Penguin alert

[Nemo]

Just dropping by to say, "feeling your pain..... " Windy!

It is shocking to have something like this happen and be so in the dark. I would be even more in the dark than those of you here discussing it.

It's made me decide for better or worse to stick with my Google site, in the hope they sort of look after their own (maybe pay someone to play with it a little and improve many aspects!), but I will add to my business with extra websites, not replacement ones, which was what I had previously thought.

[gam]

... a template site is one which is auto generated from a database ...

By this definition, aren't most of the rental listing sites template sites? Pages on those sites are 'auto generated from a database'.

You've taken what I've said too literally - or maybe I just didn't explain myself very well

What I should have said is that Google's number 2 aim* is to reduce spam-like search results. A technique widely used by certain types of internet marketers is to have many hundreds or thousands of websites to promote their wares or services. Maintaining even a couple of sites is a fair bit of work so they (cleverly) came up with ways to auto generate the content of their sites based around a set of templates, databases and other tools. Through these methods, hundreds of sites can be modified in minutes or hours, each one containing largely unique content with whatever links, keywords etc are desired. As they became more sophisticated they could be made to respond to complex search terms, dynamically creating links, content and new pages on-the-fly.

Such sites have been referred to in the past as "template sites" and this is what I suspect is being referred to when people say Google doesn't like templates. Just my opinion.

Because so little is actually known about how Google's algorithms work, people tend to obsess about off the cuff comments made by the industry experts e.g. the whole "home" debate.

With regard to the generic use of templates in websites, personally I don't find it credible that Google would intentionally penalise websites that are built on templates. That's the way things are going. Wordpress as an example is the chosen platform for a very significant percentage of new sites being published with more than 70 million sites currently live. Add in Joomla and countless other template type website creation tools and I'd be confident that the vast majority of new sites would fall into that category. Googles own Blog tool included. Could Google maintain a list of approved template (theme) developers? Not a chance and why would they?

*No 1 being making money - effectively, achieving No.2 is just contributing to their dominance, increasing the prominence and effectiveness of AdWords and hence their revenues. (For the avoidance of doubt, that's also just my opinion).

[kendalcottages]

Alas... once upon a time Google's number 1 aim was to deliver good quality search results.

[gam]

It would be nice to think that was ever or still true.

Google actually publish their philosophy. Whilst not a set of goals as such, they no doubt contribute to goal setting.

I do feel they've been pushing the boundaries of No.6 for some while now.

[Thomas BC]

Thanks for the explanation Gam - I was indeed reading you too literally and I was not aware of the mechanics of the kind of sites to which your were referring.

[kendalcottages]

Thanks for that link, gam... very interesting. I'd question more than just number 6, mind. Taking some of those points in turn:

1. not sure they're focussing on the user - rather, their profits and shareholders - right now

2. LOL. So why are they tinkering with Google Plus (seemingly at the expense of search so far this year, I'd say) and the myriad of other Google products?!

3. I'll grant them that one.

4. wouldn't say it's democratic these days! They clearly favour big brands (which I've raised elsewhere on LMH) and can bring down websites (and livelihoods) on a whim. Take the penalty I illustrated above. There was nothing democratic about that - Google just decided to penalise the site as it decided it didn't like paid links.

[Thomas BC]

4. wouldn't say it's democratic these days! They clearly favour big brands (which I've raised elsewhere on LMH) and can bring down websites (and livelihoods) on a whim. Take the penalty I illustrated above. There was nothing democratic about that - Google just decided to penalise the site as it decided it didn't like paid links.

I find your experience (Google love that word these days) quite disturbing. At the end of the day, and besides the obvious, what is the difference between you earning money from affiliate links (I assume besides your own ad on your current HP, the others are affiliates) or from a paid for text link? Had you placed a google text box in the same place, would they have still penalised you I wonder.

I often see Google has visited my sites and look at the odd page or two, and its like the internet equivalent of a police raid. As you said right up front, it really is a pity there is not more competition.

[Windy]

Paolo's Intasure ad might want second thoughts based on that ???

[kendalcottages]

The difference, I think they would argue, is that the travel insurance link was aiming to usurp Google's algo by artificially gaining 'unnatural' links that pass PageRank. (Actually, that was the aim of the advertiser - my aim was to make money from it, and I confess I did make a very healthy sum whilst it lasted! But I guess I was deemed as 'evil' in assisting the advertiser achieve his aims.) I'm not sure about the Intasure link, but Google AdSense and many affiliate links don't pass any weight when it comes to PageRank to the best of my knowledge.

Increasingly I find that what Google says we should do, and actually does itself, are at odds with each other:

eg. 1 "buying links is bad" (but AdWords is great! )

eg. 2 "don't litter your page with ads, particularly above the fold" (just look at the Google search results these days and see how little you actually get in the way of genuine results before the fold)

eg. 3 "create useful content" - the content in Google's SERPs is getting increasingly less useful IMHO, particularly when they start delivering multiple results from the same domain

...and so on and so forth. It strikes me that they're basically saying "do as I say, not as I do" and that rather grates!

[Thomas BC]

Of course, its the buying PageRank issue. Thanks kc. I hope you made enough money to offset the losses you have had as a result of being penalised!

[Windy]

Has anybody else noticed this?

If you enter a search in Google the search results have components of the search phrase in bold text.

If I search for "lake district lodges" I see at #1

Log Cabins And Lodges In The Lake District

and at #2

Lake District Cottages Self Catering Holidays Cumbrian Cottages ...

Notice how Google appears to have used some sort of internal thesaurus to add Cabin and Cottage as synonyms because it knows better than I do what I want to search for?

Unfortunately searching for "Lake District Cottages" doesn't appear to throw up any results for lodge, so it looks as if my searches get diluted with their results but theirs don't with mine

This seems to have crept in at the end of last year.

You can insist on a verbatim search by checking that option bottom left of the search page under More search Options, but I wonder how many users realise that, or care much either way.

Are Google not quite as clever as they think they are? Discuss

[Thomas BC]

Windy, I am assuming you have not heard back from Google yet ...

Following on from your Paypal France search exercise, are you getting the same results? I am not.

The article below provides another interesting example, albeit with a search on Viagra and coming at it from a different angle. The author (English is clearly not his first language, or he is hopping mad) concludes that Bing provides much more reliable results:

http://www.php-developer.org/why-google ... ative-seo/

[Windy]

AT number 6 P1 I still see

Viagra paypal france - Approved Online Pharmacy!
gekgasifier. com/2009/06/maker-faire-2009/
This site may be compromised.
Rating: 9.5/10 - 264 votes
Viagra paypal france. Low prices, best offers! Anonymous delivery. Absolute privacy.

I had been worried as this is for a personalised search (signed into Google). I thought Google's new algorithm was probably so powerful that it had tapped into Lady Windermere's brain and was gently suggesting I really ought to be getting some chemical help in the hydraulic department. However I get the same when logged out - phew!

The poster you link to sounds almost as exasperated as I am. I have heard nothing from G$$gle and my search results for relevant content searches are now down 90%.

I am getting lots of impressions for "Olympic Flame" due to single short blog post I wrote a couple of months back though so that's all OK isn't it?

[Hells Bells]

Just checked this myself, and I get two results for Vi@gra at no 6 and 10.

[seancollins2103]

Very hard to provide specific advice and many of you are experienced and will have thought through/worked through most scenarios. However I asked our Head of SEO to take a quick look. If there is any interest I would be happy to put together an online Q&A.




A few points:

To those who think they have been impacted by penguin:
On top of checking your stats - Have you verified your site in webmaster tools? Google has been good at notifying people who have ‘unnatural links’ via the webmaster inbox, so if this is the case you’ll have a black and white explanation. I don’t know the content of the message but it might give tips on resolving the issues.

If you’re concerned about your inbound links looking natural, I suggest majesticseo.com which, once you verify your site with them, gives a breakdown of your linking as seen by their crawler.

It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out – it’s concerning that Google have made it easier to perform negative SEO on your competitors.

In regards to undoing your on-page SEO, my opinion is that keyword in title and meta description are always going to be important, until such a time as they are not what search engines use to represent your site in results. Though if you’ve got crazy with one keyword then maybe a few variations might be helpful…

To those of your who’ve lost a few positions on page 1 and noticed the associated drop in traffic, you can try and boost your click-through rate in the lower position by using ‘search snippets’ – like adding ‘author’ and ‘hreview’ microformats.

Kendalcottages – your experience with paid links is interesting – Google tolerates paid links if they follow their guidelines - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bi ... swer=66736