Google’s Penguin update to its algorithm, has a lot of people on the WebmasterWorld.com Forum chatting about its effect

Most comments are detecting changes to their own sites and pages.

As usually it was one comment that started off the conversation that is currently over 30 pages and here it is:

“”"After over 10 years of consistently ranking between position #1 and #3 on page one for a single four letter word search term, the month of March (starting on the 10th) has resulted in falling to below the fold, then to page 2, then page 3 and today I have been completely removed for that term.

In place is nothing but garbage. Branding obviously has lost traction. I’m thinking whatever they have done is meant to stick. I checked to see if I had been over optimized for the term, but with a mere 4 occurrences on my page and my need to use that term to describe my product, I really don’t know what they want from us anymore…

The effect of lost traffic has set off all the “Big Traffic change for URL” warnings and the anayltics charts have nose dived. Anyone else seeing this type of situation on their long established sites?

Lost income from March updates is just about $1000 / week.

I’d almost guess that Google is just removing older authority sites in favor of nothing but news articles and blogs.”"

Here are some other comments I found interesting off the forum:

1.

”

Matt Cutts and his team are geniuses and have finally figured out a way to combat SPAM on the internet. This update had a ton of collateral damage and he will be fixing it in the coming weeks and/or months.

or

Matt Cutts and his team have over-engineered the Google algorithm and this cluster-f@*$ of an update will solve nothing. Thousands of honest webmasters who were only trying to follow the rules will get dinged……and yes, some spammers will, however the spammers will come right back with a new set of tricks, once they figure out how to take advantage of the new loopholes created by the algorithm.

Meanwhile, thousands of honest webmasters will still pay the price and never get their rankings back…..thereby creating a void in the search results that will be filled with even more spammy looking sites.

I think Cutts and Co. unfairly targeted sites with affiliate links and made “catch-all” filters for sites that do have affiliate links, regardless of whether they were spam or not.

Just my .02

Meanwhile, (and I’m not going to “out” anyone) but one website I know has continued to rank #1 for a medium competition (organic) keyword, despite all of Panda’s best efforts.

“Build your site for your visitors” is a crock of #*$! for this particular query, as he is merely promoting an affiliate program. His entire backlink profile consists of paid links, multiple aged domains that he most likely purchased (totally non-relevant) and a few other tricks which I won’t disseminate due to the fact I might have to follow suit.

This whole “build your site for your visitors” is a crock of b.s. We build our sites for the Google algorithm and whatever they seem to think is “right”.

For you see, many many many honest webmasters got dinged by this update on April 24th 2012. They were “following the rules” and look where it got them.

This update has taught me a very valuable lesson: Don’t listen to the propaganda coming out of Cutts mouth. Instead, pay attention to the sites who continually survive draconian algorithm update after update…..then copy what they are doing.

Here’s your quality site, Cutts. Exactly as the algorithm you engineered wants it to look/feel like. Screw the visitor.”

2.

“”Ok, so after a few seconds of research it’s apparent that this is indeed part of the 40 Venice updates. This is going to absolutely KILL any businesses that rely on nationwide customers when the business operates from a single location.

Correct me if I’m wrong (I usually am) but are they trying to make me a local business ONLY now? It sounds to me that after the dust settles, the only people who will find me are local customers. I have customers around the entire globe!

The way the new strategy sounds is that you need to create a separate page for each location your business covers….ARE YOU KIDDING ME? That would require hundreds if not THOUSANDS of landing pages! Oh wait! Google frowns on landing (doorway) pages!

How about just a site tag that tells Google that your site is regional, nationwide or global?

It’s as if they want you to open an office in every city that you intend to do business in, then provide a geographical physical address and site for each business. Who came up with this half baked concept?

Again, it seems Google wants to paint us into a tiny corner. That’s not just evil, it’s inept!”"”

3.

“”My apologies for another editorial, but here’s my take on what has so far amounted to be one of the most devastation “quality updates” Google has released to date.

Looking at this entire issue from the “Google Love” perspective that Larry Page seems to be craving….IF they want love, then let’s open the black box a little bit for honest users. Since This April thread started, we’ve seen endless complaints and speculation on what is happening. That right there is the problem and the basis for hating on Google.

Google recently added a feature to WMT to notify you if your CMS scripts are out of date and to update them. I thought that feature was pretty much useless and a crutch for lazy webmasters. However, maybe it’s not so bad, but let’s expand on that…if they are going to drop you for some reason, at least TELL US what metric we are being drop for! If its keyword loaded, let us know. If its excessive back links, let us know. A little feedback will buy a lot of user love.

It’s doesn’t have to be a detailed report, just send us a message saying “page abc is being de-ranked for xyz issue”. You know they have the horsepower to do this, but sadly I believe their fear is that it opens up the “gaming the system” by black hatters. There’s always a few bad apples.

So how do you get around the gaming issue?

I suggest they begin a small business verification program. Remember is the old days when you could pay Google (or was it Yahoo) $299 for organic inclusion? Why not bring that back but let’s make it an annual $599 or an even $1000 to register your LEGITIMATE business with Google.

Then, once you’ve registered, you will need to verify your business, tax ids and all the other details. You know they have most of this info anyway and if you’re a decent taxpaying business owner, you have nothing to fear. Your site should be secure and conform to a certain quality standard. In a roundabout way, that’s what they are trying to force us into right now.

If you’re a web spammer from a foreign country or tying to apply with false credentials, you’re out of business. Perhaps inclusion in this program would improve transparency and a modicum of love between Google and their legitimate small business owner users and hopefully mitigate some of the financial pain we are felling every month.

If you’re a blogger making money solely on Adsense, well, then perhaps it’s time to re-think your business strategy and stop polluting the web with re-hash. In many cases this is the space junk we all abhor.

Agree with it or not, but the overseer’s are upon us and here to stay. If I have to partner in with Google and BUY their trust (like the bigs boys do already) to avoid these financial disasters called “quality updates” that are basically as costly, useless and ineffective as the “war on drugs”, then so be it.

You may now continue your speculation.”"

4.

“”"”The best indicator that the results are woefully unstable:

In the last month our days to transaction has dropped to near zero. Gone are the 28+, 14 day and 7-14 day transactions. Everything is 0 or 1 days and searches for the company name have gone up 4x.

I thought the results were great 18 months ago. Good 12 months ago. Unstable 6 months ago, bad 3 months ago and so bad now I’m beginning to wonder about the future of the search engines. I wish I could post examples from the last year or two showing the degradation of searches. Bing is not much better currently. What’s happened?

It doesnt matter what I type in the box most of the time I cannot find what I want. If I’m doing a medical search I don’t want a yahoo answers page. If I’m buying a product I don’t always want amazon. Gone are the small .edu’s returning for searches. Somewhere the knob for big sites considered authorities in one topic is turned to high for other topics.

This started a few months ago and is getting worse. Sites authority is being misunderstood. Our site is an authority in the wrong areas and we are getting the wrong traffic as a result and my own searches yield the same thing in all other areas. My guess is the problem is with a semantic misunderstanding of page wording.”"”

5.

“”I broadly agree with you, semantic analysis is clearly at work, but I think it was switched on or “turned up” before Penguin. I noticed a sudden change in Google’s behaviour a few weeks ago, when search for “how to stop x” (where x is a personal problem) started producing search results full of how to avoid x, how to overcome x, how to control x, how to prevent x (and vice versa).

Nonetheless, the degree to which search results now produce irrelevant but indirectly related meanings suggests to me that this algo has introduced much greater use of semantic analysis.

At the same time I see no clear patterns, and see little opportunity to anlayze what is happening, which might imply that they have introduced a whole raft of changes in the Penguin update – I don’t think that is news.

My sense is that the following factors are implicated in Penguin:

There is a big attack on sites with affiliate links; some EMD and small sites which have survived appear to be ones without affiliate links

The top ten results seem somehow different in quality and nature to the ones on page 2 and further down, leading me to wonder if they are being treated differently in the final stages of ranking….and yes, I know that doesn’t quite make sense, since they obviously are, or they wouldn’t be in the top 10, but I can’t articulate what it is that I am sensing.

most of the sites I see in the top 10 results that have blog comment spam as their backlinks are relatively new sites

The sites which have hundreds or thousands of spammy backlinks from blog link networks, the ones that are still in the top 10 results, seem to be older sites which have recently risen to the top of the search results

Keyword stuffing does not seem to have affected sites’ position in the search engine rankings as far as I can see”"

7.

“What has changed in the algo? No doubt many things have but my sense is strong around:

linked websites – in networks with a clear footprint – got demoted (ho hum!), not just in their own right but also in their ability to pass PR

a narrowing of the acceptable frequency of anchor text which would cause a target URL to feature in the search results for a particular phrase; too low – no chance of appearing, unsurprisingly, but go a smidgen over the acceptable upper limit (IMJ around 40%) – and the website plummets for that and all other searches

great sensitivity to link churn – changing, adding, or removing links too quickly (and that may be not very quickly at all) causes a penalty

I’m not so sure that thin content has really had much to do with this….

As always, though, massive link span can still keep you there, till it’s detected..”"”

8.

“I’m still in shock. Some of the newly ranked top 10 sites across numerous queries are fairly new, and in fact seem to show a rapid increase in backlinks just since February. Removed from the serps were established, trusted websites that have been around a long time and are expected to have some strange links. If I need to get a loan or make a purchase of any kind online, I would certainly prefer to do business with someone who has been in the business for 10 years than a fly-by-night site that gets a free pass because no one links to them. They haven’t been around long enough to ever get a blogroll link. The entire update makes no sense. It’s just not right.”

9.

“I’m at a total loss. Traffic is way up from google, 50% since the 20th. But the traffic is wrong. I cannot say exactly how or why. I think we are getting people looking for something somewhat related so they hang around for a bit but not the laser sharp customers bing sends us. Brand widget pole is the product we may get searches for telephone poles, or political polls if the name of the product brand is even remotely close.

To me it seems the more they reduce exact matches the less targeted the traffic is and indeed my personal searches return mostly trash. Searching for medical conditions I’m suddenly getting sites that require me to sign up so they can email me videos? Major medical sites are down the page beyond irrelevant YouTube videos?

It seems to me that googles algorithm is like windows nt. it’s gotten so big with so many fixes on top of fixes changes are having unintended consequences. Mr Cutts indicates this influences 3% of searches but I find it hard to believe they can calculate that figure. Every search I do seems to be changed right now so what are the other 97% people searching for the color yellow?”

As for Google this is how they described the change and what they are seeking to do with it:

• Categorize paginated documents. [launch codename "Xirtam3", project codename "CategorizePaginatedDocuments"] Sometimes, search results can be dominated by documents from a paginated series. This change helps surface more diverse results in such cases.
• More language-relevant navigational results. [launch codename "Raquel"] For navigational searches when the user types in a web address, such as [bol.com], we generally try to rank that web address at the top. However, this isn’t always the best answer. For example, bol.com is a Dutch page, but many users are actually searching in Portuguese and are looking for the Brazilian email service, http://www.bol.uol.com.br/. This change takes into account language to help return the most relevant navigational results.
• Country identification for webpages. [launch codename "sudoku"] Location is an important signal we use to surface content more relevant to a particular country. For a while we’ve had systems designed to detect when a website, subdomain, or directory is relevant to a set of countries. This change extends the granularity of those systems to the page level for sites that host user generated content, meaning that some pages on a particular site can be considered relevant to France, while others might be considered relevant to Spain.
• Anchors bug fix. [launch codename "Organochloride", project codename "Anchors"] This change fixed a bug related to our handling of anchors.
• More domain diversity. [launch codename "Horde", project codename "Domain Crowding"] Sometimes search returns too many results from the same domain. This change helps surface content from a more diverse set of domains.
• More local sites from organizations. [project codename "ImpOrgMap2"] This change makes it more likely you’ll find an organization website from your country (e.g. mexico.cnn.com for Mexico rather than cnn.com).
• Improvements to local navigational searches. [launch codename "onebar-l"] For searches that include location terms, e.g. [dunston mint seattle] or [Vaso Azzurro Restaurant 94043], we are more likely to rank the local navigational homepages in the top position, even in cases where the navigational page does not mention the location.
• Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking. [launch codename "Bi02sw41"] One of the most fundamental signals used in search is whether and how your search terms appear on the pages you’re searching. This change improves the way those terms are scored.
• Disable salience in snippets. [launch codename "DSS", project codename "Snippets"] This change updates our system for generating snippets to keep it consistent with other infrastructure improvements. It also simplifies and increases consistency in the snippet generation process.
• More text from the beginning of the page in snippets. [launch codename "solar", project codename "Snippets"] This change makes it more likely we’ll show text from the beginning of a page in snippets when that text is particularly relevant.
• Smoother ranking changes for fresh results. [launch codename "sep", project codename "Freshness"] We want to help you find the freshest results, particularly for searches with important new web content, such as breaking news topics. We try to promote content that appears to be fresh. This change applies a more granular classifier, leading to more nuanced changes in ranking based on freshness.
• Improvement in a freshness signal. [launch codename "citron", project codename "Freshness"] This change is a minor improvement to one of the freshness signals which helps to better identify fresh documents.
• No freshness boost for low-quality content. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We have modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude fresh content identified as particularly low-quality.
• Tweak to trigger behavior for Instant Previews. This change narrows the trigger area for Instant Previews so that you won’t see a preview until you hover and pause over the icon to the right of each search result. In the past the feature would trigger if you moused into a larger button area.
• Sunrise and sunset search feature internationalization. [project codename "sunrise-i18n"] We’ve internationalized the sunrise and sunset search feature to 33 new languages, so now you can more easily plan an evening jog before dusk or set your alarm clock to watch the sunrise with a friend.
• Improvements to currency conversion search feature in Turkish. [launch codename "kur", project codename "kur"] We launched improvements to the currency conversion search feature in Turkish. Try searching for [dolar kuru], [euro ne kadar], or [avro kaç para].
• Improvements to news clustering for Serbian. [launch codename "serbian-5"] For news results, we generally try to cluster articles about the same story into groups. This change improves clustering in Serbian by better grouping articles written in Cyrillic and Latin. We also improved our use of “stemming” — a technique that relies on the “stem” or root of a word.
• Better query interpretation. This launch helps us better interpret the likely intention of your search query as suggested by your last few searches.
• News universal results serving improvements. [launch codename "inhale"] This change streamlines the serving of news results on Google by shifting to a more unified system architecture.
• UI improvements for breaking news topics. [launch codename "Smoothie", project codename "Smoothie"] We’ve improved the user interface for news results when you’re searching for a breaking news topic. You’ll often see a large image thumbnail alongside two fresh news results.
• More comprehensive predictions for local queries. [project codename "Autocomplete"] This change improves the comprehensiveness of autocomplete predictions by expanding coverage for long-tail U.S. local search queries such as addresses or small businesses.
• Improvements to triggering of public data search feature. [launch codename "Plunge_Local", project codename "DIVE"] This launch improves triggering for the public data search feature, broadening the range of queries that will return helpful population and unemployment data.
• Adding Japanese and Korean to error page classifier. [launch codename "maniac4jars", project codename "Soft404"] We have signals designed to detect crypto 404 pages (also known as “soft 404s”), pages that return valid text to a browser, but the text only contains error messages, such as “Page not found.” It’s rare that a user will be looking for such a page, so it’s important we be able to detect them. This change extends a particular classifier to Japanese and Korean.
• More efficient generation of alternative titles. [launch codename "HalfMarathon"] We use a variety of signals to generate titles in search results. This change makes the process more efficient, saving tremendous CPU resources without degrading quality.
• More concise and/or informative titles. [launch codename "kebmo"] We look at a number of factors when deciding what to show for the title of a search result. This change means you’ll find more informative titles and/or more concise titles with the same information.
• Fewer bad spell corrections internationally. [launch codename "Potage", project codename "Spelling"] When you search for [mango tea], we don’t want to show spelling predictions like “Did you mean ‘mint tea’?” We have algorithms designed to prevent these “bad spell corrections” and this change internationalizes one of those algorithms.
• More spelling corrections globally and in more languages. [launch codename "pita", project codename "Autocomplete"] Sometimes autocomplete will correct your spelling before you’ve finished typing. We’ve been offering advanced spelling corrections in English, and recently we extended the comprehensiveness of this feature to cover more than 60 languages.
• More spell corrections for long queries. [launch codename "caterpillar_new", project codename "Spelling"] We rolled out a change making it more likely that your query will get a spell correction even if it’s longer than ten terms. You can watch uncut footage of when we decided to launch this from our past blog post.
• More comprehensive triggering of “showing results for” goes international. [launch codename "ifprdym", project codename "Spelling"] In some cases when you’ve misspelled a search, say [pnumatic], the results you find will actually be results for the corrected query, “pneumatic.” In the past, we haven’t always provided the explicit user interface to say, “Showing results for pneumatic” and the option to “Search instead for pnumatic.” We recently started showing the explicit “Showing results for” interface more often in these cases in English, and now we’re expanding that to new languages.
• “Did you mean” suppression goes international. [launch codename "idymsup", project codename "Spelling"] Sometimes the “Did you mean?” spelling feature predicts spelling corrections that are accurate, but wouldn’t actually be helpful if clicked. For example, the results for the predicted correction of your search may be nearly identical to the results for your original search. In these cases, inviting you to refine your search isn’t helpful. This change first checks a spell prediction to see if it’s useful before presenting it to the user. This algorithm was already rolled out in English, but now we’ve expanded to new languages.
• Spelling model refresh and quality improvements. We’ve refreshed spelling models and launched quality improvements in 27 languages.
• Fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results. [launch codename "Queens5", project codename "Autocomplete"] We’ve rolled out a change designed to show fewer autocomplete predictions leading to low-quality results.
• Improvements to SafeSearch for videos and images. [project codename "SafeSearch"] We’ve made improvements to our SafeSearch signals in videos and images mode, making it less likely you’ll see adult content when you aren’t looking for it.
• Improved SafeSearch models. [launch codename "Squeezie", project codename "SafeSearch"] This change improves our classifier used to categorize pages for SafeSearch in 40+ languages.
• Improvements to SafeSearch signals in Russian. [project codename "SafeSearch"] This change makes it less likely that you’ll see adult content in Russian when you aren’t looking for it.
• Increase base index size by 15%. [project codename "Indexing"] The base search index is our main index for serving search results and every query that comes into Google is matched against this index. This change increases the number of documents served by that index by 15%. *Note: We’re constantly tuning the size of our different indexes and changes may not always appear in these blog posts.
• New index tier. [launch codename "cantina", project codename "Indexing"] We keep our index in “tiers” where different documents are indexed at different rates depending on how relevant they are likely to be to users. This month we introduced an additional indexing tier to support continued comprehensiveness in search results.
• Backend improvements in serving. [launch codename "Hedges", project codename "Benson"] We’ve rolled out some improvements to our serving systems making them less computationally expensive and massively simplifying code.
• “Sub-sitelinks” in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename "thanksgiving"] This improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet.
• Better ranking of expanded sitelinks. [project codename "Megasitelinks"] This change improves the ranking of megasitelinks by providing a minimum score for the sitelink based on a score for the same URL used in general ranking.
• Sitelinks data refresh. [launch codename "Saralee-76"] Sitelinks (the links that appear beneath some search results and link deeper into the site) are generated in part by an offline process that analyzes site structure and other data to determine the most relevant links to show users. We’ve recently updated the data through our offline process. These updates happen frequently (on the order of weeks).
• Less snippet duplication in expanded sitelinks. [project codename "Megasitelinks"] We’ve adopted a new technique to reduce duplication in the snippets of expanded sitelinks.
• Movie showtimes search feature for mobile in China, Korea and Japan. We’ve expanded our movie showtimes feature for mobile to China, Korea and Japan.
• No freshness boost for low quality sites. [launch codename “NoRot”, project codename “Freshness”] We’ve modified a classifier we use to promote fresh content to exclude sites identified as particularly low-quality.
• MLB search feature. [launch codename "BallFour", project codename "Live Results"] As the MLB season began, we rolled out a new MLB search feature. Try searching for [sf giants score] or [mlb scores].
• Spanish football (La Liga) search feature. This feature provides scores and information about teams playing in La Liga. Try searching for [barcelona fc] or [la liga].
• Formula 1 racing search feature. [launch codename "CheckeredFlag"] This month we introduced a new search feature to help you find Formula 1 leaderboards and results. Try searching [formula 1] or [mark webber].
• Tweaks to NHL search feature. We’ve improved the NHL search feature so it’s more likely to appear when relevant. Try searching for [nhl scores] or [capitals score].
• Keyword stuffing classifier improvement. [project codename "Spam"] We have classifiers designed to detect when a website is keyword stuffing. This change made the keyword stuffing classifier better.
• More authoritative results. We’ve tweaked a signal we use to surface more authoritative content.
• Better HTML5 resource caching for mobile. We’ve improved caching of different components of the search results page, dramatically reducing latency in a number of cases.

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