Matt Cutts double arm pumps in excitement over corporate infiltration into the organic search results... Cha-ching!
Say what? Not the big G…
On April 24, 2012 Matt Cutts published this post
Another step to reward high-quality sites
(Another attempt to put brands on every search result)
The day after, nearly every marketer I know had most of their business wiped out.
The update, which was claimed to only affect “around 3%” of the search results, has seemingly affected closer to 30%.
There was bloodshed.
In his post, Matt claims that the original Panda update affected 12% of the SERPs, but yet from my memory as a survivor, had no where near the impact as this one. There was one rather interesting survivor though, and my guess is you’ll recognize him.
Here’s the image Matt Cutts referred to in his post.
Okay fair enough, that’s spam… so let’s only wipe out people using these methods, right? More like, let’s go ahead and take out EVERYONE that has what we deem as “low quality” backlinks. Doesn’t matter who built them, we dont care.
As we all know, backlinks are the only thing that allows little dudes to compete with the big boys in the SERPs. Backlinks drive the Internet.
In fact, although Google says they don’t like “paid links“, they are certainly okay with people buying PPC ads that say things such as “Link Building Packs from $97-297″.
Apparently if I wanted to buy some links, it’s as easy as doing a Google search. Check out one of the results
Maybe it’s just me, but it really strikes a nerve to find out the same company that wiped out a large portion of my business overnight for backlinks is selling them behind my back.
What could be worse?
Lets take a look at Jon Leger’s post and see what he found.
Warning: hold in the coffee…
Lost your business? Well, our friend “pay day loans” certainly didn’t.
Thanks to Bing (I imagine, as the page is still indexed there), Jon was able to discover the full story.
Here’s the page Matt Cutts referred to… http://profitmonarchs.com/get-fit-using-these-simple-and-easy-methods/
Now click on the “pay day loans” , and notice it goes to dergimea.info, and then redirects to http://www.checkintocash.com/ ( the guy’s main site)
 Same Website as Matt Cutts posted from a different view. |
 Proof that this site still ranked post-algo update. |
Woah.. wait… what does this mean?! I think Jon put it quite well.
Total. Complete. Failure.
They wiped out businesses, but of all people… somehow forgot to penalize one of the example offenders? And just to make it the ULTIMATE fail, it’s all done through a .info 301 redirect! something that most of us don’t even do…
Who would’ve thought, “Backlinks”, the very core foundation of Google’s search engine, could ever lead to such widespread destruction. The algorithm is now returning lower quality results, and it appears “relevance” has been often been thrown out the window.
As Carl Sagan once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
Well.. here it is.
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Google Panda: Penguin 4/25/2012 Wall of Shame
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Case Study #1: Make money… with a blog network? WHAT?
Excuse me? Make money online with my OWN BLOG NETWORK? Congratulations, Google ranks sites that instruct people to violate their own guidelines. I lost most of my business overnight, yet this “Blogger Noob” promotes breaking guidelines, and ranks on the first page of “make money online”?
I don’t even…
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Case Study #2: Spun Content Backlinks gets you penalties, Spun content on-page makes you cash.
“bread machine reviews”
Snippet 1: http://breadmachinereviews.tripod.com/
The changes needed to supply a gluten no cost products end result in a yeast bread, nevertheless, the dough itself finally ends up considerably wetter and even more like a batter than a conventional bread dough.
Snippet 2: http://topbreadmakersonline.weebly.com/
I have right now already been the owner of the bread machine reviews with regard to 5 several weeks, and today It ‘s time that i can talk about my very own encounters concerning the benefits and drawbacks for me whenever you make breads having a breadmaker.
Snippet 3: http://bestbreadmachines.webs.com/
Unfortunately the superior from the business bread out there in outlets is simply not often what on earth is claimed to become. Panasonic SD-YD250This could be the second, most favored bread-maker amongst people.
Pretty disheartening to see businesses taken out by newb spammers using garbage spun content. I mean come on.. what’s worse, spun content backlinks the user never sees, or spun content spam in the top 10 results?
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Case Study #3: The “Viagra” situation.
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Need I say more? Showing infected results, and removing the company’s official page from #1 is definitely not higher quality for users.
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Case Study #4: We killed backlink spam! But.. meta spam?
“buy shoes” #7
Before discounting / penalizing 10 years of backlinks, it’s probably a good idea to figure out META spam.
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Case Study #5: Wtf is that?
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If this dude can rank #3 with 20,000,000 links and a stuffed META title & description, why were so many others affected? He’s on a free hosting service with a subdomain. Makes no sense.
Should this guy not be a HUGE target for an unnatural links penalty?
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Case Study #6: Jimdo spamming. The “Post Penguin” business model?
Another “Wtf” example. This Jimdo site is ranking top 10. More spam sites breaking through Google’s apparent “brand” filter for massive amounts of backlinks.
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Case Study #7: Amazon scraper comes back from the dead.
True story, I haven’t seen one notification from this site in at least 8 months. It’s an Amazon scraper site with 3,000 pages indexed. I’d say at least 30% of the content is totally irrelevant, as 3 years ago (when I was a newb) I scraped a bunch of keywords and auto generated 100% of it.
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Case Study #8: Google: Penalize thousands of websites for backlinks.. still doesn’t fix parked classier issue. Facepalm.
… I’m pretty sure there’s a site with backlinks that should be filling that spot. This is not quality or appealing to users.
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Matt Cutts, the point of this article was to prove that not only have you potentially destroyed 1000s of businesses overnight, and released an inferior quality algorithm…. You forgot to penalize the example offender, and your company is selling ad space for others to SELL links…
On a final note, Matt, this is the Internet. People on the Internet do not want Brands shoved down their throat on every SERP.
Penalizing backlinks has severely damaged the free flow of online information, and pushed low quality results into high rankings.
My question is…
Did Google sell out?
Post your horror stories below, and maybe Matt Cutts will take some sort of action, although I don’t expect much.
Google’s non-reply on the subject of Negative SEO has proven a lot about them as a company. They aren’t who they used to be.
April 27th, 2012 at 4:42 am
[...] Google Update Destroys 1000′s of Online Businesses [...]
April 27th, 2012 at 4:54 am
Thanks for the post, I got a great laugh out of these examples, especially with the “bread machine reviews” and the “WTF” images lol.
I ranted on a post on this earlier today: http://www.motoza.com/google-over-optimization-penalties-why-it-worries-me/
I think Google went WAY overboard this time and screwed up. Will searchers use Google less? Maybe not in the short term, but if this madness continues, only Bing would start getting more popular…
April 27th, 2012 at 5:15 am
Thanks for the comment! & I agree, they went WAY overboard this time. And the worst part.. even after 5 years of SEO knowledge, I cannot confidently say I can outrank spam anymore.
I mean, that “best registry cleaner” guy has 20,000,000 backlinks, an ugly website, Kw stuffed META… I don’t even know what to think. The only thing I can imagine is that Google has some sort of “breakthrough filter” to allow big brands to not be affected if you have X amount of backlinks.
Obviously that # is higher than most Internet marketers would achieve, but the ultra spammers appear to be ranking without problems.
I need to add this to the collection: https://twitter.com/#!/tehseowner/status/195383075985817600/
Another web 2.0 spammer ranking top 10. One thing’s for sure, 3% is not an accurate reflection of the SERPs affected with this update.
Regarding Bing.. All of my sites always rank fine there & are still getting traffic. If Google keeps the current results, I’d seriously consider switching to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Blekko.
April 27th, 2012 at 6:25 pm
A site I manage lost all its rankings for the blog posts we produce. The rest of the site was okay, still ranking. The scraper sites who stole the content are now ranking. The site had a bad backlink profile which had been cleaned up. Probably too late. Okay I understand that but to now rank the scapers where we used to rank it means the content is good because the scrapers have no content except ours, no backlinks and lots of adsense. Infuriating. The very least a smart company like google should be able to do is only give credit for content to the original producer.
April 27th, 2012 at 8:39 pm
More examples:
buy oxycontin
#2 result is a winery
python hosting
#1 result is a page that consists of the single word “OK”
search engine
altavista and dogpile are in the top 3. Google, Bing, and Yahoo don’t rank well enough to make the top 5.
April 28th, 2012 at 5:50 am
Oh god I can’t stop laughing reading that Weebly blog article on Breadmakers coming in at #5 in Page 1 SERPS! Some of the finest and most eloquent LITERATURE I have ever read.
Gawd forbid Googlebot should actually evaluate the page content in it’s algos. But it doesn’t trust that, nor does it trust Description meta tags so it’ll override those (and Titles too!) when it seems fit. It doesn’t trust backlinks, nor the Anchor Text associated with it now either. Wow. It’s like this Penguin Webspam Update delivers Top Results by IGNORING… everything the internet is made of???
April 28th, 2012 at 10:24 am
This is hilarious!!!!!
This updated really did go way overboard. In 2 years of SEO my sites have not been affected at all…believe me, I’m not a spammer, I write good, unique content and don’t outsource any work…yet with penguin my sites were blown out of the water…
I think a Penguin 1.1 has surely got to be on the cards. So hold tight. In the long run, white hat has got to come out on top.
April 29th, 2012 at 1:46 pm
Hi,
our site lost 50% traffic due the pengiun update. I was so frustrated about this that I’ve created a new website: SEO Stories. This site should help pengiun / google update victims.
Thumbs up for your great article, I linked it in our blog.
Best wishes,
Georg.
April 30th, 2012 at 1:05 am
Well. I got a spam email in 2002 and bought the domain http://www.6sigma.us. I used godaddy $19.99 to build the site. I did not sleep for four years. I was able to build a business that feeds a dozen families. After the penquin came we lost about 35% of our rankings. Some if the keywords just don’t rank in the top 100 pages know. Other key words are unaffected.
I wrote hundreds of aritcles from 2005 to 2007. In 2008 I stopped posting any articles since the web was out of control with posting. The majority of articles on the web in our business area are just copies on my original articles.
Sure I need to update the site and I will do this. I can’t control the thousands of websites that copied our articles to create PPC click farms for Google and Yahoo PPC. Talk about a two headed Janus. My full name is very unique only five people in the world with my name yet there are 561,000 are pages indexed with my name on it on the web. Imagine how many are out there not indexed. So many sites copied my articles. Reminds when Google was going public and for a very specific keyword I paid only a dollar a day. In two months with all the ADSENSE sites out there buying keyword lists and using google’s own search bar to steal money from people the cost was $20 a day, Yes from $1 to $20 a day in two months. I found one guy who made 11 identical websites and and put a google search bar on it and click on my site all day I guess. I am sure thousands of other sites too.
Google your Adsense is the cause of many of these problems. Allowing people to just click away and make money from content they stole from others. Yes even better the thives were nice enough to give us backlinks and now the content orginators are getting payback. I would appreciate if I can get my cut of the millions of dollars my content has generated for Google. Yes millions. Just my little site. We will see what happens. I wish google.com would follow their SEO guideline. Don’t hide the adwords by making the background white.
I know Google is making efforts but content we all posted six and seven years ago and the last three years being stolen and reposted on millions of sites. How can we stop this?
Kind regards,
Peter
April 30th, 2012 at 2:23 am
Well the thing is that backlinks were always a way to “claim” content more or less. For example if I make a website that I’m real proud of, the first thing I’d try to do is get a couple High PR links so Google thinks that it’s a powerful piece of content.
Now… If I do that… I’ll probably get sandboxed from day 1, since they’re penalizing links like crazy. Sadly, this situation leaves a lot of “unclaimed” content for scrapers to steal and use to their advantage.
So I would say, if it was bad in the past, hold on tight.. it’s probably about to get worse. Do not buy any services or links from ppl you don’t trust (i.e. Fiverr), because often times they are the same people stealing the content.
I think Google will do at least some sort of refresh soon, there’s just too many low quality SERPs out there after the update.
May 1st, 2012 at 5:20 pm
I am one of those businesses that lost everything and I am starting from scratch again. I was living off of a handful sites I had ranking on the first page. 3 were pretty authoritative sites with lots of content and backlinks.
It makes me really sick but I don’t have any other alternative. I have to start from scratch. I was paying my during-the-university accumulated debts so I didn’t put much aside.
Lesson learned: Don’t be at the mercy of Google! Diversify your activity.
But I have to say I never thought Google could fail so monumentally!
Great post BTW,
Husam
May 3rd, 2012 at 10:02 am
Fantastic post! This comes to crazy research for me…I am totally agree with that Google is doing wrong with the small business, who really work hard..and but why i don’t know..the Google is said to be king of search are not penalizing the site which is to be penalize
May 3rd, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Husam… I’m pretty much in your same spot bro. I have a TON of websites.. but the bulk of my income came from 10 authority sites.
They had been ranking #1-3 for at least 8 months without many additional links, now.. destroyed.. although admittedly the links before then were a bit shady
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Look on the bright side… they knocked out EVERYONE who made our same mistakes… that means its a level playing field now. We already know markets that convert, the only thing we’re missing is the Traffic… of course the most important part BUT it can be reclaimed.
Good luck, hope you’ve already started rebuilding… I know I have. This might just be the best chance to “hit a homer” since back in the golden days, if we play our cards right.
May 15th, 2012 at 1:13 pm
Our 11 year old “authority” site got clobbered bad on the longtail. We went from the 50,000th site on the web to well over the 100,000th within 2 weeks. Per day clicks went from over 4000 to 500 per day. Looks like ad ridden how-to sites have taken over.
In many cases, our serps stayed somewhat intact, but the traffic we now get is all zombie. Cutt’s can double pump himself dry.
May 16th, 2012 at 12:05 am
This is one of the better post
thanks for all your hard work to display the info
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There are 12 GOOGLE “board of directors”
3 are formerly affiliated with AMAZON.
L. John Doerr: previously a director of Amazon.com
Ann Mather: previously Zappos.com which was aquired by Amazon.com in 2009
K. Ram Shriram: served as Vice President of Business Development at Amazon.com
On April 24th 2012 GOOGLE, which accounts for almost 70% of all online search, released the PENGUIN update.
While they say it was a “webspam” update it was really the change that exposes their relationship with AMAZON and now sends all PORN and PRODUCT searches to AMAZON and it’s subsudiaries to include the IMDB.com and Zappos.
Not only does AMAZON control the #1 ranking on GOOGLE for “books”, it is #1 for almost every english word from “jewelry boxes” to “XXX” and “sex toys”.
What Does This Mean?
GOOGLE and AMAZON have cleverly manipulated you, the average person, into a direct buying path for basically every product in the world killing off their competition. Google controls 70% of all search online which now means AMAZON controls 70% of all online purchases. THAT’ IS ALOT OF MONEY!
May 16th, 2012 at 9:47 am
Have any of you guys experienced what many term “Zombie traffic”? Our SERP’s looks fine as do many others HOWEVER since this update (actually started prior to it but seems worse now) we see this pattern:-
(1) Traffic spike from Google, sales conversions great
(2) Within 24 hours sales conversions drop off a cliff
(3) Traffic appears normal, dig deeper and bounce rates have shot up AND there is loads of foreign traffic.
People in the UK, Germany & USA have all seen the same thing yet the smart ass Google bum kissers say it’s our sites at fault! Google is playing dirty right now, they can throttle traffic at will & it seems they can sort between converting & non-converting traffic, spying on user behaviour I wonder?