Lost and confused after Penguin!

[Tz_Seo]

I own an EMD which was hit by google penguin.

I lost my #1 position to Google US SERP and went to #5 for the keyword which applies to the EMD.

What I have tried so far is deleting the exact anchor text links from the footers of my c-block sites.

That did not seem to help because i did not gain any position from that change.

I also altered my meta title, description and keywords because they were spamming a bit. Things did not improved.

My  Links w/ Exact Anchor Text is at 5%,

Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text at 3%

The web pages that are above me are to 0% to both categories because they are not showing up with their main page.

What is going on?

The thing that confuses me the most is that i am also targeting for two other markets, Australia and Canada. In Canada I have maintained my #1 and to Australia I lost my first position falling to #2.

I did not receive any message to my webmaster tools account and never made any black hat link building.

Is the EMD fact the problem, but why not for other markets except US?

Penguin has run to other markets(CA, AU) as well becuase i have seen a drop to other keywords and also to my traffic.

Really what do you think?

[AJPro]

Hi,

I don't think it's because of the penguin you went from #1 to #5. From what I understand a penguin hit is much worse.

Could just be that Google doesn't give as much value to an exact match domain or it could be just natural fluctuations? I know our keywords move up and down a few places every week.

[Tz_Seo]

Hi Stefan,

Before penguin the EMD was at #1 solid. The other websites that came above after the 24th of April were not even the 1st page of SERP.

That is why I think it is the penguin.

[rayvensoft]

Hi,
   This could definitely be penguin if your traffic went down after April 24th or after the 1.1 update (don't remember the exact date, but it was about 2 weeks ago).  I had a number of sites have a simalar drop of a few positions from 1 to 8 or 9 or some such.  Some have come back over the last few weeks others haven't.

Based on what you have said, your link profit is fine, so my guess would be that google simply discounted some of the links back to your site.  By this I mean that some links that it used to count as good links it no longer counts as good links.  That would explain part of the drop.

As for your competition who has a much worse link profile than you beating you, all I can say is I feel you pain.  I am also being beaten in one of my big keywords by a page with awful design, spelling and grammar mistakes all over the place and no back links.  For now, I would say just be patient.  Google is going to be fine tuning things for the next few months - I still see big changes every week in the SERPs in my field.  So taking drastic measures now may do more harm than good.

Good luck.

[Tz_Seo]

Hey Reymond,

Thank for the reply.

From my experience on penguin, concerning EMDs, I agree with you on the devaluation of certain links which used to give me the #1 in US, but what about the #1 in Canada?

Tricky situation!

[Dr-Pete]

My gut reaction is similar to Stefan's  - a #1 to #5 drop may not be Penguin-related. If you saw a clear drop from 4/24-4/25, though, then that's a different matter. Penguin 1.0 did seem to hit all on one day across all countries and TLDs.

If it was Penguin and you made fixes, keep in mind that they may not have any impact until the next data update, so it depends on when those fixes happened. Penguin 1.1 rolled out on 5/25. If it was Penguin, the data still isn't very conclusive - some people are saying it's mostly on-page keyword issue and others that it's link/anchor-based. I do think toning down the exact-match anchor text is a good bet and definitely take care of any blatant on-page keyword stuffing as well.

If Google just turned down the dial on your EMD, so to speak (and maybe the US took a bigger hit just because of competitiveness), there's not a lot you can do, to be brutally honest. It's not a Capital-P penalty and changing your domain probably won't help - they've just adjusted the volume.