Internet Marketing with Josh SpauldingMaking Money through Ethical Internet Marketing.

30 comments

1. Ben (8 comments.)
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:00 pm 

   Hey Josh,

   Just had the same thing happen to my mortgage site. 10 Year old domain; natural links and over 80% original content. 20% were disclaimers and other content all mortgage site have.

   Was teaching a Facebook class last week and was showing people how to use your website to drive people to your FB apps.

   Doing a little bragging I said just look up denver mortgage rates – my site will be at the top of the page- Usually #1 never below #3!

   All of the sudden couldn’t find it! embarresed I gave them the URL.

   Now I have a so -so blog 3 Years old; 90% auto content that I have neglected for a year- on page 2!

   Well that’s why we keep learning from guys like you!

   Let us know when YOU get it all figured out for us (hehe) and then let us know! (I know you can do it- no pressure)

   Have good one! Good Post!

2. Robert (1 comments.)
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:14 pm 

   My main money making web hosting site that was pulling in about $5k/mo is now earning me a big fat $0 and I cannot for the life of me figure it out. I still have the #3 listing for what I *thought* was my money page, but my traffic dropped by about 90% and now nothing is converting. That tells me maybe something else was my money page and I can’t find it to resurrect it. It’s maddening.

3. Josh Spaulding
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:18 pm 

   OUCH very sorry to hear that from both of you.

   Robert, you may want to setup some goals in google analytics. You can figure it out pretty easily that one usually.

4. Shane Trusty (1 comments.)
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:18 pm 

   The past few years of Google getting steadily too big for its britches has led me to focus more on growing my list as well as sidestepping them in my traffic strategies. I firmly believe that at some point in the future the masses will have enough of the “big G knows best” mentality and take their searches elsewhere.

5. Eric (1 comments.)
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:22 pm 

   I’ve never gotten slapped by Google before, but this big smelly penguin flipper caught me right across the kisser!

   The site that fared worse is, I think, a very high quality site called Santa Barbara Wine Tours. I’m from Santa Barbara and really into wine, so even though this site is monetized, it was mostly a labor of love.

   Before this update, it ranked no. 3 for the main keyword and even as high as no. 1 for some keyword phrases. Now, it’s been banished to page 5 for the main keyword and kicked off of page 1 for most of the related keywords as well.

   I have another site, Mold Removal Santa Barbara, that is made up of just 3 rewritten posts. It was no. 1 before the penguin waddled into town, but now it holds spots 1 and 2!

6. Josh Spaulding
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:22 pm 

   That may happen sooner rather than later if they push out more smelly updates Bing’s search share continues to increase as well. But Bing will turn into a monster as well if it does ever beat out Google. They all do. It’s the nature of this World.

7. Josh Spaulding
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:24 pm 

   @ Eric – Familiar story. I think it’s pretty clear. Smelly Penguin prefers low quality sits. So get started on as many splogs as possible.

8. Rika Susan (28 comments.)
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:25 pm 

   No rhyme or reason with this one, Josh. My site took a huge hit. More than 6 years old, and an authority site, only original content written by myself and no underhand tactics. All that effort.

   I am sure it wasn’t the intention of Google to drop a site like mine way back or to impact your Germany site negatively, but this is the unfortunate result of their spam slam. This time there really seems to be a doozy of a mistake in the algo.

9. John Gibb (2 comments.)
   3rd May, 2012 at 3:36 pm 

   Could not agree more with this post, well said.

   I wrote about what happened to 1000 of my websites overall over at my blog as well.

   I still believe that websites genuinely writing for the humans and really reaching out to help people (providing value) are going to come out on top in the end. Such websites can’t be ignored by the search engines, especially not Google… or like josh said – their whole business model will go down hill fast.

10. Stef (68 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 4:10 pm 

    Jonathan points out an interesting subject that I don’t read too often:
    What are people looking for:
    e.g buying window blinds for their house of window blinds for their computer?
    Or the example in his forum: are people looking to buy bicycle wheels or do they want to read about a compassionate biker when they look for bicycle wheels.

    Anyways, if people can’t find what they are looking for, the searching will stop and the latter is never a SE intention.

11. Ann (1 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 5:20 pm 

    Yep. On May 1st a geo-targeted site I built , with an exact domain name match, which I was about to ‘flip’ to a pharmacist went from a solid #2 position (about 3 months time to that date) to page 4 – along with my competitor who also had an edm and landed also on page 4 overnight below me (they were a paid directory for pharmacist’s). Page 1 for our targeted edm keyword went from having only 2 Google Places listings on it, to being suddenly swamped with Google Places listings along with ads. There’s only a few spots left for organic listings now, as they get shoved further back on Page 2 and so on. I’m seeing this pattern happen more and more.

    I can only say I find relief in that I didn’t sell the site first, then have the client see his new acquisition tank really fast, with little hope for resurrection.

12. George Best (2 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 6:38 pm 

    My experience with my site rankings has been mixed, but overall it was probably a good thing to be reminded not to rely too heavily on any one source of traffic.

    The thing that confuses me is why Google seems to think that putting up quality, well-optimized content and then promoting it with backlinking, bookmarks, etc., is “gaming the system”. They put the system in place and then get all pissy about it when people figure it out and use the system to their advantage. When you make it about backlinks, intelligent webmasters are not likely to sit around waiting to get all natural backlinks. But intelligent webmasters also know that having a top Google ranking for a high volume keyword does you no good if your content is garbage and it doesn’t convert.

    Google is so concerned with link profiles and footprints that they seem to miss the whole concept of content quality. If they really want to provide a good user experience as they always claim to, they’d be looking more at bounce rates and average time spent on a page rather than where the links are coming from, what ratio the keyword links have to url and non-keyword links, etc.. They spend all this time on their super-secret complex algorithm when all they really need to do is look at what visitors are doing when they go to a given page. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if most page visitors leave within 20 seconds, it’s probably crap. Sure, use linking to index the pages initially, but once the site starts getting traffic, the links should be relatively unimportant compared to user activity on the page.

13. Hristo (5 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 7:50 pm 

    I was wondering why I lost almost all traffic to some of my sites. And it wasn’t even the beginning of the month when rankings usually change! It seems to be coming back slowly in the last couple of days, so I hope this continues until everything is back to normal (or better )

14. Erin Allen (1 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 7:51 pm 

    Thank you so much for post. I kept going crazy trying to figure out why my click thru rates went from really great down to about 50% of what I was getting.
    I kept thinking that maybe my links had been hijacked and I was examing everything.
    I am praying that I can get things turned around soon so that I start making more $$$.

15. Sprichie (1 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 8:40 pm 

    Hey Josh,

    I actually never pay any attention to what Google does and only heard of penguin because I get your emails. My PR went from 3 to 4 so maybe it benefited me in some way.

    Your timing of writing this article is perfect though as I just wrote an article on my site about how Google Plus is dead. Ex: I have a post with 599 Facebook shares to only 2 G+ shares, go figure. Their whole model is faulty and will be replaced by a fully functioning socially powered search engine in the future. Like the failure with Google Plus, their search engine algorithm needs a tweak before they lose out there as well.

    Your split toe shoe site is hilarious by the way; never even heard of those before. Like you point out though, it’s a great example of why these updates are BS. You, Me and many others work in an ethical way and although you know how to game the search engines you don’t, but then are slapped in the face.

    For those that aren’t familiar with your work, I reference some of your past reports for link building and I’ve taken my new site starting Jan 1, 2012 from scratch, to over 10,000 unique visitors, with over 30,000 pageviews as of 4-30-2012. This month should double both those numbers. You probably know of Gary Vaynerchuk, but for those that don’t, they should. Your advice coupled with his have been invaluable to me.

    Once I got away from making everything perfect for Google and just became a real person, making real connections with people online, writing about whatever I wanted, things finally worked out.

    Thanks again for your invaluable advice.

    Scott Sprich

16. Gary Lambert (6 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 8:45 pm 

    Most of my sites didn’t really lose any rankings. I had one that got messed up. It was all over the first page of Google for most of its keywords. Now they are all 3-5 pages deep.

    I read an article this morning from Micro Site Masters that was really good. It broke down the effect that penguin had on all there customers.

    Here it is if you want to check it out.
    http://bit.ly/Jp3AYu

17. Herschel Lawhorn (1 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 9:32 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    I like your term Smelly Penguin. That is sure what it is. I had two sites that I thought was my best. They were getting the most traffic and one of them was about 4 years old. Lots of good content and information. I dropped from number 2 to 462 over night for one of the keywords.

    I had several other sites that I haven’t put anything new on in a month or so and they didn’t move. Go figure.

    Herschel Lawhorn

18. home defense products (1 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 9:43 pm 

    My e-commerce site went from number 5 on page 1 to 570 overnight. My articles, press releases, youtube videos and even blogcomments rank on page 1 now for the same keyword.
    I rank higher for my lsi keyword then for my main keyword.
    For the moment I am lost, but I just let it go.
    Just keep doing what I am always doing and wait it out.
    Sooner or later G must realize that their latest updates will hurt them. I read more and more about people who cancel their Google analytics, because the do not wan to give them more information then they have already.
    This is just an other prove that we must no rely on just organic traffic.
    Eddie

19. Angie Berg (52 comments.)
    3rd May, 2012 at 10:33 pm 

    The new algo does seem to be without rhyme or reason. Out of 6 sites (3 larger, 3 smaller), only one of them seems to have been negatively impacted. I pretty much follow the same processes with all of them so you would assume it would be all bad or all good. I’m just thankful only one was hit. I’m not going to do anything drastic till the dust settles. No sense running around like a crazy woman trying to change things until I know for certain if/what needs to be changed.

20. Mark
    4th May, 2012 at 12:11 am 

    I noticed that my unfinished IM review site, some pages got a boost and they were practically empty! Who can guess at the logic here? FYI: I purchased Josh’s The Offline Guru and it’s very good. I added it to my review site (no affiliate links), come and add a good review (click my name) as I want to make sure Josh gets the credit he deserves. (just search for Josh Spalding to find the listing)

21. Honest Jay (1 comments.)
    4th May, 2012 at 3:13 am 

    No I’m not the grammar police but I cringed hard when I saw “affect” numerous times when it’s supposed to be “effect”.

22. Alan's Internet Marketing (4 comments.)
    4th May, 2012 at 3:03 pm 

    Courtesy of the Google Penguin in our ‘offline business’ us and one other company now occupy 9 out of 10 of the search results for our main keywords. They’ve totally wiped out the other competitors who do less marketing, do less with their websites and definately do less to promote their websites. Thank you Google for helping us monopolize search! Bad for the customer though. Can’t help but feel they HAVE to update and change things for users sake.

23. Rick the Bike Parts Guy (2 comments.)
    4th May, 2012 at 3:20 pm 

    It will all settle out differently than it is now. As Google Search became dominant, it will become irrelevant eventually.

    At one Time Data General, IBM, Compaq, and others dominated computers Where are they now?

24. Brent Crouch (1 comments.)
    5th May, 2012 at 2:35 am 

    Most of my Adsense sites got bombed! I had one site, taxlienproperties.net. It had ranked number 1 for many years for tax lien properties. It’s now 41.

    My best site with all unique content, many natural links from authority sites, and great rankings for the last 2 years lost nearly all of it’s rankings. howtosaveelectricty.net

    Google sucks!

25. GJC
    6th May, 2012 at 5:06 pm 

    I seem to have benefited from “the Penguin” (or perhaps some of those competitors who outranked me were “slapped”). My blog (unique & well written) jumped from 13th to 7th position for my primary keyword immediately following the Penguin’s launch. The point here is that there are always two sides to the equation: how the algorithm change affects your page, AND how it affects your competitors’ pages.

26. Debbie (thewordwright) (1 comments.)
    7th May, 2012 at 3:22 pm 

    Like GJC, I gained from the release for some unknown reason. My 6-week old business site moved up in ranking (from page Nowhere to pages 1, 10, 11 and 14 for my four main keywords) and went from a PR of 0 to a PR of 2.

    It appears that there were quite a number of mishaps though (Legit sites penalized). Google launched an appeal process for those who ended up as penguin fodder. I’m quite sure that there will be a Take 2 Penguin release fairly soon.

    I find these updates necessary – although disturbing – and believe that ethical IM businesses (like yours) stand to benefit from it in the long run.

    Thanks for a great post.

27. Steve (1 comments.)
    8th May, 2012 at 1:07 am 

    Do you think it is possible to get on page 2 or 3 of google just with unique content and no backlinks for niches such as appliances and power tools?

    What wordpress theme are you using for http://www.sugaraddictiontreatment.net/?

28. Josh Spaulding
    26th June, 2012 at 12:33 pm 

    I suppose that’s possible if tehre isn’t much competition. But I don’t know why anyone would want to be on page 2 or 3. There’s no traffic there. The theme is “Healthy Diet” by Themepix.

29. erda (8 comments.)
    16th October, 2012 at 9:29 am 

    Google name their updates after the engineer that created the algorithm. Panda was named after Navneet Panda. But Penguin was originally named as the over-optimisation-penalty.

    Whilst I agree that social syndication is important, we must also think about the relevance of the content that’s being shared.

    Social isn’t correlated yet with high rankings; it’s a signal because it’s just not clean enough yet to depend upon as a solid ranking factor. It’s easier to manipulate than inbound links. When link-building we must think about the authority of the source which therefore becomes defendable for future updates. Every link tells a story which builds the persona of a website and brand.

30. farhana ktn (1 comments.)
    7th November, 2012 at 6:44 am 

    Thank you so much for post. I kept going crazy trying to figure out why my click thru rates went from really great down to about 50% of what I was getting.