After Google Penguin 2.0
spunko2010
Isle of Man
Just wanted to get some feedback on how others are doing with SER after Penguin 2.0 as I don't think there has been a thread on this... Not since May. Are you seeing gains still? Is it harder to rank? what have you changed?
Personally my main money site hasn't fully recovered since May
Never had any warnings in WMT though. I still promote it through SER.
However I have launched other sites and they are doing just as well as pre-Penguin 2.0. I have changed a few things, mainly: varying anchor text further, adding snippets and rich content/videos/images to my money site (what I would consider "junk").
There is information here which @ron posted which I find very useful: https://forum.gsa-online.de/discussion/4996/very-professional-seo-study-on-google-ranking-factors#latest
Personally my main money site hasn't fully recovered since May
Never had any warnings in WMT though. I still promote it through SER. However I have launched other sites and they are doing just as well as pre-Penguin 2.0. I have changed a few things, mainly: varying anchor text further, adding snippets and rich content/videos/images to my money site (what I would consider "junk").
There is information here which @ron posted which I find very useful: https://forum.gsa-online.de/discussion/4996/very-professional-seo-study-on-google-ranking-factors#latest
Comments
Did you try adding higher quality links to tier 1?
Like building your own personal high PR blog network? Or manual web 2.0 network?
That works pretty well for me.
Occasionally give it some juice with articles/web20/SNs built into SER but only with PR1+ and some other filters.... I think you need to be more selective on what type of links you point to T1 now.
What I wonder is if Google did 'slap' some sites down but didnt send out warnings. I noticed ranking drops of around 2-10 places after Penguin 2.0 hit and I can't seem to recover a lot of them, so who knows.
The single biggest thing i can suggest to recover is the high PR links from your own private blog network, that works really well but of course costs money to buy expired domains.
I only started using SER a week ago, for tier's 2/3 because i realised you can run it without captcha costs so that allows me to invest that saved money on more expired domains and then blast them with SER.
For tier 1's i also use other manual high quality stuff, like video submissions, press releases, web 2.0, doc submissions, article directories - But all manual and all high quality sites.
5 - 10 is a good start and should show some results. I host them on multiple shared hosting accounts - 2 -3 domains per niche per account. Other people will tell you only 1 per account but 2 - 3 is working fine for me and keeps hosting costs down.
@spunko2010 - You can still get away with bloody murder. Forget the damaged site - move it to a new domain.
On an unrelated note but still very important: One thing that people should be doing (but many forget, or do not know to do this) is to check on domaintools.com (or similar service) to make sure that your "fresh domain" is indeed fresh and never been used. I mention this because I just made that big mistake as I forgot to check it out a couple months ago. Set up some websites on "new" domains, and after 6 weeks, not one evidence of ranking in the top 1000, gulp.
Turns out the domains were not "new" - they were registered several years ago. They weren't even used for a website or spammed to death, etc. You must have a *brand new* domain, so *always* check domain tools before registering and proceeding. I had a brain cramp and just forgot. All is not lost. I need to move these sites to a fresh domain. But I wasted a bunch of time *and money* by getting all excited that my chosen domain names were available, and forgetting to check. Don't make that mistake.
Are you sure that ALL used domains are damaged goods? I can't see why google might implement that, unless it was used for spamming or badware etc . In fact some 'SEOers' recommend buying older domains...
- fake pr check
- google ban check
- site and page authority check
- domain drop checks (which is what @ron was referring to i believe)
etc
But i could be wrong :P
Yeah, these things were 4-5 years old, 2-3 domains registrars, 1-2 drops. Not even a website on the wayback machine. So it isn't even about a spammed up site.
Google likes fresh content and hence fresh domains. They do give them an advantage out of the block. It's part of their algorithm.
So to answer your question, they may not be damaged goods, but they are inferior to a brand new domain.
Spunko you will find out that when something takes a hit, usually it is better to get it over with and move it. That way you have the maximum amount of time to get it back up and earning before the next big hit. You'll just make more instead of limping along at 50% power.
The other alternative is to obviously rewrite and create a new site, and let the older one continue on. I do have a number of sites that are permanently hit, but they rank high in Bing and make decent money. In those cases I let them be, continue to spam them, and continue to rank well in Bing. So then I just made some new sites for Google.
50% is on the border. I could go in either direction. However, if I knew that I was not going to rebuild a new site because it was a pain in the ass to do so, then I would definitely move it. Your earnings will be back and running within 2 months, or at least more than 50%.
My experience is the exact opposite of yours. But i agree if a domain or has been penalised by a Google update then it's best to start again. But at the start of the SEO game i would take an aged domain any day.
If those were not even on wayback then likely there were bought and never used at all. Which means they had no domain authority and can't be compared to a proper aged and high PR domain with good authority, i would think.
Yeah I understand. But I wasn't talking about a nice, clean, aged/high PR domain versus a new domain.
What I am getting at is an old domain where nothing happened for 5 years (no content, no links, etc.) versus a brand new domain. Brand new domain triumphs.
Google definitely likes new domains. But I do agree if you have the nice old one like you mentioned, that is the top of the food chain.
It's picking up about 5-10% of the daily visits that the other sites get, and seems to have levelled off. I've done some GSA SER marketing with it but it's made no difference (as of writing its getting 1-2 hits a day for the SEO work I've done, really weird), in fact only 1/10th of the pages are indexed according to GWT. I can't seem to get the rest indexed, checked robots.txt etc and there are no warnings in GWT.
So I'm wondering if Google 'knows' I have launched another site in the same niche as is somehow throttling it. Call me paranoid but I wonder if they are logging my IP when signing into Analytics etc, or somehow detect duplicate template (the sites all look different but have the same element names, for example class="header-top-margin" . Or they have detected I've used the same mobile number to verify all accounts. No idea.
I've checked the domain and it's brand new, the sitemaps work fine etc. WHOIS data is different. Copyscape no matches. No idea what to do. Anyone had this before?
^^Exactly what @KayKay said. When Penguin 1.0 hit on April 24, 2012, that was the last day I used Google Analytics. You literally can't use that service otherwise they know exactly what you have. They can see your IP - there is no way around it. @KayKaylikes Piwik, I like Clicky. But whatever you choose, make sure it isn't Google Analytics.
As far as the problem, I have no idea if this is related: I launched a couple of sites 5 weeks ago, and absolutely nothing has happened. Then I discovered I failed on my due diligence, and that those two domains were registered 4-5 years ago, had 1-2 drops each, but were never used to host an actual website. It made me want to cry. You always want a fresh domain. I didn't have my 'A' game when I registered those domains. Moral: make sure they were never registered before.
As far as indexing, if you have any videos on there, make sure you put up the Google Video Sitemap plugin. Everything will get indexed within a day or two. And if you don't have a video, throw one up there just to get those little spiders working their butts off.
Just out of interest, what is the protocol for changing a domain without Google noticing the content has simply moved? Do you need to de-index the domain and wait for it to fall out of the SERPS then do the switch?
Take down/save the good content. Stick up garbage content. Keep building a ton of links. Wait approximately 2 weeks for the cache to reflect the new content. Then you are good to go.
Some people use robots.txt to block the googlebot on the old website, and immediately flip the content to the new site. That way, they say, there is no duplicate content issue. However, when have you heard that googlebot actually abides by the commands in robot.txt?
But what difference does it make to Google if I have 3 sites , if the content is different ? Can't find any documentation from them suggesting what the problem is.
As for having 3 sites in the same niche, google has tried to cut down on individual sites having multiple pages in the same serp, but I've never seen it with different sites.
You want to spam the hell out of the site when you dump the new crap content on it to make sure it gets crawled by G. That way the cache of your site gets updated to the new content. So spam away like there is no tomorrow.
I have multiple sites in the same niche. That's how you make the money. Whoever told you otherwise has no clue what they are talking about, or you are getting paranoid again. Just make sure you have no connection with GA on those sites. Like I said, your IP is a glowing ember when you sign on. So no GA.
I did read today someone else on BHW I think saying they had used the same mobile phone number to verify 8-10 accounts and Google took all their sites down a notch and they thought it was due to Google thinking they were running a spam network or farm. So maybe that's my issue.