Google Penguin update hit me Hard
On April 24, 2012, Google released a new search algorithm, later it was named Penguin. This was mainly meant to stop “webspam”, that is, mainly to bring down the sites which use “black hat” methods to rank well in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), like, violating webmasters guidelines, keyword stuffing, participating in link schemes, etc.
When I read it I was happy that after the Panda update, Google moved a step forward to stop those spam sites who wishes to rank well within SERPs by shortcut methods. But as days passed, I became very sad and depressed as I found out that my blog also got hit by this update. My traffic dropped below 50%, some of my great posts cannot be found within SERPs and some went very down.
I followed every guideline and believes in “white hat” SEO. Nor I ask anyone to link to my blog without any reason neither I paid any firm for link schemes. I didn’t copy anyone’s article. I wrote for my readers and tried to explain it as far as possible, and I think my old subscribers, who love to read my blog, know it very well. I believe in “white hat” which is a long term and genuine process to bring traffic. I have added share buttons so that readers can share the articles and posts that they think is useful, so that their friends too can know about it. You can find many posts which were shared many times. People don’t go “click” because it’s lying under my blog posts, they do it for a reason I believe!
Why me? Google titled their post as “Another step to reward high-quality sites”, let’s see. I have found that many blogs copied my articles and due to this particular update, they are ranking well, some even at #1, whereas my articles cannot be found within the SERPs. Yes it’s true and if you don’t believe me then look at one of the examples below.
When I saw it I didn’t knew what to do, laugh or cry. I posted it to my good subscribes and readers to inform them and as a warning massage to content thieves but this author still copied my article. It’s a ditto copy and the only difference is the title (that is also by a very little margin) but ranked #1. But strangely, Google.com and Bing judged it right.
There are so many sites ranking well though they did copied my article. Here are some more compared with Bing:
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Next, I was too depressed to go on. I don’t know whether if the authors of those blogs delete those posts, it will bring back my original articles back to its rightful positions. Whether it’s a copied article or not but almost all of my posts are attacked by Penguin.
To Google, I have been using your search engine since I got my internet connection. Your results were much more relevant. Your idea to stop webspam is great but I believe that my site is penalized wrongly and this blog don’t deserve to get the punishment. The real spam sites are out there still ranking well. It’s a request to make changes to Penguin update to bring up the original contents and bring down those sites that deserves the punishment. Thank you.
I will wait until it gets fixed. In meantime, I will try to find and update some “over-optimized” posts and see if it helps. I will delete some posts within FAQ section (only) which will become obsolete as Blogger’s Dashboard changing to new UI starting 1st May. I will also upload a new layout very soon.
Further reading:
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