Google Penguin Roll Back?

Google Penguin Roll Back?

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We missed the chatter on the 15th December which many webmasters and SEO’s were saying they were seeing roll back from the latest Google Penguin update.

Has Google Rolled Back Penguin?

Today in the UK we are seeing some fluctuation in SERPs, for some niches. It’s certainly not massively impacting many sites but the one thing we have noticed is the SERPs are pretty much the same results pre-penguin update.

Anchor text link spammers are ranking more favourably, and the results are like for like pre-penguin.

No consistency in SERPs

What’s really interesting is not all industries seem to being seeing these results. In the main most are un-affected that we’ve checked. A few ups and downs in the verticals.

From what we can tell it appears to be an old data set. Sites that were pushed down when Penguin had looked over their quality of links are back where they were before the big Penguin update.

But in some cases it is just a few of the search terms for that site. 

What if Google has rolled back penguin?

It’s very unlikely Google would roll back an update of this magnitude. Penguin after all is designed to improve the quality of search results and the majority of pre penguin sites that were link spamming are back, certainly for the industries and niches we are checking on.

On Search Engine Land there was a lot of chatter from users saying webmasters and SEOs were seeing roll backs but after a day or so they returned.

What do we know about Google Algorithm roll backs?

Well they seem to usually occur when Google is updating something which means an old data set is being used. Once this refreshes to the latest dataset things go back to normal.

Google has recently updated the local places pack to include more filters and on going AMP updates, so it’s probably likely if it is an old dataset that it’s due to one of all of these changes.

What if it’s more than a roll back what can be done to improve your rankings?

Well I hate spam but I am seeing spammers prevailing again. Out of all our  sites we’ve been monitoring, a percentage that have seen ups or downs are generally ranking like they did pre-penguin 4.0 update all have aggressive anchor text link spam. Some by as much as 50% of their anchor text are money terms. These are mainly competitor sites that were spamming.

I am a glass half full guy, and I can’t see why Google would try and award sites who spam to rank better than those who play it by the book (as we do).

I am not sure it’s an algo update however as it’s not across the board for every niche/industry/category.

You’d expect to see site wide and overall changes for everyone if it were.

But surely Google isn’t allowing aggressive anchor text spam again?

Are you seeing fluctuations in your rankings? Join the discussion and leave your comments below.

 

 

 

 

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

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