Google Penguin Check Up - Did You Get Hit By Penguin? Find Out How To Take

Advantage Of The Update

Pierre M Fiorini, Ph.D. Managing Partner

CF Search Marketing pierre@cfsearchmarketing.com

www.cfsearchmarketing.com

Contents

• What you need to know about the Penguin update

• How to identify if your site has been negatively impacted

• How to manage the negative impacts on your website.

What you need to know about the Penguin update

Penguin 4.0

• Google’s focus is delivering the highest quality to users

• Updates to the Google’s algorithm happen 500-600 times per year – some reports note up to 2000 times per year

• Here’s a link to updates that impact search: – https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Penguin 4.0

PENGUIN IS A LINK “SPAM” PENALTY ALGORITHM

• Importance: Seeks to reward quality websites and penalize

sites using “black hat” or “over optimization” techniques

• Penalizes sites with: – Spammy link profiles – Off-topic link profiles – Overly optimized anchor text links

Penguin 4.0

Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting around 3.1% of queries) Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%) Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting around 0.3% of queries) Penguin 4 (AKA Penguin 2.0) on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries) Penguin 5 (AKA Penguin 2.1) on October 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries) Penguin 6 (AKA Penguin 3.0) on October 17, 2014 (impacting less than 1% English queries). On December 1, 2014 Google confirmed that the update was still rolling out with webmasters continuing to report significant fluctuations. Penguin 7 (AKA Penguin 4.0) on September 23, 2016 Now part of core search algorithm – Will

not confirm updates anymore

Penguin 4.0

• Google also said this new Penguin algorithm is “more granular.”

Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

• Our interpretation of this statement is that Penguin might impact specific pages on a site, or it might impact sections or wide swaths of a site, while other pages are fine.

Penguin 4.0 – Spammy Links Example…

Money or PPC Keywords

Penguin 4.0 – Off Topic Link Profiles…

Penguin 4.0 – Overly Optimized Anchors…

dodge dealers nyc

dodge dealers westbury ny

How to Identify if your Site has been Negatively Impacted

Evaluating Your Site…

• Has your site been hit by Penguin…

1. Look at website organic traffic

Did traffic taper off after Sept. 23?

2. Check Organic Search Rankings

You Don’t “Show up Anywhere”

Identification – Google Analytics

• A major hit

• Same type of situation here

Penguin

Check Sept. 30 Going Forward…

Identification – Google Analytics

Something’s going on…Downward trend for months and months

Identification - Keywords

• Keyword Types

– Make

– Make/Model

– Year/Make/Model

– Service

– Parts

– Others…

• LONG TAIL – Most traffic comes from there

dodge

dodge dealers ohio

2015 ram dayton oh

ALL OF THESE TYPES OF KEYWORDS PENGUIN HITS

Identification - Rankers Need Rank Checking Software….

Identification - Rankers

• Things to look for..

1. Long tail rankings down/gone

Showing up on pg 3-5

2. Overall site rankings down for Broad, Dealer keywords

Showing up on pg 3-5

3. Map Rankings gone

This may happen later

Things to look for…

How to manage the negative impacts on your website.

Managing Negative Impacts

• Disavow, Disavow, Disavow…

• Identify bad links, go to search console and disavow links – Google will then treat links as “no follow”

Managing Negative Impacts

• Build MORE Authoritative links

• Hopefully, that will “drown out” the bad links

Managing Negative Impacts

• If those 2 options don’t work…

• You will need to do…

Managing Negative Impacts

• Start over with new Url

• Make sure you DON’T POINT OLD DOMAIN TO NEW DOMAIN

Questions???

• Free Dealer Intel

– Uses thousands of keywords

– Your Geos

– Your competitor Urls

– Ranks your site using the Google Algorithm

– Gives a rating of 1-10 along with your competitors