At about 7AM Brisbane time yesterday there were some big changes to the way Google ranks web sites.
These changes are part of the Google Penguin series of algorithm updates and this big change has been called Penguin 2.0
These Penguin updates are designed to reduce the effectiveness of web link spam. In my experience all that will happen is that the type of spam will change, not the quantity.
There is a multi-billion industry built around building links for people to help them rank better in Google. It is very early days yet, but from our preliminary analysis of winners and losers post Penguin 2.0, we believe:
Links that do not work as well
- Blog comments
- Forum signature links
- Forum profile links
- Business directory links
- Free Wiki links (not to be confused with Wikipedia)
- Any links with the nofollow attribute
- Any links that are easy to build using automation software like SENuke, Scrapebox, GSA or other popular packages
Links that do still work
- Paid links from high PageRank pages that have related content (yes, Google hates paid links, but they do work well)
- Links from articles and blog posts with relevant content and a low volume of outbound links
- Links from partner, donor and supplier pages
The other thing we have noticed is that sites with lots of pages tend to do better than sites with a few pages.
If your web site has been hit by the latest changes, the advice at this stage is don’t panic and no make any radical changes. Give it 12-14 days and see what happens. Hopefully by next Friday there will be some more hard data and analysis as to exactly what is going on.
