Penguin 3.0 is out!

^This. If there is an update indeed out then its a huge fail.

Those are all spammy niches to begin with, not really any other option than to deliver spammy sites in the SERPs whether it's your spammy site/s or another guys spammy sites..

Bridaldesire is not even close to a noob but how can you know.

Yes major shifts are going on at the moment.

Could be other sites just passing you, I'm seeing a number of sites completely tank, eg 100+ positions lost so that's more likely the result of a Penguin update, though can't be sure on such short notice of course.

Pirate update seems to depend on the number of DMCA complains and has less to do with links being build, besides they do a real poor job as I the first page is still full of torrent download sites for a certain popular serie.

If this is Pirate then marketers suck. An Anti piracy filter should not cause this much excitement.

Only y see increases so far but who knows might be crying by nightfall.


Cue the SEO is dead threads this week.

If so I would more think its a hit against tiered link building which Web 2.0s are used with alot. I can't see a hit based on a non relevant link pointing to you. That happens all the time organically.

Nothing. Just wait and carry on as usual. Penguin is an addition to the algorithm - sort of like adding another graphics card to your computer to improve the performance. The whole system still works without the extra graphics card - just not as well.

I'll keep building PBN links, and I imagine the algorithm outside of Penguin will continue to push me upwards back to where I was - until the next Penguin strikes at least.

My keywords only dropped between 1 and 2 places, and my homepage is unaffected and still at #1. I'll just build more links to my deep-pages and business as usual.

Impossible to say and as Ice said theres nothing to do now. Its too early for anyone to say. However given that from spring of last year Cutts was talking about denying the benefit to link spammers "upstream" tiered link building is bound to see more algo adjustments.

Google won't stop until GSA is only good for an icon on your desktop.

Just tell them sure no problem.. It's $750 a month now

its 2014.....So why??????????

Some other things you might want to look out for:

- all links pointing at just 1 or 2 pages of your money site
- as good as none links from relevant domains (BIG ONE)
- large amount of money anchors in general

That are just a few quick observations I made based on sites that tanked and sites that didn't.

Mutliple ways to achieve relevant links:

- (sub domain) web2.0's/blogs
- commenting on relevant authority blogs
- setting up hyper relevant domains (expired domains)
- forum participation

Saw quite a few sites survive purely based on a decent amount of nofollow but relevant blog comments

Sorry but some of you guys are going to kill yourselves with correlations that didn't have one thing to do with causation. I have had a very good day with one particular client who is new (with me) shooting WAY up - no social signals, comments or building nofollow links - not an EMD either.

The only thing you can know now, if this was penguin, is that non link spammed sites are going to do better because thats what penguin is designed to achieve.

Without disavowing how did you clean them up? If you have someone spamming you with shitty low quality blog posts? I am sure 99% of webmasters will not take them down. Any suggestions?

How long is a piece of string?

In most niches it's quite normal to achieve relevant links without much effort.

Travel sites from travel directories and blogs

Local businesses from Yelp and such where they end up on a page with other plumbers or have their own dedicated page.

Relevancy isn't neccesairly needed at site level (though more valuable eg less links needed), page level also plays a fairly large role.

Take a public blog network link for example, homepage link next to tons of different topics, once you start using excerpts you avoid that and then the link becomes a lot more relevant.

Web2.0's are also easy to utilize to achieve relevant links, especially when on a sub domain as that's kind of a domain on itself.

So is relevant blog commenting, forum participation and what not.

To put it from my own perspective, you can get away with a lot more paid / unnatural links when you have a decent portion of relevant links. Data doesn't lie.

I haven't figured that out myself yet vandernath, but if my rankings don't atleast somewhat recover from a pretty harsh lashing I'm thinking of diluting my links. I don't know how to get rid of bad links, but I feel that it might give Google extra fuel if you just admit you were using paid services.

Anyway, my plan of action includes:

- Diluting anchor texts
- creating a pbn (or possibly hiring a service that may do this)
- getting more contextual links from other blogs, forums, and article directories

I'm still fairly new to SEO tech, so there are probably other things that'll help get me back to normal. I have to say that this was a pretty fail update by Google though, there is a ton of spammy sites ranking even higher for keywords I was targeting, as well as lower quality content.

Still good to now its been confirmed. I hope its fully rolled out and settled because I like what I see.

We already have been creating PBNs that are focused around a subject (if you were talking to me) but not for those reasons but because they look more natural. They aren't all all about a narrow niche either because you'd be making a grave mistake to think that a PBN all about one very narrow niche is going to look natural automatically. I Recently had a discussion with a client about just that thing. Articles are a footprint. Normal sites are not built around narrow market niches but wider ones and blogs should be about someones life or interests not products. Businesses blog yes but they di so besides their main site. Whenever I see a site blogging about a market niche its always been spammy and looked obvious when they linked to their money site.

Sure but you are mixing apples with oranges . We were not having a discussion about spammy PBN practices.and for the record I don't care if you have all the links related five links in an article will always be a dead giveaway of a PBN or bought links. Relevancy will not save a bad setup PBN. The net is filled with bloggers that talk about a variety of things in their life and the links they give are solid because they do look natural and are built around the subject of their lives. We 've been building those kinds for a while. and we uild mostly ESN (Exclusive SEO networks) so they generally have few links and serve one person of business.

I am aware of LSI as are most of us here are. Google has been using it for years on pages. The issue I raised was not complexity but CPU load.

We will just disagree until you can give some real proof . I see no reason for Google to even bother their CPus about determining what an entire site is about. it serves no purpose. They don't rank entire sites but pages. Many sites have different categories and some of their most trusted like Wikipedia and CNN can't be pigeoned holed into one subject. Google can go off the signals on a page and the anchor text coming into that page while never needing to determine what the whole site is about. It would be a complete waste of programming resources., often be dead wrong and pointless.

Lets look at WF. So google categorizes WF as a site about internet marketing. So what if I get a link on WF in the suggestion or off topic forum? Why would that have a benefit for relevance for IM?? Google would find much more relevant links if I am actually on a page that is talking about Internet marketing or SEO or PPC than the suggestion forum just because the site is about internet marketing.

The value of the result and load on resources trying to categorize billions of sites in the world just isn't worth it.

I'm starting to like these updates too, one of my small 5 page websites has just jumped onto page 1 of Google and it's an EMD. Are EMD's coming back?

Haven't been around here in many moons... and I still see some old heads like Mike Anthony going at it.

Hahahaha, and Google still doing their thing... and everyone running for cover.. entertaining.

Dan CPU load is not about having data but processing that data. The programmers would have to program a process by which every site is identified with a particular niche even though in several site multiple non niche words and phrases will be present. so that involves analyzing words and phrase on every site, weighing them and deciding which ones are the predominant ones even in cases where the word appears less than the niche name is even mentioned (like the word news may not be mentioned in most stories on a news site). It would all be pointless given the easier thing would be to go off anchor text to each page and be done with it (using human intelligence from votes/links just as google does for links already)

as the saying goes ignorance is bliss my man. Call me when you have some proof that makes sense for your theory

Of course Google knows what a site is about, try to rank a site with 10 pages that cover 10 complete different topics and see what the outcome is, you'll be dissapppointed with the results.

Now try to rank a site with 10 pages laser focused on one topic and it will go a lot easier. No one that ranks sites will be surprised about that.

But relevancy is about a little more then just the content on a page and most seem to completely ignore that out of their own interest.

All the talk about making a site look real, first for who really? The chance of a manual review is almost non existent and when it happens Google is only one step away from instructing their manual reviewers to take a quick peek at the back link profile when having the slightest doubt, this will reveal everything and the excuse that there are plenty of re-used domains doesn't go up there as 99 out of 100 sites on the web DO have an anchor/link profile that matches the theme/topic of the site. It are just a few exceptions that don't have it and in those cases it are 99 out of 100 times sites with very few non matching links. A rock solid PR3 or PR4 with 1000's of links being about a complete different topic probably happens once in a million times.

So for me doing all the effort to make a network site look real (while still failing cause of above mentioned reason) is all a waste of time, the only reason I prefer to dedicate one domain per client is so that the client needs less "paid" links and thus it leaves less footprints that will be picked up automatically (yes dozens or hundreds of links from WP sites do leave a footprint when that's your main link source). Another reason might be that I would like the network site to rank to drive traffic but then there will be a little more needed then just making it visual look real, eg building links.

You can respond to it, but I probably won't read it as I know I'm right so there's nothing to discuss about it

Makes sense to contact bloggers about IM when trying to rank a mortgage company.

So cut the crap, of course you look for relevancy without you even knowing or admitting it.

Thinking that Google can't determine what a site is about is beyond ridiculous, what do you think Google ranks sites based on? Relevant content perhaps? Gosh it's the core of their business to know what pages/sites are about and people keep on claiming it's to hard to compute. Facepalm!

Do you have any Web2.0s pointing to your money site? Are these spammy or do they contain keyword anchor text? Spun content?

I explain more at my site if that helps.