Penguin 4.0 Realtime Recovery
Welcome back Rankers! I’ve just arrived back from Cuba, and it was awesome. Here’s a photo from my hotel room with the Capitol building.
A big ‘Hi!’ to everyone I met there. You are only allowed to get online in public places at government approved Wi-Fi hotspots, which meant I spent most of my time offline, as it was just too difficult to get online. It was slightly gratifying to visit a place that had worse Internet than us!
Slow Penguin Rollout
As you are aware, when I was away, around September 24, we had Google Penguin 4.0 roll out. It still appears as though it is still rolling out in Australia as over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen incremental changes in a lot of the search results. Specifically around October 1st, and then last weekend there appeared to be further changes. If you are experiencing changes, and you are in the .com.au, then please let us know as I’d like to get third party confirmation. We haven’t seen any of our own clients sites drop since Penguin 4.0 which is good, but we have seen other sites drop, especially in the area that we play in of SEO, we like to keep an eye on who is moving and dropping. As you can imagine, there have been quite a few losers in that area. As I’ve said before, just proves that backlinking is bad for your SEO.
How To Check If You’ve Been Hit
Now if you suspect that you have been hit by this Penguin update, as Andre from Portugal said on YouTube, here’s what you can check. Go into Google Search Console and head into the Search Analytics. What you should be looking for in Search Analytics is making sure you have your ‘Clicks’ and ‘Impressions’ ticked.
What you are looking for is a drop around the 20th-24th September. If there is a drop there and it’s consistent, then you’ve probably taken a Penguin hit. As you can see with this particular client their clicks and impressions have both risen. Normally in a Google Penguin update we’d say that was probably a result of other sites falling around them, but that’s not the case in this instance. Now if your site has dropped around that time, then it is most likely a Penguin 4.0 hit. What you can then do is (still in Google Search Console) click on ‘Links to your site,’ under ‘Search Traffic,’ where you can download the latest links. This will give you a spreadsheet, or CSV file, with a list of backlinks. If you go through those links and see any that are a little questionable, for example we have one that appears to have copied one of our blog posts and maybe given us a link in return, you can ask them to remove the content and then disavow the link. If the content remains after that then you can submit a Google DMCA complaint, which is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act. By doing that you will get rid of the dodgy backlink, which should enable you to recover fairly quickly if you have been hit. Now if this is you, please let us know how you go, as we’d love to know if a disavow submission recovers your rankings. Google is telling us that it actually should, so I’d love to confirm this through someone who has actually experienced the problem.
Build Audience Not Backlinks
Just on the whole backlinks thing again. As we’ve said before, backlinks is bad for SEO. What’s good for SEO is building an audience and building your brand. The way to do that is you need to get out and participate in other online communities. The side effect of doing that is that you get a backlink from it as you’re helping people out, contributing stories, and the like. When you get backlinks you should get them from working on your brand and your audience. You should treat backlinking campaigns like a date with Donald Trump; avoid them where possible. Stick to audience building and traffic campaigns. It’s the reason we are on SmartCompany and SEMrush, and the reason we contribute to other people’s blogs. It’s to expose our brand to a bigger audience and attract more people to us. Side effect? We get awesome backlinks. If you are going out there just seeking backlinks, you will get hit. Even though the new Penguin 4.0 is real-time, it will be adjusted. We are seeing some sites that I know have questionable backlinks and they actually haven’t been hit by this latest Penguin 4.0 update, but they will at some point as Google will continually tweak the way the algorithm works out what is a good and bad backlink. Hopefully that’s helpful and I’ll see you all next week. Thanks very much. If this has been helpful to you or your network, please share it, as we’d love to get more viewers as you can imagine. Bye for now.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
