Video Transcript – SEO Hysteria & Google Updates

SEO Hysteria & Google Updates – original post here

Welcome back, Rankers, and a happy new year. I hope this recording goes well, because I’ve only got one of those left. Anyway, that was it. So I can’t re-record. Okay. Did you have a good break? I didn’t. I worked. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Martyr. That’s the sort of bloke I am. But there’s a lot of talk right now about the dreaded you-know-what, and that is the Penguin. There is a lot of talk that, “Oh my God. There’s a Penguin update happening.” I don’t think so. Something’s happening, but I don’t think it’s Penguin.

And we’ve seen reports out of MozCast. Who are the other ones? There’s Link, Accurank. A whole bunch of these sites that go around and look at the search results and say, “Yes.” And they measure temperature and stuff and they say, “Yeah. Something’s going on.” They’re quite extensive talks, but that’s pretty much all they do, is they can say, “Something’s going on. There are big changes going on in the search results.”

I don’t think it’s Penguin and I will show you why. So if I go and have a look at a few of our clients, you can see…and this is what all the MozCast and all these algorithms are saying…is that something happened on the 10th of January. And you can see here, this keyword for this client went from number 31…so not setting the world on fire for this key phrase…and it went back up to 78 and then back down to 24. So essentially 31 to 24. A seven spot jump. Okay. It’s all right. Same client…and this client is fashion industry…kind of went up there and then back down a little bit there. Not as pronounced as some of them. But you can see, it’s all happening on the 10th. And we go up and then we go down. That’s one client.

Then we go to another client and you can see it’s far more pronounced. But exactly the same day. Same sort of pattern. Stable and then boom, drops through the floor down to 14. And then comes back up to number one, was number three. And that client’s got a bunch of those phrases like that, too. You can see them. And I’ve checked this with multiple tools as well. We’ve got other rank-checking software and I’ve checked it with that and I get the same sort of graphs.

This one here, too. Here’s another one. This one may not be included, because it kind of went up on the ninth. But then essentially over that three days, went from number seven to number three. And this one here as well. Let’s see. This one’s a little bit more unstable, as you can see. But definitely similar patterns. So that’s just four clients or three clients at random. The reason I don’t think that this change is Penguin is because what Penguin does is that it, in the past, pushes sites down that are buying back-links, that are basically spamming the Google search results.

You don’t usually see something like that. You don’t usually see a whole bunch of clients drop and then come back up again. That is something else. And that change has happened across the mobile index as well as the desktop. And at one point, I thought it might have been some change in places, but it’s not. It’s not places. It’s something else. They were doing something else on the weekend and it affected a lot of search results, which is why all the algorithm chasers went, “Ah. My God. What’s going on?”

Here’s why I don’t think it’s Penguin. If it was Penguin, that wouldn’t have happened. Plus if I was to do “skip bins Melbourne” as a search…and I don’t have a client in this category, thank goodness…you can see the number one result here is Cheapest Skip Bins Melbourne, which is curious for a couple of reasons. Number one, it’s a well-known brand here in Australia, is Jim’s. No, not mine, although I do own JimsSEO.com.au, thank you very much.

No, this guy, Jim’s Skip Bins, Jim’s Hooklift Bins, big franchise here in Australia. Huge brand. They’ve gone for CheapestSkipBinsMelbourne. I don’t know why. Well, actually I do know why obviously. “Hey, we’re number one for skip bin Melbourne.” But you’ve forgotten about click-through rate and brand recognition, and you’ve got none of that in your domain. So anyway. Strange, strange decision to…why not just go for “Jim’s Skip Bins”?

Anyway. Excuse me. This site is one I expect to be affected by Penguin. The reason is, if I go and have a look at Site Explorer and I can see here that it’s got…well, what’s funny here is how many back-links it does actually have. It’s a skip bin hire site with back-links from 50 different domains, totalling 313 back-links. And it’s back-links like this, ATaseteOfTaiChi.com.au. Now this only ticks two of the boxes of my four reasons to, well, four…I can’t even say it. Four checks to know that your back-links are spammy.

And this one ticks two of those back-links because it’s getting this, ATasteOfTaiChi. Hey, we can probably work out who the SEO company is. Because just go “A Taste of Tai Chi” and then you go “whois.” Okay. No company name. Oh. I’ll Google his name later. But it’s only got…that’s it. That’s the entire site. You’re looking at it. Right? And it’s got three totally disconnected blog-posts. Spammy blog-posts, purely for back-linking. Right?

They’re still ranking number one. So if a Penguin update happened, it was the worst Penguin update in the history of Penguins. And that’s why I don’t think it happened. The other reason is…I mean, there’s more than one, right? So that other company that…see this brand here, they’re all over the radio. All over. All Over Bins. I’ll probably click on them more than I’d click on CheapestSkipBin. Anyway.

Rent-A-Skip is another one, right? So we’re going to have a look at Rent-A-Skip. And this is Rent-A-Skip’s back-links. They’ve got a similar number to the CheapestSkipBins. And we’re just getting back-links from PopularDirectory, NewtonsApple, GardeningTipsAndIdeas. I don’t know what that means. Anyway. So as you can see by the anchor text right there, rentaskip, rentaskip, rentaskip. Yeah, those back-links are spammy.

So your top two for a given search are spammy. So Penguin hasn’t happened, guys. There was an update. All the rankings are back where they were. Some are slightly better, some are slightly worse. But for the most part, not much of a change from whatever that change was on Saturday. I don’t think it was Penguin.

If you’ve seen something different or if your rankings have been affected by that change that happened on the weekend, please let me know. Because I’d like to find out more. And have a great year, have a great 2016. And we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.