Google Penguin or Panda?

Yesterday it was a flurry of activity in the office. In the morning I was off at the ATSA2014 conference on behalf of MYOB & The Savvy Accountant podcast series which I host. When I got back into my car to head back to the office my phone was buzzing with messages. Google had announced a Penguin update. Unfortunately for us it also coincided with our cloud based ranking tool failing to update. This meant we were in the dark about the Penguin effects until yesterday afternoon at 3pm when it started to update. We had checked a few keywords manually and the signs were good but as we currently monitor nearly 5000 keywords we did not have a very good snapshot until the updates were finished around 4pm.

Love A Penguin Update

We saw the usual effects of a Google Penguin update for SEO. A lot of the spammers got hit. There were some interesting exceptions though of sites that nothing happened to even though when you look at their backlink profile it is obviously spammy. What was nice to see was a lot of sites that we had disavowed for previously jumped up in the rankings. Typically if you have been hit by a Penguin update and you disavow your spammy backlinks you won’t see an upswing until another Penguin update.

A Panda Too.

Something else we saw yesterday though which was a little odd though was that the sites that had the biggest jumps had all undergone Panda treatments for duplicate content. Google did announce a Panda update around the start of the month but we had not seen any reall effects of it until yesterday. I’m talking massive jumps too, like in the case of one client, a 30 spot jump to no.1 or a 229 spot jump to no.6. Pretty extraordinary as there was no Penguin effect involved at all. Love to know what you are seeing and don’t forget to book for our webinar which is next week: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6070785589126366721