Google Penguin was probably one of the most dramatic updates ever launched by Google. It marked a major policy shift by the search engine in that for the first time ever, links to your website could actually damage your website’s ranks. Prior to Penguin, Google had always stated that because website owners don’t control what sites link to them, it would not be fair to penalize a site owner if low quality sites linked to their website. Also, if “bad” links could hurt a website’s ranks, then unscrupulous people could engage in negative SEO on competitor websites. By building large volumes of low quality, unnatural links to a competitor’s website, you could hurt their ranks. However, Google acknowledged that it needed to do something as link-building had got out of control. Literally tens of thousands of people were being employed, typically in low cost economies, to churn out links from business directories, articles directories, social bookmarking websites, blog/forum commenting etc. None of this work added any value to the Internet; in fact it created vast volumes of spam. Anyone who owns a blog will be only too familiar with the hundreds of comments from spammers on each post that go something like this: “Great post. Buy Nike Trainers.” The fact that such techniques did work well meant that they endured and grew. The fact that a website could increase its ranks on Google by submitting low quality articles to 50 articles directories purely to get links was a strange situation but that was the reality.
In order to finally put a stop to such practices, Google launched Penguin and overnight links that previously either helped your ranks or at worst made no difference became dangerous as they actively harmed ranks. SEO companies everywhere that relied on link-manufacturing (pretty much all SEO companies) needed to re-evaluate. For years, SEOs had been listening to Cutts, Fishkin et al. talking about the need for high quality content, the importance of social and building relationships with industry influencers but had dismissed it as aspirational fluff and not scalable. However, when Penguin hit, SEOs had to finally start listening as link manufacturing plants on an industrial scale were now redundant. The SEO industry is reacting and evolving. Companies are now working with clients to generate genuinely interesting and compelling content and building outreach teams to engage with influencers. People who had been asked to submit a website to 50 directories per day were left go and people who can create compelling content were hired. When you think about the service that Google has done to Net at large, it is immense. The spam merchants will die off over time as they no longer have a product to sell. Inevitably, their clients will blame them, which in my view is unfair, as the SEO company did what worked when it worked but then Google shifted the goal posts. Instead of having people working each day on commenting on forums and blogs purely for links, people will be looking to create content that other Net users will find genuinely interesting. There will be and already is a surge in the amount of amazing content being produced in the form of infographics, video, blog posts and more.
The SEO industry moving forward will be a far more creative and nicer place to be as companies produce genuinely interesting content each day as opposed to spamming. However, the question that many site owners that did get hit have to ask is “can I recover from this?” Google has given a lot of advice on how to recover. Effectively it has said “remember all those low quality links that you kept building for years despite us telling you not to? Please identify all of them, delete them from the Internet and if you can’t, then please let us know where they are and we will disavow (discount them).” This translates into “you created the mess, you tidy it up.” However, despite all the guidance issued by Google on how to recover, some site owners have decided it best to just start afresh as the time and effort required to recover would be better spent starting again on a new site.
There are pros and cons to starting again. The chief pro is that you start with a clean slate, focus on quality from the word go and over time ranks will steadily improve. A major con is that the domain will be new and so will struggle to outrank domains several years old. Of course, you could look to buy an old domain but it may be difficult to get one that you want. While we have seen sites improve after Penguin, getting back to pre-Penguin levels is really a tough slog. Disavowing all potentially harmful links takes massive amounts of time as you literally need to through link by link making judgement calls as to which links may be harming you. Once done, you need to set about the process of rebuilding trust with Google slowly. Below is a rank graph for a client that got hit by Penguin 2.0.
Once hit on May 23, we set about disavowing and as you can see we are now almost back at pre-penguin ranks. Graphs like this lead me to believe that hanging in there and recovering ranks with your existing site is the best approach.
While for those who got hit, ourselves among them, Penguin has been quite stressful, it is clear that this is an update that will cleanse the web of vast amounts of spam and replace it with genuinely amazing content being produced by creative and intelligent people. SEO 2.0 will make the Net a far better place to be. Well done Google!
