A Few Things That WILL NOT Save You From Penguin

A Few Things That WILL NOT Save You From Penguin

*Domain Age Only — I’ve had aged domains that are over 12 years old with good links STILL smoked by this update, going from thousands of people a day to hundreds. If anyone says the key to beating the Penguin update is to have aged sites, this is not true from what I’ve seen. Domain Age (the age of when your site was first indexed, not the age of the registration date) may allow your site to “get away with” more than a new site, but it’s not going to save you or it won’t have saved on it’s own.

*Quality Links Only — I’m absolutely sure that aged links from quality sites were an important factor for ensuring sites fell on the right side of whatever quality score Google gives sites and it’s a pretty safe bet to say that the more quality links your site had, the safer it is/was from the Penguin update. But it’s no sure guarantee. I have two sites to use as an example here. Both are large sites (one much larger than the other, however with thousands and thousands  of indexed pages while the other site has only hundreds). Both sites are at least 6 years old. Both had aged, quality links. The smaller site was hit while the larger site was untouched (I can argue I gained traffic actually since my competition was wiped out while my site was not).

There is no argument that both the above factors influenced whether your site was affected by Penguin, but just because you had an aged site or you had mostly/all quality links doesn’t mean your site was guaranteed a free pass from Penguin. I suspect if your link profile was good but your onpage factors failed, you still would get hit. I’m sure if you’ve got an aged site with awesome links, you’re site has a higher “threshold” before it falls south of whatever quality score dips into negative territory.

*Perfect On-Page SEO – too much on-page overoptimization seems to trigger a penelty (i’ve had multiple sites with no links but really optimized on-page seo get hit). But if you’re on-page SEO was neither too aggressive or nor too little to help ranking, you still may have been caught by Penguin if your backlink profile triggered flags.

*Quality, Lengthy Content — Google can’t tell quality from shit. You could have amazing content, but Google Search being algorithmically driven, there is no real way to ascertain “quality” from “crap” on all but the most crude of terms (keyword density too high, duplicate content present). I’ve had plenty of quality content-rich sites with 4000 word posts hammered out of the SERPs.