Did you lose significant traffic between April 19th (Panda 3.5) and April 24th (Penguin)? Your site may have been affected by the infamous Google algorithm updates that occur every few months; we definitely got affected along with some of top Orlando web design competitors.
Let's start with Penguin and what it affects
Google's goal for 2011 was to eliminate spammer sites that downloaded and reposted good quality content just to gain false ranking. This type of activity is typical of the industry; a prime example is YouTube's search engine. When you are looking for a video, sometimes it is almost impossible to find the original video if it is popular because users put the same video name in their titles (i.e. Music Video Name).
"The Penguin Update launched on April 24. It was a change to Google’s search results that was designed to punish pages that have been spamming Google. If you’re not familiar with spam, it’s when people do things like “keyword stuffing” or “cloaking” that violate Google’s guidelines." -SEL, Danny Sullivan
Next, Panda 3.5 another hit on website content
Panda has always been about good-quality content over low-quality content. Look at this post by search metrics talking about the Winners / Losers list of this wonderful update. There are some large companies on that list that seem to have taken a hit, but overall it looks like Google managed to hit the nail on the head this round of updates.
How do you know if your site is affected?
At this point, there are a few ways you can tell how things are panning out for you site by doing a comparison of your traffic from before the April 19th and after the April 24th. If you notice a significant increase or drop in keyword traffic to your site, more than likely you were affected. Now more than ever it is important that you follow the website guidelines that Google puts out as they consistantly try to make the internet a better place. They certainly have a +1 from us on this update!
Resources:
If you want to look deeper into this, check out these links that provide some great information on this past update and how to recover.
- Google Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice
- Google Webmaster Guidelines
- 5 types of Link Issues Harming Sites
- Google Penguin Form: Think they got it wrong? Mention "Penguin" to have your voice heard.
- Google Spam Form: Think a site should have been effected? Report it.