have risen to first page on some searches with a few million results. God knows what is going on.

I think the bolded part is your problem. I'm assuming you don't have 12+ full time staff - I reckon it would take at least that many people to properly run 50 sites. In fact I'd say one person can't run more than 2 sites so you'd probably need 25 people.

If you're getting away with putting < 1 hour into each site every week... then it probably wasn't ever going to be a viable long term business model as they clearly can't be good quality sites that will stand the test of time.

I've had a bunch of my own sites battered - from panda and penguin, then link warnings, and now we've got the exact match domain hurricane coming too. For me, the way out of this is to build less sites but far higher quality. I think for most people that is going to be the only route to staying in the game and making enough money to live on.

[MKJones]

I think the bolded part is your problem. I'm assuming you don't have 12+ full time staff - I reckon it would take at least that many people to properly run 50 sites. In fact I'd say one person can't run more than 2 sites so you'd probably need 25 people.

If you're getting away with putting < 1 hour into each site every week... then it probably wasn't ever going to be a viable long term business model as they clearly can't be good quality sites that will stand the test of time.

I've had a bunch of my own sites battered - from panda and penguin, then link warnings, and now we've got the exact match domain hurricane coming too. For me, the way out of this is to build less sites but far higher quality. I think for most people that is going to be the only route to staying in the game and making enough money to live on.

The sites I have created are rubbish for sure in Google's eyes. I have never been interested in writing content and so on, or spending hours backlinking. I posted somewhere a long time ago that backlinking manually was a nonsense in my eyes as it was false advertising in a way. It seems now that Google has decided that such links are not so important anymore too.

I have only ever been interesting in servers and the files needed to setup big comparison sites. With this in mind I ran various experiments with home servers. I now run all my sites from them and they fly. All off home broadband too . I am still not interested in writing content or developing my sites in any way really. Funny thing is my sites convert extremely well or should I say the sites that I send the visitors too do. As far as I am concerned my site's job isn't about pumping loads of regurgitated info into a page but for the user to find a product fast. It is the job of the site that they are sent to do that. It does seem to work and in some cases extremely well. It is a ton of work just to create one comparison site never mind 50. It is also an ongoing concern too as there is quite a bit of maintenance. Also each site needs various categories created and so on.

I could probably get tons more traffic by following Google's guidelines but I can't see me doing so somehow, though I might have to at some point or other.

I tested my sites on people I know and they liked them. They are fast and easy to use and are real money makers with the right amount of traffic. I will be experimenting with ppc soon which should be interesting.

Here is a site that is getting a heap of traffic now: Cycles - BMX Bikes, Kids Bikes, Mountain Bikes, Road Bikes, Touring Bikes And Cycling Accessories From Featured UK Companies.

Even the name is nasty as these were banned domains at one time - free ones! I ain't taking the mick though with Google as it just made sense to use such domains as to renew my gb.net domains would have cost a fortune!