Today, while checking my customer’s rankings; I noticed a huge pattern of movement in websites belonging to my customers. Basically, sites that we were trying to recover after Penguin 3.0.
I also observed a lot of webmasters describe their recoveries across forums, this, in addition to my clients contacting me to inform me of good sales and traffic increase.
You can find one of the discussions on Black Hat World forum below:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/721012-my-penguin-3-0-effected-site-has-now-resurfaced-onto-front-page.html
Let me show you a few Penguin recoveries:
One more website (my client) – an eCommerce, made a screenshot and sent his analytics view (traffic from today compared to a week ago – hourly view)!
And here’s one of the best examples below – a site hit with Penguin 3.0 (negative SEO), which I described in detail here: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/google-penguin-3-0-analysis/
Here, you can see how its rankings dropped on October 18th (Penguin 3.0)
… and one more:
Clients and friends have been contacting me with their stories ever since:
and there are many more, still trying to digest them all. However, one thing is sure…
Recoveries are spectacular!
I have recorded many more really great jumps, but I need to go through each one step by step. One thing is certain; those are all Penguin sites. Thin content and Panda didn’t move at all today, so I am 100% sure that what we are seeing is a Penguin 3.1!
Update – November 28, 2014
Today, I see that most of the recoveries are still ranking well. Still, I notice that rankings are not consistent for domains that recovered yesterday. AcaiBerries.it would be a great example. It is a domain I wrote about here: http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/google-penguin-3-0-analysis/ It recorded a spectacular drop in domain ranking for “weight loss” (in Italian “Dimagranti”). The Website was nuked with Penguin 3.0, and now it has come back:
Still, it doesn’t show up in the top 10 results each time I search for it. If you Google “dimagranti” in Google.it, you may find it either in the top 10 or far down in SERPs. Are those Penguin tremors as with Penguin 3.1? Hard to say, but I am guessing that we will know more this weekend.
Algoroo.com also noticed a huge SERP movement on November 28th, 2014.
End of update
Is it all real?
Google has always had the “no updates before Christmas” policy and they usually avoid rolling out new algorithms before the end of the year. Could this be a glitch in the test? Still, it affected more websites than I expected. Are these recoveries permanent?
Most probably we won’t hear from Googlers today, as it is Thanksgiving Day in the USA. Still, it is the biggest swing I’ve seen this year.
Rankings are definitely still jumping and are very unstable today, yet it’s happening on this scale only for Penguin hit sites! I think it will settle down before the end of the week.
I will post Penguin 3.1 analysis as soon as I dig into all the cases. If you want to read about it – please subscribe below!
