Google: Further Penguin Update “Jolts” To Come; Panda Is Smoother & Monthly

Fasten your seat belt, if you’ve been spamming Google. The anti-spam “Penguin Update” will have more jolts in the coming months, as Google continues to adjust it. In contrast, updates to the Panda algorithm aimed at low-quality pages are now so minor as not to be noticed, when they roll out monthly.

Speaking yesterday at the SES San Francisco conference, the head of Google’s spam fighting team Matt Cutts talked about how Google is still adjusting the Penguin Update algorithm that’s designed to penalize sites that spam Google.

Technically, Google’s saying that Penguin isn’t a penalty but rather an “adjustment” that simply doesn’t let sites get rewarded for spam as much as in the past. In particular, some linking activities that generated credit in the past seem to have been taken out.

Updatequakes & Aftershocks

Last year, Google rolled out its Panda Update designed to penalize (or adjust) pages that had poor quality content. Each further update produced changes in the search results, creating “winners and losers” that were felt across a wide-range of publishers.

But kind of like an major earthquake, each Panda update was more like an aftershock to the main quake, where the effects were less dramatic. Now Panda’s updated on a roughly monthly basis, Cutts said, and the changes are so subtle that few notice.

Indeed, Google itself hasn’t announced any major changes to get us from Panda 3.0 to Panda 4.0 and beyond. The latest, in late July, we dubbed Panda 3.9. It seems likely we’re going to have Panda 3.91 follow, rather than going to Panda 4.0.

Penguin Is Still Shaking Out

Penguin is different. Cutts said that because the Penguin algorithm is newer, it will face bigger adjustments and thus be more “jolting” for people it hits, until it smooths out over time similar to Panda. He also just added more to his statement yesterday in a comment at Search Engine Roundtable:

I was giving context on the fact that lots of people were asking me when the next Penguin update would happen, as if they expected Penguin updates to happen on a monthly basis and as if Penguin would only involve data refreshes.

If you remember, in the early days of Panda, it took several months for us to iterate on the algorithm, and the Panda impact tended to be somewhat larger (e.g. the April 2011 update incorporated new signals like sites that users block). Later on, the Panda updates had less impact over time as we stabilized the signals/algorithm and Panda moved closer to near-monthly updates.

Likewise, we’re still in the early stages of Penguin where the engineers are incorporating new signals and iterating to improve the algorithm. Because of that, expect that the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact. It’s not the case that people should just expect data refreshes for Penguin quite yet.

So far, Google’s only announced one further change to Penguin, which we dubbed Penguin 1.1. That came last May, about a month after the initial Penguin Update. We made it Penguin 1.1 rather than Penguin 2.0 because, as Google said it impacted less than 0.1% of all search results, it seemed a minor change.

Will the next update be Penguin 1.2 or Penguin 2.0, and will it be soon? Certainly, it feels overdue, and given what Cutts said, it seems likely to be a major revision. Keep in mind, however, that for all the “losers” in any update that will scream, there will be winners — perhaps even some of the sites that lost initially.

Google Explains New Link Warnings, Says Don’t Panic But Don’t Ignore

Confused by the latest link warnings that Google has been sending out? As we covered before, it’s all been pretty confusing. That’s why Google has posted more information meant to calm some worries, though it’s still likely that even after this, some are going to panic.

The “Old” Link Warnings: Entire Site Impacted

Google’s post starts with some history, explaining just as we’ve done how earlier this year, it began sending out link warnings:

Let’s talk about the original link messages that we’ve been sending out for months.

When we see unnatural links pointing to a site, there are different ways we can respond. In many severe cases, we reduce our trust in the entire site. For example, that can happen when we believe a site has been engaging in a pretty widespread pattern of link spam over a long period of time.

If your site is notified for these unnatural links, we recommend removing as many of the spammy or low-quality links as you possibly can and then submitting a reconsideration request for your site.

Sometimes, Links Ignored

As you can see, if you got one of these messages in the past, it was a sign that your entire site might be distrusted. But Google’s post went on to say:

In a few situations, we have heard about directories or blog networks that won’t take links down. If a website tries to charge you to put links up and to take links down, feel free to let us know about that, either in your reconsideration request or by mentioning it on our webmaster forum or in a separate spam report. We have taken action on several such sites, because they often turn out to be doing link spamming themselves.

This is a slightly new twist to concerns some have had that if they can’t get links removed, what can they do? Google’s saying that in some cases, it might decide a directory or link network is spam, so it will block those sites — and in turn, those links should no longer count as harmful to the sites they point at.

I’ve covered this before, in terms of negative SEO. There are those who received notices from being in link networks, then assumed that this meant anyone could link to anyone from these networks as a means of harming them. That only works assuming that the networks were allowed to continue passing harmful link credit.

The New Warnings

Now on to the new warnings:

In less severe cases, we sometimes target specific spammy or artificial links created as part of a link scheme and distrust only those links, rather than taking action on a site’s overall ranking.

The new messages make it clear that we are taking “targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole.”

The new messages also lack the yellow exclamation mark that other messages have, which tries to convey that we’re addressing a situation that is not as severe as the previous “we are losing trust in your entire site” messages.

To be clear, there were some people who recently got these “new” warnings that looked exactly the same as the old ones. The concern these raised prompted Google to make the changes above, as we covered previously, along with examples of how to tell what’s more severe due to a yellow warning symbol like this:

 

New Warnings May Ignore Links, Not Harm Entire Site

As for those who get one of the new warnings, apparently they mean that Google’s not penalizing your site. Rather, it’s going to “take action” against the link pointing at your site, meaning it won’t trust it. Google goes on to explain this more:

These new messages are worth your attention.Fundamentally, it means we’re distrusting some links to your site.

We often take this action when we see a site that is mostly good but might be might have some spammy or artificial links pointing to it (widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.).

So while the site’s overall rankings might not drop directly, likewise the site might not be able to rank for some phrases.

I wouldn’t classify these messages as purely advisory or something to be ignored, or only for innocent sites.

You Won’t Rank For Some Terms But Don’t Panic?

I think Google sees the explanation above as reassuring, since it says that the site overall won’t drop in rankings. But saying the site may drop for some rankings, combined with advice that anyone who gets one of these new notices should take action, is still going to cause concern.

That’s why the next part of Google’s post immediately after the paragraph above isn’t at all calming:

On the other hand, I don’t want site owners to panic. We do use this message some of the time for innocent sites where people are pointing hacked anchor text to their site to try to make them rank for queries like [buy viagra].

Here’s a thought. If you don’t want sites to panic, then send those “innocent sites” messages that clearly explain they are innocent and don’t have to worry about taking any action. Otherwise, there’s no way for them to know they really are innocent. It’s like giving a driver something that looks like a ticket with no indication that it’s just an advisory they can ignore.

Examples Of Those Who Did Panic & Didn’t Need To

The post goes on with examples of things to avoid, such as widget links and paid links. Then a third example says this:

In some cases we’re ignoring links to a site where the site itself didn’t violate our guidelines. A good example of that is reputation management.

We had two groups write in; one was a large news website, while the other was a not-for-profit publisher. Both had gotten the new link message.

In one case, it appeared that a “reputation management” firm was using spammy links to try to push up positive articles on the news site, and we were ignoring those links to the news site.

In the other case, someone was trying to manipulate the search results for a person’s name by buying links on a well-known paid text link ad network. Likewise, we were just ignoring those specific links, and the not-for-profit publisher didn’t need to take any action.

In summary, both sites got one of these new messages that Google has said shouldn’t be ignored. At the same time, the publishers — clearly concerned enough about them to write in — were apparently told they could ignore these messages, because the links themselves were ignored. Bottom line: a lot of time wasted by all parties.

If You Get A Message, Investigate, Says Google

What to do if you got one of these new warnings? The latest advice from Google:

We recently launched the ability to download backlinks to your site sorted by date. If you get this new link message, you may want to check your most recent links to spot anything unusual going on.

If you discover that someone in your company has been doing widgetbait, paid links, or serious linkspam, it’s worth cleaning that up and submitting a reconsideration request.

We’re also looking at some ways to provide more concrete examples to make these messages more actionable and to help narrow down where to look when you get one.

Google also said less than 20,000 domains have received these messages and going forward, only about 10 sites per day can expect to receive them. It also offered some final reassurance:

If you get one of these new messages, it’s not a cause for panic, but neither should you completely ignore it. The message says that the current incident isn’t affecting our opinion of the entire website, but it is affecting our opinion of some links to the website, and the site might not rank as well for some phrases as a result.

Google Needs Better Messages

I just don’t see how any of these new messages aren’t going to cause panic by those who get them. Saying a site might not rank well for some terms is self-evidently a panic-inducing statement. Worse, it induces panic when, in some cases, the site doesn’t need to actually do anything at all.

Last time I wrote about this, I said Google should just stop sending warnings until it could clear things up better. Nothing in today’s post has changed that view. This entire situation just seems to go from bad to worse.

Google’s SEO Guide On A/B & Multivariate Testing

Google posted some guidelines on how you can conduct A/B or multivariate testing and stay clear of any issues with being listed in its search engine, such as avoiding penalties.

No Cloaking

Google says you shouldn’t cloak, show its crawlers something that humans wouldn’t see. From its post:

Make sure that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content variant to serve, based on user-agent. An example of this would be always serving the original content when you see the user-agent “Googlebot.” Remember that infringing our Guidelines can get your site demoted or removed from Google search results—probably not the desired outcome of your test.

Use rel=“canonical”

Google says publishers should make use of the rel=canonical method to ensure that any alternative pages reference what should be the main one:

We recommend using rel=“canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your intent in this situation. Let’s say you were testing variations of your homepage; you don’t want search engines to not index your homepage, you just want them to understand that all the test URLs are close duplicates or variations on the original URL and should be grouped as such, with the original URL as the canonical. Using noindex rather than rel=“canonical” in such a situation can sometimes have unexpected effects.

Use 302s, Not 301s

Google recommends using the temporary direction method, a 302, over the permanent 301 redirect:

This tells search engines that this redirect is temporary—it will only be in place as long as you’re running the experiment—and that they should keep the original URL in their index rather than replacing it with the target of the redirect (the test page). JavaScript-based redirects are also fine.

Don’t Run Experiments Longer Than Necessary

If you’ve been running an experiment longer than Google expects one should run, it warns that you could face penalty. How long is too long isn’t said. Google just says:

Once you’ve concluded the test, you should update your site with the desired content variation(s) and remove all elements of the test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and markup. If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly. This is especially true if you’re serving one content variant to a large percentage of your users.

If you follow these guidelines, Google does not promise there will be no impact in your search results but does say there will be “little or no impact on your site in search results.”