Has the Google Penguin become the punisher ?
Eric Enge wrote a very good article on Search Engine Land that took a look at how punitive the Google Penguin really is. Enge expressed that he had a heavy heart with relation to the unforgiving nature of the Penguin.
Enge gives those webmasters new to the game a primer on how the Penguin came to be:
History Of Penguin
The first release of Penguin took place on April 24, 2012, and it landed on the industry like a ton of bricks. From my perspective, everything seemed normal when Penguin 1.1 landed on May 25, 2012.
Things were looking like Panda, that we might expect regular updates, and webmasters who had been gobbled up by Penguin had a reasonable way to recover if they cleaned up their acts and started doing what Google wanted. But then the updates became rare. Here is the entire update history:
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Penguin #1 (1.0): April 24, 2012
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Penguin #2: May 25, 2012
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Penguin #3: October 5, 2012
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Penguin #4 (2.0): May 22, 2013
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Penguin #5: October 4, 2013
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And then, nothing!
I am not an SEO expert so let me get that out of the way up front, but I do read a lot about SEO and at times I think it can become confusing for those like myself who know a little, but nowhere near what an SEO professional knows.
From what I understand there has not been a new Penguin release for several months, and without it, those who have followed their Webmaster tools updates and have gotten links removed or disavowed, still cannot improve their ranking.
Enge points out three scenarios for why Google is doing what it is doing:
Why is Google handling Penguin this way? I can think of only three possible answers:
- Doing data refreshes of the algorithm is incredibly hard. I only list this one for completeness, because I don’t believe it to be true.
- They believe that frequent data refreshes would make it too easy for churn and burn spammers. This one is a real possibility.
- They are frustrated and angry after a long war against a tide of spammers that never stop. Just like the Roman army trying to hold back the barbarians.
Could it be that the third reason explains why Penguin almost never updates? All I can say to that is, I hope not.
There are 71 comments which are also very good, one commenter talked about how he has done all he could do and his business is still down because of no Penguin refresh.
Karl Baxter wrote:
There’s rumour’s that google will not refresh penguin as Matt Cutts stated “they can’t run penguin as it is too susceptible to negative seo. and they don’t care who is affected” I am a business owner that made the mistake of paying a trusted S.E.O company in the UK to work on our site in 2010 to 2012 , My site got hit in April 2012 and I have done everything possible to try to get my site to recover. I know its my fault as I did not understand S>E>O fully and was at the time happy with the results but with 95% of organic traffic removed my company is really struggling now and I have had to make Family members redundant including my Brother 🙁
Please Please Please Google can you refresh the data. I can do no more now on link removals every spam link has been removed or disavow’ed our link profile is showing only 80 spam domain left (all disavow’ed) that are Live and over 700 domains with natural links including links from the BBC, NBC, Yahoo News etc Our website is a good quality site that provides a great user experience, but no organic rankings 🙁
Read the full article here
I dont think its a coincidence that a lack of ability to improve your search rankings or gain insight into how to better promote your website has coincided with an increase in Googles advertising revenues.
The question is: who are the Romans, and who are the Barbarians?
You seldom see any using a search engine to look for twitter, or facebook. Or godaddy. Or any real website out there. Search is for I don’t know, losers?
In regards to the opening comment “There’s rumour’s that google will not refresh penguin as Matt Cutts stated “they can’t run penguin as it is too susceptible to negative seo.”
Penguin is currently already “too susceptible to negative seo” and this is a major problem that needs to be fixed. Local business which Google has stated they love are suffering at the hands of a very competitive and fierce marketplace from their competitors from negative comments and negative SEO. For the most part, any local business does not have the authority to withstand a well planned negative SEO attack. Many local businesses will have at most a couple thousand backlinks from a couple hundred IP addresses. A couple SENUKE campaigns, a couple fiverr gigs and a run from Search Engine Ranker or ScrapeBox, building thousands of backlinks to a website targeting their main keywords and their website is screwed. Who is left to pick up the pieces, the small business paying someone to undue what was done or start over. Its just not fair and that is why Penguin is so very flawed. After all Penguin is algorithmic and it only sees good and bad.
The future is negative SEO unfortunately. The web is about to get very ugly.
Hello MHB,
The Era of SEO Manipulated Search Engine Marketing is waning and giving way to recycling back to identifiable and meaningfull Online Business Names.
Early in The SEO Manipulated search Engine Era a name like Google or yahoo or aviya or ————- were able to be found through Search Engine Marketing because the channels for doing so were functional to a limited degree.
The Google Search Engine alone has the data of 30 trillion Unique websites, dumped into its massively overloaded data base, causing a tremendously dysfunctional process for finding anyones Online Business called(Marketing Saturation Obsolescence)
http://www.businessinsider.com/500m-things-google-has-never-heard-of-2013-5#ixzz2TK2lnz1R
The future holds nothing but more Market saturating dumps of Bastardized and manipulated data to the already overloaded Search Engine Model, increasing its already Dysfunctional Marketing Platform.
We say we are going full circle back to meaningful Online business names, such as International Business Machines, General motors, Ford, American telephone &Telegraph, .SalesForce, FaceBook, YouTube, Etc. Etc.
Ah we know the first comment will be oh you mean IBM,GM,ATT, the truncated versions. Yes you can truncate Meaningfull names that are recognizable, but how about truncating Google,Zynga,Yahoo, Aviya, NO WAY !
The next big Online Marketing Locating systems will be Identifiable Pure Play Type-In names with .COM to the right of the dot. Definitional Type-Ins are the future, and the ones who position themselves early as such will be the new Online Powers into the future.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group0 (Metal Tiger) (Former Rockefeller IBEC Marketing Analyst/Strategist)
Seriously are you looking at things through a Time Machine the web used to be more typein oriented type in’s have been going down for years. As any domain owner with a real traffic portfolio what with their type in ‘s in 2003 what are their type in 2015 ? I think most will tell you type ins are on the downside.
Hello Domain Shame says ,
We really find you almost hilariously out of sync. You obviously have no grip on the DISRUPTION OF THE STATUS QUO, that is going to turn your World Upside Down. JAS 5/3/15
Jeff what I find hilarious is you first off Jeff I don’t own stock in Google, I don’t make any money off of search engine marketing so what goes on with Google is neither a plus or minus for me. but I said ask anyone that has a real traffic portfolio and ask themif type intraffic is down from what it was 10-12 years ago maybe Michael can weigh in on that.
Hello Domain Shame says
GOOGLES SEM SEO practices of the PAST are Changing Rapidly DomainShame are you aware of this ??
Swindles and Spam, Lurking in Your Search Results / (New York Times – Business Thur. may 23/13.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/technology/personaltech/how-to-detect-swindles-and-spam-lurking-in-your-search-results.html?_r=0
” Online advertisements are 182 times more likely to deliver malicious content than pornographic sites ”
Search Engine Spammers know that spelling mistakes open a door for SEO Manipulated interference. Its very common for people to leave out the o in a .COM site, search, opening the door for SEO Thievery(The Act of Stealing),
So for instance if you type in .cm the country code for cameroon, you might get Spam instead of the .COM page you wanted. This also applies to a misspelled .co where the m is left out.
Other door openers for spammers,are Web Address shorteners ( Truncated URLs) which can often lead you to unsavory Web destinations.
The need for Correctly spelled Web addresses, is becoming more and more pronounced, especially with the addition of millions of new web addresses, that will be created with the additional .Whatevers entering the DNS.