Community Discussion: What changes are you seeing as a result of Penguin 4.0?

[Brett-S]

Little drop? - you need to dig deeper into what pages are dropping, then action on those. Maybe a couple pages got hit by nasty-penguins, you never know.

[lizzyr]

I'm just seeing it this morning, so certainly more digging will be necessary.  Yeah, the drop isn't super drastic, but enough to make me concerned.

[Parker_Content]

I've seen individual keywords leap +50 and then go back down again between September 1 and now. I think things have finally settled out. We also lost some Feature positions that have since recovered during that time. I know in my client's niche most of the competitors are relying on static content and directories. So, I am now assuming that all has settled out, sites have been crawled and we will see more consistency in our results.

In the past 3 weeks, I have seen very rapid responsiveness to targeting new keywords.  I tweaked a few older blog articles to add a few words and uploaded new articles during that time. My ranking for the added keywords showed up on the next weekly results. It makes for a nice study, but if any of the competition starts adding content, then all bets are off.

[lizzyr]

Thanks for the reply!  Things had been steady until last week when we had a very nice gain out of nowhere and then this week where we are now dropped below where we were 2 months ago, eliminating any incremental gains and of course the big gain from last week.  Hoping that things will settle down...

[VeroBrain]

Hi Liz,
Sorry to hear about the drop. It seems a new update happened yesterday as it is shown in the MozCast Although it is no possible to say if it was Penguin or other, with so little data.

[lizzyr]

Thanks.  I didn't know about MozCast, so it is great to learn of that new tool.

[ClaytonJ]

We track 35 sites carefully and we are yet to find any evidence that we can attribute to the penguin update. We have asked around and have not yet come across anyone who has been impacted. We are keen to hear from anyone with a clear and obvious impact.