http://www.seroundtable.com/you-may-never-recover-from-penguin-update-16726.html
Posted by Jim Boykin on FB
FYI
Its a scary thought.
Seems at odds with Google seeming to be frequently reversing manually applied link penalties in response to disavow and reconsideration requests.
My Dinner table Rant now ends with:
"So what is the point of search now" ?
If I expect to find niche small businesses on the web when shopping, I find it very difficult on Google. I don't see it coming back. I have not given up on it, but my life plan does not depend on it.
QuoteSeems at odds with Google seeming to be frequently reversing manually applied link penalties in response to disavow and reconsideration requests.
But Are they? Are sites coming back? Or is there something else at play here?
I have to say, the Google results are "comfortable" There are very few hyphenated domains, and otherwise spammy results. Just nothing interesting that I did not know existed before.
>comfortable
Rupert, you summed that up nicely. I'm finding nothing new in the serps.
So are sites really coming back from penguin penalties or not? If so, how? Have large "brands" taken over the serps? Solutions?
I think they have taken over. I think small ecom sites have a chance, but will have to work even harder.
I am optimistic. All my efforts for my old site are getting business through other small websites. They all have small user bases, and are ideally suited to benefiting from my service. (I think :))
So blow Google, they have made me survive without them, and I will. Not there yet, but I will.
I finally realised this week, that I never (almost never) search for product on Google now. I cannot be the first to change my habits, and surely wont be the last. I think they have actually made a mistake here, by making the results so vanilla.
Or perhaps no one cares :)
>vanilla
The way I figure it, if they are going to serve up plain vanilla results, I might as well use Bing, or DuckDuckGo which is a Bing retread, and I do. I don't miss Google.
Product searches: weird, I hadn't realised how useful Google shopping had become until they made it paid only (and killed it). That was actually something that was giving small retailers a chance. I found myself missing it lately.
The main results now remind me of shopping in city centres - they're all the same.
I was searching for some pretty niche products yesterday and came across 2 bloody good little independent stores. It is sad that I didn't know about both of them before: I do pretty frequent searches for products both stock, but all the more common (and profitable) stuff is dominated by bland non-specialist brands.
The problem is that Google stopped caring about returning the best results. Their #1 aim now seems to be "an ok first page for everything". As long as a difficult page 1 screenshot doesn't end up in a newspaper then bland is fine.
Going elsewhere, both for businesses and for shoppers, seems to be a logical result. But it's about searcher behaviour changing as well - the queries becoming longer and more specific so the searchers end up with exactly the stuff they search for. Ranking some general non- specialised big brands for that would be totally stupid of G.