Were Any of Your Sites Affected By the Penguin?

I realize that the title may sound odd to those who have no idea what I'm talking about, but basically the Penguin is a "web spam algorithm" released by Google a few times over the past couple of years, and most recently May 22nd.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/

It hasn't seemed to affect any of my sites (at least yet) and two sites which were affected last year (April 24 2012 -I remember that day well-) seem to have benefited from it too.

How about you?

 

Boy, it sounds like a Batman villain, doesn't it? I don't know if I can attribute it to The Penguin, but my traffic has indeed dropped lately.

 

My traffic has remained consistent throughout the updates. I have not noticed any drop in traffic yet. However, I would not let my guard down. I am going keep chugging along and do what I need to do to build more traffic.

Thanks BennyCurry for posting the link. You just motivated me to work on my sites a tad harder!

 

No really change in my stats, maybe +5% since May 22nd

 

My site has dropped in rankings a bit since the penguin update, but we're starting to recover and climb the rankings again.

 

Some of my older sites seem to have gotten an Increase in organic traffic which they never received before, it's not a lot less than 50 a day but it seems to of Increased my earnings through Adsense over the last few days as well.

 

As far as I can tell, the affect on my sites has pretty much zero as far as this penguin update goes.

My stats program says the change in 'traffic' from Google between months is about 100 or so out of about 60 000 at the most.

Webmaster Tools has been useless in all cases.

 

Yeah, you never know when the Penguin will get you. I know that a lot of people who thought they were in the clear got hit. It doesn't seem to matter if you're whitehat, greyhat, or blackhat, the Penguin can strike at any time.

Since a few of my sites got hit last year I started to diversify ways I am getting traffic, just in case .

 

The week from April 7 2013 - April 14, 2013 we went from 500,000+ indexed URLs to 250,000. I don't know if this was Penguin or what. Nearly nothing was changed. I confirmed with Google that the site had not faced any kind of crawling restrictions. Earlier that month we modified robots.txt to un-restrict everything from being indexed. Perhaps that was not a good idea, but the result should not have been in 250,000 URLs being removed in the span of one week. This was confirmed with Google Webmaster Tools and it is still a mystery to me.

 

My blog was not too much affected by it, but HubPages - one of the sites I write for - took a battering in terms of traffic. Although they are trying their level best to get that site back to where it was before, I think, it's not going to get better anytime sooner.

 

Have any of your sites that were affected recovered? I'm looking at Hubpages from SEMRUSH and they never seemed to recover at all. They were at 5 million visitors in December, and now 900,000 last month. Is there no hope at all?

 

I haven't had any problems with traffic on the forums and sites I've already established but I've found that setting up a new site is no longer as easy. I think seo is going to start becoming increasing more about other factors other than just backlinks/page optimization, so far the easiest way to get ranked in google is from links within google ;?

 

Bit ridiculous but... am I the only one who thought of the Batman villain when I read the title?

Maybe it's the whole 'affected by the Penguin' part, which makes it sound like a supervillain going after websites rather than a search engine algorithm change.

 

After the Penguin update my site's stats really didn't fluctuate much at all, I was surprised to be honest. I know alot of people were devasted by the update. I hope the next update google has is not as damaging to all webmasters.

 

This is more likely what I was about to say; I was not hit by The Penguin, but The Joker before Batman came to rescue, hahaha

Jokes aside, I saw a slight "retroactive" effect , but nothing that really hurt my sites. Now I'm just wondering what The Hummingbird will bring, and why Google's mental fixation for zoo characters.

 

Thankfully it didn't affect me too badly, but since it was rolled out I've received so many emails asking me to remove links that sites have paid people to spam my comments sections with. I charge them a fee to remove these links, some people think this is nasty on my part, but they paid someone to create the mess so they can pay me to take time out of my day to clear some of it up.

 

I've noticed no change in traffic aside from my usual seasonal swings

 

Do you mean these two pesky Penguins? We captured them and put them back on ice.

 

Sorry, but in my opinion, asking for money to remove links from your site, in unethical.
This has been over discussed in many SEO related communities and that's the common consensus.

Although your site might be a specific case.

 

I have been called unethical many times for admitting that I charge a removal fee, it doesn't bother me. I believe my argument is very much valid.

I am interested to know why it is unethical for me to charge people a removal fee, but it isn't unethical for them (maybe pay someone) to spam my blog?