My site was hit by the Penguin Update, Now What?

[knowyourbank]

My site is very young, having only been up for about a month and a half. Despite being nascent we were seeing a ton of organic traffic.

Enter Google Penguin update....

Traffic is down 40% or so over the past week. So, assuming the damage has been done, the question is, what do we do next to start moving back towards where we were? If we're doing everything everything right do we just chalk it up to the fact that our site is very new and stay the course on original content and link building?

I know you can submit your site for reconsideration which is something that we are going to do this week, but I wonder what else we can do to start edging back to where we were pre-penguin update.

Maybe this would be a good Whiteboard Friday topic.

[chronicle]

Google is not looking at reconsideration submissions for the penguin update.  I feel your pain.  My site is about six month old and we were ranked in the top ten for 33 of our target keywords.  Now we only have one in the top ten and the rest are all over 35... We don't have any of the spam stuff google listed... Not sure how to cope.

[LawSEOGuy]

Me too... I am down 40%. I used to get traffic on over 7,000 keywords monthly. A have a 500 page website so the usually jargon about "build quality content and you are safe" is a failed strategy.

I think you have to look deeper at Google's big picture strategy (its ugly).

Every time there is a major change in the search algorithm they make all prior SEO work nearly worthless.

Why would Google do that?

Three reasons:

1. They think they own the internet. They have been muscling in on organic search results for years. They now give Google products more and more space on landing pages and using Google maps is a take over of the internet. Do you have any doubt that they will eventually charge for Google maps and thus eliminate the need for a great portion of organic content. Isn't it amazing that they prohibit "link building schemes" yet that is where they get all of their profits i.e., Adwords. The internet was created to be a public resource utility. It's a Google owned corporate asset now and to a great extent they control the value of everyone's website.

2. Google has hijacked the internet. When they reshuffle the search results they create a lot of new losers who need to buy Adwods to recoup traffic. But note, there are not an equal amount of new winners. Many of the top rank positions in my niche are from (sterile) government sites and Wikipedia. (they don't buy Adwords) Neither do they pick up the phone and give people personal advice 24/7 (like I used to).

3. Big brand companies have been pressuring Google for years. Big companies want the little guy out of the internet and with every algorithm they get closer to their goal. Smaller companies don't have the resources to "start over" every 12 months, big companies do.

Frankly, I think it is over for the SEO business. (that's the way Google wants it) How can someone charge people a reasonable fee when Google can shuffle the deck anytime they want and make that work worthless?

It's become an anti-trust issue they need new competitors and consumers need choices.  I liked the old search results better... but I don't have the choice and neither does anyone else. I also want to opt out of Adwords and local maps too. Their billion dollar link building schemes is a violation of my SEO policy.

Looking for a new line of work... another attack on the little guy. (it's Pottersville on a global scale)

Good luck..

Bri

[GeorgFranz]

Hi Grant,

you are not alone...

My site lost 50% traffic. I've already created a question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/lost-50-google-traffic-in-one-day-panic

The reasons are - probably:

a) over optimization of your site

b) bad links from outer web space...

c) bad anchor texts

I am still investigating why our site was hit that hard.

I've created a new website: http://www.seo-stories.com for all pengiun victims.

Ich hope that helped a bit.

Best wishes,

Georg.

[EGOL]

Frankly, I think it is over for the SEO business.

I agree that a lot of the low value methods and the SEOs who have built a business upon them are in trouble.  Imagine how many clients are calling them!

[KellysTutorials]

I'll  be checking out your site!  thanks!

I too was hit very hard by Penguin.  I'm still not sure why, and actually, that's the main reason I am now here.  I have noticed, at least in my niche, that the big names moved closer to the top of page 1 in Google, which pushed me down!

The big company I compete with has domain authority much higher than mine, they have millions of incoming links, and that's because they're a huge company!  I do think the little guy got hurt most, no doubt in my mind.

But I can't change this, so it's best to focus on those things we have control over, and Georg, I think you have mentioned the most important issues.  I have been reviewing all my backlinks, and I just discovered that one Site links to m 690 times, yet to only 28 pages.

I'm thinking that 'looks' like spam.  So I investigated further, and the topics of the pages linking to me did not add one bit of value and were not relevant in the least.  I hate to get rid of 690 backlinks, but I think they are hurting me more than helping me.

[HMCOE]

Until the public gets educated on the "Alternatives" we're stuck. Sorry