Google rolled out a new update yesterday and this one is aimed squarely at the thing I’ve been going on about for the past year. They’re calling it Penguin. Matt Cutts announced it on the 24th as an update targeting “webspam”, which in plain terms means the sites that have been gaming rankings with manipulative links and stuffed-keyword pages.
I’ve spent today watching rankings move around across the sites I keep an eye on and reading the webmaster forums fill up with people asking what on earth just happened to them.
The early pattern, from what I can see and what people are reporting, is that Penguin has gone after two things in particular.
Over-optimised anchor text is one. If a huge share of your inbound links use your exact money keyword as the clickable text, that now reads as a signal of manipulation rather than popularity. Real links don’t look like that. When people link to you naturally they use your brand name, your bare URL, “click here”, the title of the page, a slightly mangled version of your company name. A link profile where four hundred sites all coincidentally chose “cheap widgets London” as the anchor was always a fiction, and Google has decided to stop pretending it believed it.
The second is the low-quality link networks themselves. Blog networks, paid-link farms, the sell-a-link directories I moaned about a couple of months ago. Sites built to pass links and do nothing else.
What makes this one bite is that it punishes the tactic that felt safest. Content spam, the Panda target, everyone at least knew was dodgy. Aggressive link building, though, was sold for years as the professional thing to do, the core of an SEO campaign, the reason you paid an agency a retainer. A lot of businesses are about to find that the very work they commissioned in good faith is now the thing dragging them down the results.
How you recover from this, I genuinely don’t know yet, and anyone claiming they do a day in is guessing. There is no button to press. You can’t tell Google to ignore a bad link. The only levers I can see are slow and manual, and I suspect the next few months are going to be miserable for a lot of sites that thought they were doing everything right.
I’ll write more once the picture clears. For now I’m mostly telling clients to stop building the sort of links that got them here, and to sit tight while we work out what cleaning up actually involves.
