Google Penguin Update / Over Optimization Penalty, April 24th launch for real estate

[webmaster]

I am starting this thread to discuss the specific "penguin update" that Google Launched late April that many Realtors / Webmasters (indeed even our own customers) have reported seeing the effects of.

Have you seen a decline in rankings / traffic almost immediately after April 24th? Chances are this is a good place to start. *Please note, if you saw a decline in the month prior, chances are you triggered the "Panda Filter" that was recently updated nearly a month prior.

So what is the Penguin update? Basically it is an update to the Google algorithm that "punishes" webmasters (in a far more aggressive way that we have seen in recent times) for blatantly violating their terms of service. Things like keyword stuffing, purchasing links (and many other forms of link schemes), and many other items seem to be reviewed in this update. It is also one of the first times we have seen an active / aggressive penalty against a site based on "who links to you" - meaning you could be harmed by sites that link to you and you might not even know they exist. Let's give Google some credit though, they are pretty good at telling what obvious link spam is.

Why have you been hit? Here is my #1 answer (ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE OF YOU WITH OLD SITES)

It's your links! For years SEO has been about adopting the "next link technique" from reciprocal linking, to swapping blog posts, or blog rolls, to blog and forum commenting, purchasing links you name it. In the past it seems that these techniques (which worked for quite some time) would simply seem to get devalued (Google no longer counted them) so you moved onto the next "thing" - but of course how many of you went and removed all your link exchanges? Deleted blog posts etc? You didn't know for sure that they were devalued and what hurt could possibly come from leaving them right?

Well now Google is looking at your linking and actively penalizing you for these techniques that you may have not even performed for years (hopefully because you learned better). They are even going so far as to send you a letter in your webmaster tools advising you that your linking is inappropriate and you need to check yourself (fix your problem) and request forgiveness.

But what if I didn't get a letter? You likely don't have a penalty BUT what if a lot of those partners you have did? Imagine you were getting your juice from 10-20 sites (out of your thousands of links) and all of a sudden most of them got a penalty. Now you have no juice and thousands of links to get through to try to figure out where the lost juice was.

I am not sure finding the lost juice is the answer for this - instead, it is time to stop resting on old links that have lost their value and realize you need to learn how to link build in 2012 (Again most older sites are guilty of sitting on their authority and not actively updating their link portfolio) - this has finally caught up to many with this update.

No penalty, and your rankings dropped prior to April 24th? Again - that is likely the Panda algorithm which we will discuss in another thread.

So let's talk Penguin - anyone hit? Have questions, comments, observations?

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

Yeah, i didnt get any letter and i suffered a huge drop on 3 of my 5 REW sites. But as you say my Fort Worth was number 1 for so long that I didn't have to do anything to get it new links. Now my Newer San Antonio site got hit really hard it went from page 1 to page 28 for San Antonio Homes for Sale.

But I think i found a reason for the drop on most of my inside pages for all my sites. I had a link building program that did blog post and linked directly to my money sites. I have since changed this but the only problem is i can get rid of these links.

[Gerry]

For the longest time, the thinking had been, "Google will never penalize you according to who links to you, since you don't have control over that. That would make it easy for your competition to sabotage you, by linking to YOUR site from trashy domains". So I wonder...

[satxproperty]

I have thousands of links laying around pointing back to me from long lost and forgotten websites, too.

I still rank high for a brokerage that I left nearly 10 years ago and has since gone out of business because of some of the old linking practices still existing. A different brokerage that I left was very upset that even after leaving I'd still rank higher than his website. Way back then, I tried in earnest to persuade the website owners to remove or change my links, most don't even respond. So, what are we supposed to do with these old lingering links?

BTW, so what does link building in 2012 look like?

[webmaster]

Just finished our first post penguin SEO meeting. For us, our first priority is link review. We will be downloading links from Google webmaster tools and looking for the obvious (and suspect) links and making a spreadsheet for our customers to follow up on. The categories will likely be "obvious" "likely" and "maybe"

The obvious ones are the "site wide" links in footers, or sidebars that appear to be clearly purchased (even if they aren't Google will think they are) - here is one such example: toptenrealestatedeals.com/homes/top-ten-home-deals/nv/las_vegas/diann3/2/ - what do you think Google is going to think about those links in the footer? Most def spam. Ok the footer links are most def spam, but what about the primary bio link top left? Well because it's sitewide, and anchor text, likely still spam - but if it does truly have value / drive traffic instead of having it removed, ask the webmaster to add a rel="nofollow" to it, and you don't loose the traffic benefit / exposure.

Some "likely" links are things like reciprocal link directories. We already know that google doesn't like them, and even though you may have gotten rid of yours, you are likely getting links from them still - as Randy mentioned, it can be VERY hard to get these removed but we are going to recommend users try AND that they document for reporting purposes afterwards.

In the "maybe" category will be things like blogroll links. I have not seen definitively that blogrolls are being penalized but there are certainly some spammy ones out there. If you are anchor text heavy (the same anchor text) on hundreds of blog pages, it will likely look suspect.

This is not going to "fix" your rankings - why? Because you WERE getting juice (a positive) from those links before - now they are hurting you, so removing them will remove the hurt, but will not put back the "help" - make sense? Anyone who cannot benefit from past links (because they are in the penalty categories) must now embark on new link building that adheres to Google's quality guidelines. (Editorial links, earned links, those posted via exposure in social media etc)

[justsold]

In response to the toptenrealestatedeals.com footer, those are absolutely NOT paid links. Have never sent them a dime - I was one of the first agents to post listings on their site. Those links are supposed to be a reward for driving traffic to their site for the top 5 referrers each month. And they also drive traffic back to my site since they advertise heavily with some of the major news sites. Should I request that they just link to me from their home page?

[sffisher]

IF google did anything about a link like that, wouldn't they just not pass value to those links from that page instead of an actual "penalty". Links like this are everywhere online and in every niche...

[webmaster]

Diann, I am not accusing you of purchasing them - what I am saying is that because of the format (in the footer, heavy anchor text) that an "algorithm" would place them in the paid link (sponsored link) category. Yes it should be main page only if you are keeping it.

sffisher - last month you would have been correct - Google's previous solution to paid links was to simply devalue them - however this is an integral part of the penguin update - the AI attempts to identify (and subsequently penalize) sites that have unnatural links (paid links, link exchanges etc) - thank goodness it is (or at least appears to be) a selective keyword penalty vs a total site penalty (so you can still rank for terms you were not abusing anchor text on) - that's my take so far anyways.

[justsold]

Hey Morgan, I know you know I did not pay for them - never got into the paid link thing because I was too "frugal." But wouldn't a change in the algorithm that way as a penalty open the door up for swamping your competitors with "unnatural" links to get them penalized?

[Eric Miller Ft Lauderdale]

Ouch, I am finding it hard to beleive that this is just a Google redo issue. I have been slammed at FortLauderdaleGroup.com, basically gone. It does not look like Google has me down, any ideas. Open to ideas