Penguin

[Chunkford]

[hungrygoose]

ic 

I'm not sure about spun either because a friend of mine is selling a "get out of penguin" service for $150 which is basically only spun content and so far it's working.  It's all the nasty stuff but with pretty good quality stun content and directories. 

BUT... If Penguin is the same as Panda as in it's an offline algo run once per month it will be VERY interesting to see what happens to these when it runs again.  And if they do drop would it work again and his client would be locked into paying him every month to get out of the sandbox every month.

[I, Brian]

I'm not seeing a correlation to spun content links myself.

It's probably because the only areas I see an effect is where spun content is involved, though this is more social media links than articles.

I'm also thinking that rather than penalize, they are simply devaluing these links causing rank to drop.

I'm seeing a negative effect - presumably based on link profile. Positions gained through normal links have disappeared.

However, I only have a small set of sites I monitor, so my base is quite limited.

[Adam C]

Seeing a few things that correlate with the anchor text observation in the micrositemasters post, but only contradictions to the relevance suggestion.  Not sure their analysis was all that strong on the relevance factor.

[4Eyes]

I find it hard to think they will be acting based on relevance unless it is heavily modified based on other 'fuzzy logic' factors.

Then there is the question of how they define relevance... could be :
* site relevance (seems unlikely to me)
* page relevance (more likely perhaps)
* surrounding text relevance (eg. paragraph or a specific number of words around the link)
* other relevance factors - incoming links, page title etc

... or even some hybrid combination of the above.

Not suggesting it is, just that those factors need to be at least considered.
Having said that, past experience suggests it is less complicated than we give them credit for.

[hungrygoose]

I find it hard to think they will be acting based on relevance unless it is heavily modified based on other 'fuzzy logic' factors.

Then there is the question of how they define relevance... could be :
* site relevance (seems unlikely to me)
* page relevance (more likely perhaps)
* surrounding text relevance (eg. paragraph or a specific number of words around the link)
* other relevance factors - incoming links, page title etc

... or even some hybrid combination of the above.

I think the page level is the easiest.  Are the page titles relevant, is URL keyworded, are the h1etc tags related etc  This would allow big generic sites to still have good links, eg a directory.

[Chunkford]

Yea have to agree with hungrygoose.
Page level makes much more sense and will allow sites totally none relevant to pass a "vote" meaningfully.
E.g. Bill Gate talking about a restaurant he visited on his personal blog

[Drastic]

Seeing a few things that correlate with the anchor text observation in the micrositemasters post, but only contradictions to the relevance suggestion.  Not sure their analysis was all that strong on the relevance factor.

Agree, and the more I think about it, the more I think it's only anchor text based and the relevance bit is just a side effect.

[2much]

Drastic but if it was just anchor, then how come examples like the one above didn't get nuked?

I have a couple of sites that lost their long tails all together.  The commonalities:

- Relatively high anchor density
- No social profile
- Obvious paid link profile

The issue I'm having is in identifiying commonalities, for every theory I come up with, I find a handful of sites that defy it.

I am beginning to think it is a matter of ratios.

For example, it is ok to have high anchor density if you also have a social profile and a percentage of high quality links.

Or, you can have a large amount of low quality links if your anchor density is low and you have a social presence.

I may be totally wrong but in the past I could almost always find theories that stood up to the test of various sites, but not this time. 

[Drastic]

I don't think it's a specific "hit 42.5% of density and remove anchor value," but a bit more complex where something like a few image links, site name and url anchors may keep you out of hot water when you are pushing over the limit.

I could be wrong, but that's what it looks like from here.

[thesaintv12]

My experience based on sites that were actually useful, aged, PR 3+, and in most cases loved/liked by users has been-

The sites where we pushed one or two terms via forum profiles and blog comments (which really did work for my test group in days gone by BTW), have really been hit.  The main anchor text terms have been removed from the G.  However, after a week or so, the secondary terms for deep pages have gone up (perhaps to fill the space vacated by the other profile/comment hoggers in those terms? Maybe because they were actually really relevant pages)  This should be no surprise since the holy G warned us of this.

There have been two other upsides I have found, one which I wont talk about in public here (IC), but the other is that by adding bing webmaster tools it has increased the ranking in both Bing and Yahoo.  That is the single change I made to two sites, I didn't remove G's webmaster tools, just added bing's.  This did not work previously (last test April 2011).  Might just be a fluke, but I'll test on a few more sites.  Interesting that I have Bing/Yahoo sending traffic which then clicks on G ads.  I might run a split test on G/Adcenter/?? to see which brings in the money.  Certainly in the phone apps tests I have been running so far there is little difference between Android and Windows Phone in terms of income (I guess it is a big fish/small fish situation).

Anyway, I am rambling, Massive anchor text spam is what Penguin has killed for me (and I did go to town!).  Onsite spun pages are ranking better as a result (IMO).

On a side note, the G seem to have a swell of bad blood directed towards them from people who have been fans up until now.  These are people who make money for adsense, in the most part. It will be interesting to see where it goes.  There might be some fun left in the web yet - Someone press the reset button!

[2much]

I'm thinking maybe this guy hit the nail on the head.  What do you guys think?

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-penguin-update-how-google-identifies-spam

[hungrygoose]

Has anyone done or know of an analysis of the % of nofollow links??  I'd like to see that spread with the anchor text spread. 

[JasonD]

Overall, I don't strongly disagree with this analysis.

https://plus.google.com/u/1/111294201325870406922/posts/MjLCYnwMdBB

[Chunkford]

The site ranks #1 for chicago bankruptcy attorney.

For me the site ranks 1st for their places page not their actual website in the naturals.
That's unless I'm seeing the wrong site.