New Penguin update

[yagoparamo]

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2260002/Google-Penguin-the-Second-Major-Coming-How-to-Prepare?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+sew+(Search+Engine+Watch)

 

[JessicaRuth]

This is closer than we think - and are we prepared?

This article is from today and says, "it would be significant and one of the most talked about Google algorithm updates this year." - from Matt Cutts.

 

[yagoparamo]

Jess,

Based on what you read... can you give us your opinion on what the 2 most important updates/changes would be?

 

[cmjerry4531]

Penguin goes after over-optimization, and spam both on-site, and off-site: Google Launches "Penguin Update" Targeting Webspam In Search Results

The two things I would do are:

1. Make sure that you are using keywords in your links less than 10% of the time, digging down to page level metrics, and disavowing any spammy looking links.

I have a dealer who had a bunch of links from pages that were just pure links, and no content. So, I attempted to email the domain owner, which of course failed, and then just disavowed it in webmaster tools. I also make sure that we are link building towards branded, and benign links so that we never get over-optimized, leaving us in the grasp of a Penguin updated, or too spammy, which would put you in the range of an unnatural link penalty.

2. Making sure your content is pretty much grammatically correct, and not keyword stuffed.

If your content reads like this, then you might want to rewrite it:
The best thing about having a Dodge Dart in Minneapolis, is that you will be one of the first people with a Dodge Dart in Minneapolis and be the envy of all the people that want a Dodge Dart in Minneapolis.

Also watch out for things like this:
Our dealership is a great Buick dealer MA. As a MA Buick dealer, we pride ourselves on fantastic service.

Forcing in keywords with bad grammar continues to be less helpful for SEO, and even worse for conversions.

 

[joe.pistell]

From my seat, Penguin 1.0 totally missed our industry. It's possible that Penguin 2.0 may do the same.

SEO Best practices & penalties from Google -and the SEO community- frequently just don't show up in our industry. I see link spam and page dupes and content dupes galore and Google rewards and penalizes randomly... it's simply hit or miss.


IMO, google parses it's problems into industries. It sorts the industries by Cost Per Click and focuses most of its Algo work in the high dollar areas. IMO, Car Dealers fall off the radar because we're moved into a separate bucket of sites that are local only.

Additionally, Car dealers are franchises and franchises by their nature are NOT UNIQUE, they are duplicated businesses, ergo duplicate content IS a signature of the business model.


Here is the Penguin Algo impact table that puts my observations into perspective FYI:
•Penguin 1.0: April 24, 2012 (3.1% queries affected)
•Penguin 1.1: May 26, 2012 (less than 0.1%)
•Penguin 1.2: Oct. 5, 2012 (0.3%)


We all know that Matt Cutts is on the record saying that a giant Panda 2.0 launch is imminent. Matt C does mention local results near the end of the video. We'll see if it trickles down into our space.

 

[cmjerry4531]

From my seat, Penguin 1.0 totally missed our industry. It's possible that Penguin 2.0 may do the same.

Too true! Some industries have a really low threshold for exact match keyword links, but I've seen dealers with more than 50% without a penalty. The bell curve for dealer links is also way into the range of spam with almost all links getting a Domain Authority, based on SeoMoz's tools, of 10-40.

There has been a big movement for different website vendors to reduce the amount of duplicate content on the sites. I've noticed some Dealer.com sites utilizing the rel="next" "prev" to try fix it with pagination, and some vendors are outright noindexing it.