Panda / Penguin Repair

1. Panda / Penguin Repair SEO is dead. Long live the king

2. Help or harm (‘11)? Links? Keywords in the link? Targeting low hanging keywords Domain name exact match Domain Age (5 years?) Lots of pages? Latent Symantic Indexing Ads on your page? Affiliate links on your page? Http Redirects? Social media? Negative SEO?

3. Panda and Penguin • The ongoing flux of Panda and Penguin & co. is now a very common and normal part of everyday life. • There are many, many updates each week, so this is not big news. • At a simplified level Panda is about content • Penguin is about offpage / spam

4. Panda • Started - Feb 23,2011 • Thin content / content farms • Ad to content ratio • Duplicate content • Low content on the page (Publishing stubs)

5. Penguin • Started- April 24,2012 • Keyword stuffing • Bad link neighborhood • “Negative SEO” • Link similarity

6. Pigeon 2 – Dec 22nd 2014 • This rollout happened late last week, and may indeed impact local shopping traffic for many merchants in the UK, Canada or Australia. Which again is surprising to us that they have not held this update until after the holiday shopping season. (Dec 22)

7. Penguin Everflux – Dec 10 • We are somewhat screwed now..

8. Pirate 2.0 — October 21, 2014 • More than two years after the original DMCA/"Pirate" update, Google launched another update to combat software and digital media piracy. This update was highly targeted, causing dramatic drops in ranking to a relatively small group of sites.

9. Penguin 3.0 — October 17, 2014 • More than a year after the previous Penguin update (2.1), Google launched a Penguin refresh. This update appeared to be smaller than expected (<1% of US/English queries affected) and was probably data-only (not a new Penguin algorithm). The timing of the update was unclear, especially internationally, and Google claimed it was spread out over "weeks".

10. 2014.. • "In The News" Box — October 2014 • Google made what looked like a display change to News-box results, but later announced that they had expanded news links to a much larger set of potential sites. The presence of news results in SERPs also spiked, and major news sites reported substantial traffic changes. • Google’s “In The News” Box Now Lists More Than Traditional News Sites (SEL) • Panda 4.1 (#27) — September 23, 2014 • Google announced a significant Panda update, which included an algorithmic component. They estimated the impact at 3-5% of queries affected. Given the "slow rollout," the exact timing was unclear. • Authorship Removed — August 28, 2014 • Following up on the June 28th drop of authorship photos, Google announced that they would be completely removing authorship markup (and would no longer process it). By the next morning, authorship bylines had disappeared from all SERPs. • Official Announcement from John Mueller (Google+)

11. 2014 • HTTPS/SSL Update — August 6, 2014 • After months of speculation, Google announced that they would be giving preference to secure sites, and that adding encryption would provide a "lightweight" rankings boost. They stressed that this boost would start out small, but implied it might increase if the changed proved to be positive. • HTTPS as a ranking signal (Google) • Pigeon — July 24, 2014 • Google shook the local SEO world with an update that dramatically altered some local results and modified how they handle and interpret location cues. Google claimed that Pigeon created closer ties between the local algorithm and core algorithm(s). • Google “Pigeon” Updates Local Search Algorithm With Stronger Ties To Web Search Signal (SEL) • Google Updates Local Algo with More Web Based Signals - Turmoil in SERPs (Blumenthals.com) • Authorship Photo Drop — June 28, 2014 • John Mueller made a surprise announcement (on June 25th) that Google would be dropping all authorship photos from SERPs (after heavily promoting authorship as a connection to Google+). The drop was complete around June 28th.

12. 2014 • Payday Loan 3.0 — June 12, 2014 • Less than a month after the Payday Loan 2.0 anti-spam update, Google launched another major iteration. Official statements suggested that 2.0 targeted specific sites, while 3.0 targeted spammy queries. • Google Spam Algorithm Version 3.0 Launches Today (SER) • Panda 4.0 (#26) — May 19, 2014 • Google confirmed a major Panda update that likely included both an algorithm update and a data refresh. Officially, about 7.5% of English-language queries were affected. While Matt Cutts said it began rolling out on 5/20, our data strongly suggests it started earlier. • Google Begins Rolling Out Panda 4.0 Now (SEL) • Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 & eBay's Very Bad Day (Moz) • Payday Loan 2.0 — May 16, 2014 • Just prior to Panda 4.0, Google updated it's "payday loan" algorithm, which targets especially spammy queries. The exact date of the roll-out was unclear (Google said "this past weekend" on 5/20), and the back-to-back updates made the details difficult to sort out.

13. How to spot it Find the date, find the Update

14. Panguin • = • Panguin.com

15. SEM Rush

16. Other resources.. • http://www.shoutmeloud.com/panda-penguin-tool-find-which-google-algo-hit-your-website.html • https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/the-latest-5-tools-ive-added-to-my-seo-toolbox/ • http://www.linkresearchtools.com/tools/dtox/€149 / month • Disavow toolhttps://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en • https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main • Toxic links • http://moz.com/community/q/finding-toxic-backlinks • Get list of Google webmaster links • http://www.google.com/webmasters/

17. Weekly view

18. How to find what you were hit by

19. Weekly view

20. Weekly view – a client

21. Weekly view

22. MozAlgo listing • http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

23. Basic Keyword Analysis SEO is dead. Long live the king

24. Keyword examples • If you take samples of what you had been ranking for BEFORE, and what you ranked for AFTER, then you can reverse back which keywords you were hit by, and why. • It may be possible to then rework them using clean SEO ongoing. • Many people track their primary keywords, and know how they are ranking month to month

25. Anon Case study • Offshore - 4 M page views / month • Yoastplugin • Lockedup sitemap listing (2x examples of this!) • Fixed RSS = massive thin content dump • Dropped ~80% of traffic • Rebuilt from ~50-100 words per page to 500-1000 / page • Pagination as a strategy • Recovered to 90% of original and other countries fixed before launch so up now 25% on total.