A month after Penguin 2.0 was released, the dust is settling and most people are eager to know: What exactly is Penguin 2.0 filtering? How does Penguin 2.0 differ from Penguin 1.0? What can I do to recover my site and to protect my site from getting hit in the future? Should I try to recover, or start over with a fresh domain?
First let me give you some context. The first Penguin was a more lethal, shotgun link spam filter. They had to send a message to the SEO community, so they pulled out their shotgun, fired, and took down thousands and thousands of sites. If you got hit by Penguin 1.0, the aftermath was brutal, with rankings completely gone for most head terms, the long tail disappearing, and a loss of between 30% and 80% of organic traffic. What Penguin 1.0 specifically targeted was link networks, paid links, high anchor density, and massive numbers of low quality links. Some sites still have Penguin 1.0 penalites that haven’t been removed.
So what does Penguin 2.0 look for?
After analyzing hundreds of sites, the main commonality I’ve seen with sites affected by Penguin 2.0 is that they have a high volume of Money keywords in Anchor text. Sites that are safe have a high density of Brand anchor terms, and a high number of “Other” or “Noise” terms. One obvious giveaway for most penalized sites is that, if you look at their backlink profile, you see heavy usage of money keywords and the entire profile looks very contrived.
What was perplexing about Penguin 2.0 is that you could still find sites that have high Money anchor density, but didn’t get penalized. Why did some sites get hit, while others didn’t? I believe a fundamental aspect of Penguin 2.0’s mechanism is an evaluation of a site’s backlink profile as it COMPARES to competitors.
Each keyword niche should trigger a different type of backlink profile based on the topic and niche. So the backlink ratio has to be comparable to others in the same competitive space.
My hypothesis is that Google uses it’s normal ranking algorithm to come up with a set of sites that should rank for a keyword. Then it runs this set through the Penguin 2.0 filter to determine averages and ratios. Finally, sites with too many red flags, were the ratios are obviously unnatural, get flagged by the algorithm and penalized. Then the positions are adjusted based on the new penalty.
So what ratios does Google look for?
Some of the known ratios that Google looks for are:
- Unique C class links to domain
- Link Velocity Trends
- Number of Keywords Ranking
- Number of Links from N/A or PR0 domains
- .EDU/.Gov links
- SiteWide Link Ratio
- Deep Link Ratio
- Pagerank of Backlinks
- Indexped Pages
- TitleRank
- Traffic to the Domain
- Clickthrough Ratio
- Social Votes
- Percentage of Follow/No Follow Links
- Link Position in the Source Code
- Link Type (text, image, script)
Anchor density
By comparing a site to the averages of the backlink profile of top competing sites, the algorithmic filter can easily detect unnatural ratios.
It is my belief that having a couple of unnatural ratios doesn’t lead to negative consequences. Having TOO MANY red flags, or ratios that fall too far outside of the averages of competing sites, will trigger the Penguin Penalty.
Even if your site has significantly better ratios than your competitors, this can be seen as a sign of manipulation of the search results, which is what Google is openly declaring war against.
What Google wants is for people to focus on producing great sites, with amazing, shareable content, instead of link building and SEO tactics. By penalizing harshly for footprints and unnatural ratios, they are pushing people to be cautious of their backlink profiles and avoid spammy backlink building tactics.
So what can you do to protect your site from Future Penguin Penalties?
Your SEO processes have to change. Just as we do keyword research, on-page seo, and link building as part of a cohesive online marketing strategy,
Source: Search Engine Journal
