Google has a name for the new update it released earlier in the week – PENGUIN.
Penguin was supposed to target ‘webspam’, but in fact, nuked a lot of other types of websites, and apparently, a lot of websites that have not been involved in any ‘link-schemes’, for instance.
Read this first though:
My advice to people worried has been this. The update launched on April 24. Look at your search-related traffic from Google immediately after that date. Do you see a major drop compared with a day or two before? If so, you were probably hit by Penguin. See a rise in traffic? You probably benefited from Penguin. See no change? Then it really had no impact on you. SEL
If your website lost rankings on April 24, or disappeared altogether, and you think you have been hard done by …… you can tell Google here.
A LOT of webmasters are, well, no less than OUTRAGED, at what Google has done this month.
There are MANY complaints on the actual post from from Google about the Penguin Update, (although it’s usually only complaints you hear about as actually telling people you are winning in Google is not usually the best tactic)!
Here’s one:
I built a public benefit website that for 8 years has helped thousands and thousands of addicts find addiction treatment for free… We were able to provide the service through the industry paying for featured status for their centers in our directory of treatment centers… Harvard’s addiction hospital links to us, as well as a number of super picky super high quality websites… A few years back I started to notice crap links pointing at the site… Then Panda came and the site lost half it’s traffic… We submitted reinclusion requests, we sent notices for sites to remove links to us and informed Google, and now this! Now our site is nowhere to be found, and competitors (who are no doubt paying link companies to take down certain competitors thanks to the algorithms changes) have won! Well done Google… You took a true public benefit site out of the rankings (one with a database of treatment centers more complete than the U.S. government’s), and replaced it with referral sites (of course, the exact-keyword match .com) and individual treatment centers that charge people in dire need of help (and usually broke) scores of thousands of dollars for treatment, because they can afford to bring down the real good-guys that have been helping people for years by pointing links at them. Well done Google.
One can help feeling that with all these changes in Google over the last few years, that Google is at war with smaller sites that try to make a living in Google natural listings, and indeed, results they are testing where there are almost NO NATURAL LISTINGS, that Google’s main aim is to force more people into using Google Adwords (where Google makes all it’s profit).
Time will tell if this is a waste of time or not, or another fishing trip for Google Sea Lions.
I’ve added a note about the actual search for “Website Lost Rankings In Google” on our new Facebook page :)
