So. Yesterday the big news broke that Penguin had been unleashed and all hell was set to break loose. In actual fact, this was all scaremongering by Link evaluation Software companies and people looking to charge a bit more to get your site “Penguin Ready”. When you think about it, as Penguin 2.0 was directly targeting Black Hat ways and Spam Links, if your SEO Company was pushing you to vet your links and invest a bit more this month, you have to wonder why. Were they engaging in black hat or spammy ways previously? If not, why were they pushing you?
Anyway that’s by the by. You can see from statisics released from SearchMetrics that the losers pretty much deserve to lose out with the top 25 losers of traffic and visibility across search engines being porn websites and game websites. Please bear in mind that the stats released are for the United States only. The UK results won’t be released until tomorrow. You can see the top 25 hardest hit websites below:
You would expect a few of the sites on the list to appear. Such as the gaming sites and the porn sites. But what on earth are the Salvation Army doing on there? Out of everyone on the list this stuck out to me the most so I did a little digging and found that although their link profile (below) looks fairly steady, they’ve been losing links at a rate that has seen them drop 15,000 links since March. Naturally it’s not just quantity, there will have been some quality link issues but 15k links is a lot.
Have you noticed any of your websites lose rankings? What about your competitors? You should only really see rankings/traffic affected if you have engaged in bad practices previously. Over the next few days many companies who have previously ranked will be conspicuous by their absence which will most likely be down to the update of Penguin.
SearchMetrics will be updating their data for the UK over the weekend so expect to see the hardest hit websites in the UK to have the spotlight shone on them come Monday.
Enjoy the bank holiday weekend!
Blog Post by: Greg McVey
