Penguin Update

[Ghome1971]

How is everyone finding the Penguin update?

[completerookie]

doing a quick bit of research, it seems this update is designed to weed out poor links (from link farms etc) but a couple of very interesting points I read says you may encounter problems IF

• links coming from sites all having the same IP address
• links coming from sites all owned by the same person or company

Makes me wonder what effect it will have with micro-sites all owned by the same parent company,
Our company's main site has a lot of items, the menus and navigation is becoming more difficult and we about to embark on doubling up (albeit with differing text) and making more micro sites concentrating on specific categories. similar to Chris and his workwear sites.

It would be interesting on hearing from Chris Ashdown and see if he has had any effects on google postioning following the penguin update

kev

[Mike Hughes]

No real problems for me but then I've never really gone for gathering lots of low quality links. One niche site I have is down a couple of places for the main keywords but that's probably par for the course.

As you say, it does all look to be about eliminating low quality links from the rankings and there are a number of signals people are picking up on including:

- Site wide links
- mass links from the same IP
- mass links from networks of sites
- Unnatural anchor text (i.e. virtually all the same)

Essentially, any site with what looks like an unnatural link profile runs the risk of not doing so well in the serps.

The major impact at the moment seems to be a boosting of sites with high authority domains in the rankings. i.e. big, popular sites such as amazon, blogger, etc are now doing much better than they were before

There's plenty of discussion about whether there's any penalising going on or whether it's just people no longer seeing the benefits that they got before from the low quality links.

I think you're probably OK with 2-3 sites cross linking as it's fair enough for people to have their own little network (e.g. maybe an ecommerce site, a blog, a forum, etc) but much beyond that and you could be asking for trouble.

Right now I wouldn't be going for lots of small sites with links between them all. It'll be harder to get them to rank well and you run the risk of your link profile looking unnatural.

Mike

[Steve G Griggs]

I would agree with what Mike says, that's basically where Penguin seem to be aiming, at sites using loads of "paid" links and link farms.

[completerookie]

I've spent the morning reading all over the place.

one suggestion that google seems to like is to have a "parent site link" on a single page, and explain on that page, "you are just one of the sub-sites"

then all over the rest of the sub-site, have links to that one single page.
you still get the links, you still get the knowledge of being a site in your own right and you don't upset google too much

[Chunkford]

How is everyone finding the Penguin update?

It's been Interesting for sure

TBH it's been long over due and the sites that have been hit the hardest have been the sites who have over optimised their anchor text from sites with not much relevancy.

The worse thing to come out of it though is the ablility to harm other sites has been made a lot easier. But then my theory is G wanted this to cause confusion and hypocrisy between peers, and then will slowly "dial" it down behind the scene like they normally do with other updates.

[Paragon]

I think one of my sites has been hit by Penguin.
Suddenly lost position on a number of our best keyphrases.
It has really affected traffic and thus orders etc.

www.TheDancersShop.co.uk

Any Actinic SEO people got any suggestions we could try?

We do have some duplicate content (not identical), product subcategories that come under more than one main category. Could it be this?

Plus we have an Amazon affiliate shop within the site too?

I've never done any webspam related practices or blackhat techniques.

[chris ashdown]

Quite honestly I cannot see any problem with our setup with one link to each of the 7 sites, hardly a link farm, but time will tell

As a matter of interest what software are you all using to monitor keyword positions

[Paragon]

Personally I tend to check our ranking manually for a select number of keywords/phrases

[Mike Hughes]

Steve, I wouldn't be surprised if the amazon affiliate pages are to blame. Duplicate content was hit hard by the Panda update and I have heard it has a site wide impact.

Mike

[Paragon]

Thanks Mike, that was one of my initial thoughts too.
The Amazon pages don't contribute that much anyway so may remove them and see what happens.
What if we just link to separate Amazon stores rather than embed them within the website??

But in contrast I also have a standalone Amazon webstore and that is still sitting second on Google.

[Mike Hughes]

Thinking about I doubt if the amazon affiliate page is your sole problem. But there's little point in having it as anyone looking for books is going to go to amazon anyway.

You seem to be doing OK in terms of the number of links but I do wonder a bit about your anchor text distribution. I don't have any tools that look at this (so if anyone knows some good ones, please post). From a quick look, it looks as if all your external links are using your url as the anchor text. Anchor text is one of the key ranking factors and now needs to have an even distribution to do well.

So in your case I'd probably be looking at getting more deep links to your web pages using anchor text like 'Dance costumes', 'leotards', 'tutus', 'dresses', etc.

It's worth doing more checking and research though.

Mike

[RoofingWarehous]

So what would be a good example of Inbound links?

Obviously paid links coming from completely irrelevant pages are not good, but what is a good example of an inbound link?

Surely the links in your forum signitures on here cant help? Lol.

[Mike Hughes]

To avoid problems with Penguin you want to have a reasonable mix of incoming links. i.e. you should really be looking to have:

- Links from a variety of sources (i.e. not all forum links)

- Links to a variety of your pages (i.e. not all home page)

- Links with a mix of anchor text (so not all 'Cheap Viagra')

You should also be looking at the quality of the website / pages your links are on. i.e. if they're on a forum full of spammy links because no-body bothers to delete them then thats also an indicator of poor quality. Also consider the relevance of the page / website the link is on.

Signature links are not necessarily bad. Look at Lee's page on Actinic templates. He links in his signature with 'Actinic templates' and is sitting at number 3 in google. With 15,000 posts google must be seeing a lot of these links and his link profile will definitely be skewed. But then the links are all from a well controlled forum, with very few spam links, that is highly relevant to his website and his links. So in his case I'm sure the good signals outweigh the bad.

I suspect the key thing here is that Google wants to remove sites that are clearly spamming links. As long as you aren't abusively spamming links there's unlikely to be a significant hit to your website.

Mike

[RoofingWarehous]

To avoid problems with Penguin you want to have a reasonable mix of incoming links. i.e. you should really be looking to have:

- Links from a variety of sources (i.e. not all forum links)

- Links to a variety of your pages (i.e. not all home page)

- Links with a mix of anchor text (so not all 'Cheap Viagra')

You should also be looking at the quality of the website / pages your links are on. i.e. if they're on a forum full of spammy links because no-body bothers to delete them then thats also an indicator of poor quality. Also consider the relevance of the page / website the link is on.

Signature links are not necessarily bad. Look at Lee's page on Actinic templates. He links in his signature with 'Actinic templates' and is sitting at number 3 in google. With 15,000 posts google must be seeing a lot of these links and his link profile will definitely be skewed. But then the links are all from a well controlled forum, with very few spam links, that is highly relevant to his website and his links. So in his case I'm sure the good signals outweigh the bad.

I suspect the key thing here is that Google wants to remove sites that are clearly spamming links. As long as you aren't abusively spamming links there's unlikely to be a significant hit to your website.

Mike

My site is still young (5 Months online)

We have a few links out there, but a lot of our pages have been effected. I think its due to literally only 1 or 2 links pointing to these pages, have strong anchor text.

For example I have a page that has been knocked out of the SERPS;

-It has no duplicate content
-It has literally a handfull of links (But strong anchor text)

Im thinking that i just need to get more good quality links out there to balance this out.

To be fair though, I have mixed my links up, coming from a variety of good relevant sources, linking to different pages... But a lot of our terms have been effected.

I deleted my sig links from forums like this one, as i think it might help while my site is young and lacking links.

2 Weeks ago all of our pages came back in to the SERPS for 1 week.

That week we turnt over 5 figures, and had mass' of traffic. Now, since the 24th April it has been dramatically effected.

I think ill stick with getting good quality links out there, directorys and blogs dont seem to be doing me any justice atm, but im no expert.