Link Building Experts talk about Google Penguin

Panda was way more of felt update. It affected much more of the internet. That isn’t to belittle those who were hit by Penguin. Those who were hit by Penguin were hit bad.

But more sites were impacted by Panda than Penguin.

Panda seemed to be more on-site issues – looked like it interpreted thinks like bounce rate, thin content, and etc. Basically, on-site spam. Penguin seems like it’s off-site spam – bad, unnatural link profiles and etc.

To me, Panda was more of a knock on content, and Penguin was more of a knock on links. When Panda first rolled out the main issue everyone was talking about was duplicate content; with Penguin, it was low quality links. They both have similarities and they’re both more than just those simple issues, but it’s my way of summarizing it.

It seemed to me as if Google actually had three updates over the space of a week. They talked about the middle one, as “Penguin” but were deathly quiet on the other two. This means that they covered quite a bit of ground and different people are affected in different ways. In summary – this update was all about addressing unnatural link profiles designed to manipulate PageRank and Google serps. It affected Paid links, link networks, footer links and probably plenty more.

This is a really interesting question as the lines between the two updates are blurring. On a basic level Penguin is designed to be predominantly an off-page webspam policing filter focused on spam as defined by an army of human spam raters Google employed last year. The filter was then written to mimic their findings and enable the search engine to scale it globally.
Panda is a content based filter designed to weed out thin, valueless content created to ‘manipulate’ search engines. It also looks for duplication etc.

Penguin seems like the natural next step after Panda. Panda, as we all learned, was a low-quality algorithm change/filter with targeted on-page. Penguin seems to be a low-quality algorithm as well, to an extent, except it is now targeting the off-site SEO of websites. Part of this is the over-optimization section that we’ve all heard was coming (or interpreted Matt to be saying) which seems to be targeting too aggressive of anchor text, but part of it as well seems to be the deindexation of low quality directories.

I think Penguin is interesting because unlike Panda this update appears to be targeting bad SEO practices. Panda was just trying to sort Websites into “high quality” versus “low quality” whereas Penguin is trying to improve Google’s enforcement of its spam policies. Panda went after Websites that were “Not Spam” in nature — just providing the bare minimum of value to visitors. Penguin went after Websites that were (perhaps in some cases unintentionally or unwittingly) crossing the line and putting too much emphasis on doing things to please the search algorithm.

With both updates there are many people complaining about how their sites were unfairly punished. I don’t think that’s really the case. I’ve had Websites affected by both updates and I can mostly agree with the downgrades, even if I cannot be absolutely sure my most recent downgrade was due to Penguin (it happened a few days earlier). Two of the three Websites where I have taken hits depend on content provided by other people. While that’s a small sampling, it suggests to me that you really have to take your role as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief for your Websites seriously.

Both of these updates were designed to demote Websites that depend on corner-cutting techniques for producing large amounts of content AND to influence search results placement. Penguin, especially, does a really good job of targeting links that were clearly and obviously created only to help Websites outrank other Websites in spite of what the ranking algorithms were trying to do (promote really good, authoritative content).

People easily find exceptions and get angry, but Google never promised these algorithms would clean up 100% of the mess or be 100%, so people are criticizing Google for failing to deliver on promises it never made. Panda improved the quality of search results and Penguin stripped many sites of the unfair advantages they were using to compete in the search results.

Panda was probably more successful than Penguin in achieving its goals, but if — as many of us suspect — there will be more Penguin iterations with improvements, then I think Penguin may become every bit as successful as Panda.

Firstly, I want to make it clear that a lot of what we know on Penguin Update is based on educated guessing. “Educated” cause there are some sparse hints and tips coming from Google reps and “guesses” cause we can only look at the profiles of penalized sites and try to guess what it is that got them penalized. As future iterations of Penguin go live, our guesses will become more educated, as we will learn what actions help in getting out of penalty and what makes no difference.

That said, Penguin seems far more clear cut than Panda. By looking at number of sites that were hit, in different industries and by hearing from other people that are looking at even more sites that were hit, Penguin seems to be targeting low quality link profiles, while Panda is aiming for the low quality on-site content. The fact that Penguin seems far more clear cut probably stems from the ability to say with much more certainty what are spammy links, as opposed to saying what is low quality content. If I refer to the original list of questions published by the Google Search Quality team, that are supposed to serve as guidelines for assessment of quality of content, for example, the answer to the question “Whether I would feel comfortable giving credit card to this site?” can differ between different people. On the other hand, spammy link profile is much easier to spot, especially if you are an SEO – people usually do not link to websites using exact anchor keywords (and they put those exact match anchored links into sidebars or footers even less frequently) so anchor profiles that look like keyword research reports are usually a good sign of manipulation. Due to these differences, I think Penguin penalties will be much easier to diagnose, but harder to clean up, whilst Panda penalized sites will be hard to diagnose, but easier to fix.

We all know that Panda is an onpage update and that the Penguin is backing up the offpage part. First Google raised the content problem and invoked the quality of it. The same thing happened for links too.
These are just balancing updates; they sustain each other with one single purpose: cleaning the SERPs. There were rumors that Google is trying to freak out the SEOs clients toward PPC and many other conspirative directions. They might be true but there is no hard evidence on this matter.
At the beginning Google Panda was pretty “correct” about the sites he evaluates. There is a lot of junk content on web, many misleading sites that make search becoming annoying. Hitting poor content sites, thin affiliate content, scraped content, was a good thing to do.
But then raising up brands in SERPs just because are brands doesn’t seem like a good idea. Not all brands have valuable content or are useful sites (bad user experience, lot of self-promos). So that was not really the proper answer on cleaning the SERPs.
The next “cleaning measure” was to evaluate sites that are sustaining junk sites on SERPs. We now have a new concept about link building and how links should be but the same problem: evaluating and separating the good for the bad.
Devaluating web directories, poor content sites, scraping sites seems normal and it should be done long time ago.
But the next problem coming up from all these measures is if this making spamming less easy? Doesn’t mean that now buying links will be more important? Spamming social media for links will be properly handled by Google? Corrupting newspaper editors and journalists for links will be harder?
So SEOs should think about equilibrium, proportions, things done in the limits of Googles way are profitable. We heard that before, we will hear it again. Thats the game…

That’s fairly easy actually. The Panda update was more about usability. As such it focused on elements such as thin content and real estate (ads above the fold are a bad idea for example). Conversely the Penguin update was as advertised; a web spam update. That means they’re looking at on-site spam as well as off-site (link building). Many folks seem to get myopic over trying to define Penguin as one or the other. I recently covered potential elements in a post on SEW (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2174997/Life-After-Google-Penguin-Going-Beyond-the-Name)

I would say that Panda and Penguin are more similar than maybe many think:
• Both are “filters” of the main algorithm, not updates of the same Google algorithm;
• Penguin, as Panda, seems to be a learning update. As Panda refined itself with every new version, I suspect that Penguin will do the same in recognizing the patterns of the “bad link profiles”;
• Both seems to be a serious answer to an old question: what does really Google do against search spam?

I’m not quite sure they are comparable as one deals with thin content and other deals with bad links. Panda was great when I worked directly with big brands myself because it got them to really start moving on the recommendations I’d made. Penguin hasn’t negatively affected any of our clients at iAcquire, so I guess I should say thanks Google?

It looks like the Google Spam Team finally got around to changing some variables on how they handle links with the Penguin update. With Panda we definitely saw the low quality and thin content cause issues so at least they were nice enough to separate the two updates…I think.

A link that was not given by the writer for the reason of helping their users find related content or more information on what the author was writing about.

A link that doesn’t make sense in the context of it’s location. Why would a link be here? Does it make sense in this exact spot, page, and with this anchor text? If not, it’s probably a low quality link.

Ones that are created by the hundreds or thousands at the click of a button.

To ME a link defines a relationship between two urls – which means there needs to be a reflective relationship between the two businesses associated with each URL. Some relationships are string – others weak. I think Google has just introduced the concept of Divorce into the equation. If there is no relationship between the two pages of substance, then the link is probably not of a very good quality.

Again difficult to define, hence why there has been so much collateral damage as part of this rollout. Low quality for me is a link from a site either created specifically for the purpose of manipulating PageRank and passing link juice or it offers no extra value to the visitor or site.

A low quality link, in my opinion, is a manipulative link that does not add value to the Internet. I wouldn’t classify an anchor link as always manipulative either, if it adds value to the article or website where it is placed. Hence, I don’t think sites like DMOZ or BOTW are necessarily bad. But all of the directory networks with a DA >20 that are just meant for SEO (and yes, they have worked because Google let them work), I would classify these as low quality

Just about any type of link used “for SEO” strikes me as being low quality. People have put so much weight on links that they have pretty much abandoned any effort to create real value. Hence, every time I see an SEO blog article listing places to get links I write those links off as doomed to become toxic. As soon as enough people abuse those resources the search engines will devalue them. And if people insist on ignoring the search engines’ devaluations they can expect more link-based penalties for their sites.

To me “Low Quality Link” is a link that, if those kinds of links make up the majority of your profile, will get you penalized in Google. I know this definition does not mean anything really, but that is because “Low Quality” is a value judgement and these things can differ from beholder to beholder. If you are competing in a competitive niche, in which Google has for years rewarded sites using a certain kind of links, deciding that those links are “low quality”, would be negligent. Everybody has a 20-20 hindsight now that Google has dropped the hammer on certain techniques and can say “oh, well these are obviously low quality” but hundreds, if not thousands, of sites have made a lot of money over the years by building these links and the smart ones were prepared for this kind of change in algorithmic definition of what is considered quality.

Obvious optimized sites become low quality sites. Is it obvious that the content is optimized for no 1 in SERPs? Ok, then that might be tagged as low quality content and links coming from it can be marked as negative. Until now those kinds of sites were harmless but now are poisons. How much poison can you swallow so you wont be ending dead?
Next, does your site getting links with keywords anchor texts? If yes, then those links might be tagged as low quality. The new keywords are branded keywords. You are telling Google that you are building a brand and not (obvious) links. Dilute any low quality links with trusted branded links.
Keep in mind Panda and review sites that are giving you links. Are they useful to users? Is there any good user experience? Any proof of social activity?
Also, how many outgoing links does the site have? Is there any proof of link building? Having links on sites that selling lot of links may harm your rankings.

I do not think that the anchor text is now devaluated, I think Google is much more interested in proportions. Remember the equilibrium that I was saying before? Its available for anchor texts too. Until now it was simple: get back links with exact match keyword anchor texts and you will get high rankings. Now you have to dilute those exact keywords anchor texts with brand names.
So now its quite easy to build a brand then struggle to get exact keyword anchor texts.

Dropped dead. (joking)
Links value will evolve from basic signals to social signals by adding the social proof and behavior. In fact its the same kind of link building but what differ is the way links are valued. It will always count if you get links from content but now you need to confirm the “popularity” with social signals.
Building brands is the new link building, that’s for sure. How you will build it its the key.

Its should be easy to handle now that Penguin can detect irrelevant and low value links. Im sure Google seen them before. Im not sure about the “correctly” term because this is not how Google works.
“Negative SEO” is not new, weve seen tones of junk links before and Google did almost nothing about them. Just because of Penguin update we expect Google to treat them correctly, but Im not sure if this is the focus of Google. “Negative SEO” is not that common to make Google sensible about it. Ok, it will treat some of the examples that are exposed by the community but many sites can suffer penalties without getting analyzed.
I think many of “Negative SEO” penalties will be solved after the community reports with manual reviews.

That one is going to be a much larger problem. I hate to keep dropping links, but I’ve recently written at length about this as well on SEW (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2169138/Negative-SEO-Looking-for-Answers-from-Google).

I would love to see Google implement something like this.

And from what I know, they’re open to the idea. Ultimately we can’t wait upon Google to do this unfortunately. Part of the new world of SEO means watching your link profiles like a hawk. Be aware of anything suspect that comes along and make notes of it. Be aware of not only potential negative actions, but also what the client or contractors are doing.

Honestly this is a question I cannot really answer to. My hope is that Google can handle it, but the best is always to “help” Google creating a strong, relevant and trusted link profile and monitoring the link acquisition of our sites and register every anomaly. For instance, to detect suspicious spikes in links’ acquisition is surely a good practice we all will need to start.

Not until Skynet becomes self-aware. Search is algorithmic and algorithms can always be exploited once you figure out what makes it tick.

While there’s not a whole lot of solid proof it’s happening on a large scale, I think they’ll just setup filters for certain types of links and ignore them….that’s what should be happening. My belief is that all those unnatural link warnings that went out were just a scare tactic for now to calm everyone down and throw the link spammers into a tizzy. While everyone is complaining the SERPs are worse now, I don’t think Google is anywhere near done making changes and the next year should be an interesting one to say the least.

It is a friendly looking character, better than Panther. 🙂

Hard to make up a reason here without being mean to Google. So, insert mean Google joke here.

Because they’re tobogganing down a slippery slope when they make things like negative SEO and fake link removal notices possible 😉

Because they are starting to flap and are no longer able to fly?

Black and White animals…someone thought that might be funny?! I’d rather it be called the Webspam Update to help with clarity at this confusing time.

I think someone on the Search Quality team stumbled across this Penguin infographic and thought “Man, this is confusing as crap. Let’s name this algorithm something similar because we’re about to throw a ton of stuff at people and they’ll be as confused as I am right now!”

I suspect there may be a few Batman fans at Google — or perhaps they like the movie “Happy Feet”. They have so many project and update code names I don’t worry about why they pick one over the other.

Because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, but isn’t really a duck, but something else completely? I don’t know, and to be honest, this whole trend of humorously naming the updates by cute cuddly animals is somewhat distasteful in my opinion. People are getting fired, losing their income, forced to close businesses and while we can argue whether that is due to Google’s ruthlessness or lack of foresight on the size of business owners, I find it a tad in a bad taste to be treating the whole issue with humor and lightness.

Google intend to create a series of updates named by black and white animals. We have panda and penguin, up next will have updates named as skunk, zebra, cow, rabbit, orca, lemur, tiger, and. I call it „Google Zoo” and I expect to have more of these updates.
I wander how skunk update will look like. 😀

Oh my… I have no bloody idea there. They tend to have reasons, but I don’t recall seeing that anywhere. It’s certainly better than the original ‘over optimization’ update or even the ‘web spam’ update (though that one is the more fitting one). We have been joking in my community (SEO Dojo) that it seems black and white animals are the thing, (interesting given the white-hat / black-hat nature of the biz). And really, while a killer whale or a skunk might seem more appropriate to many, the cute and cuddly approach also seems a theme.

Recently I read a post saying that Penguin was choosen because of the sense of smell these (once) cute animals have. That could be a good explication to its name 🙂

The same reason they are the overlords of the internet — because they can. I suggest they call the next one skunk.

I don’t know if I can find a funny reason but Penguins are a social bird and in large groups so what if it’s a sign that Google+ and other social signals have come more into play? Links are too easily gamed these days and it makes perfect sense that social signals like shares from the collective “leaders” in your niche should do wonders for your content. If Matt Cutts, Eric Ward, Jason Acidre and Ross Hudgens all shared my latest post, what kind of signal is Google picking up from that? Most likely a good one.