Do you think the next penguin update will shake up our industry?

[wonderpunter]

On a previous thread I posted there were a lot of people experience some very strange ranking changes, some believe perhaps its some kind of testing for the next penguin update, There are also rumors that Google will be devaluing links as opposed to placing a penalty, which would be the smartest move especially if penguin was ran in real time, it means spammers wouldn't get a full year of taking top spots.

Our industry is probably one of the most notorious for link buying, I would say 90% of the top 20 results is involved in some type of link manipulation, the number sounds high but when you analyse most sites you will see these almost replica sites with no real stand out content repeated all over... with thousands of links "Spikes of 1000 at a time usually"

It would be interesting to see the carnage if google stopped valuing spammy links, PBN's "Which many have been building for years perhaps now it will come back and bite?" and alike..

What do you think will happen?

[RacingJim]

Who knows, link building and link 'value' is a very tricky thing indeed, I have tended to avoid any dodgy tactics for a long time but that's not to say I don't do some link building and anyone who does ANY link building is always going to be a bit worried when these changes come around.

[wonderpunter]

Who knows, link building and link 'value' is a very tricky thing indeed, I have tended to avoid any dodgy tactics for a long time but that's not to say I don't do some link building and anyone who does ANY link building is always going to be a bit worried when these changes come around.

If it does just devalue then surely it's better than a penalty? it means recovery should be easy and better content should be produced right?, Many top sites are there not because of their content or popularity but because they brought links.. it's been known for a while and really is the last element Google needs to eliminate to prove that content really is king?

[RacingJim]

If it does just devalue then surely it's better than a penalty? it means recovery should be easy and better content should be produced right?, Many top sites are there not because of their content or popularity but because they brought links.. it's been known for a while and really is the last element Google needs to eliminate to prove that content really is king?

I don't know, they're never going to take away the 'trust' element of their engine methinks. This means that high authority links should always help you rank higher. If they devalue low quality links that's great news for me, I don't really have any except the odd bit of junk where I think rival sites are trying to slowly negative SEO other sites. If they devalue those sorts of things then it stops negative SEO link campaigns and saves the guesswork with disavow.

[Voids]

I've never really done any link building and sites have appeared out of nowhere to over take me, looks like many of them are based on social signals and where started by twitter accounts buying followers.

[peternorsk]

I think in terms of backlinks, google will stay with the same Algorithm, de-index bad websites, manually review, etc..
About the future of seo, Schema Markup will get more value in the next 2-3 years. in my opinion.

[Muppet]

If it does just devalue then surely it's better than a penalty? it means recovery should be easy and better content should be produced right?, Many top sites are there not because of their content or popularity but because they brought links.. it's been known for a while and really is the last element Google needs to eliminate to prove that content really is king?

Au contraire, you have this completely backwards. "De-valuing" instead of penalising will inevitably mean a shift back to a link buying free for all where people use a shotgun approach of buying links in bulk and hoping that some of them benefit their site's rankings. After all if there is no penalty, there is no downside apart from possibly wasting a little bit of money on some proportion of links that aren't beneficial. The end result is a focus on link acquisition instead of content quality, which was how things were before sites started to be penalised.

On the other hand I would welcome them scrapping the penalisation thing because I am all too familiar with being deliberately attacked by scum like the Affactive criminals with 10s of thousands of extremely bad links. Penalisation has created cottage industries of negative SEO sellers and "clean up" services.

Google is damned if they do, damned if they don't.

[Simmo!]

Au contraire, you have this completely backwards. "De-valuing" instead of penalising will inevitably mean a shift back to a link buying free for all where people use a shotgun approach of buying links in bulk and hoping that some of them benefit their site's rankings. After all if there is no penalty, there is no downside apart from possibly wasting a little bit of money on some proportion of links that aren't beneficial. The end result is a focus on link acquisition instead of content quality, which was how things were before sites started to be penalised.

On the other hand I would welcome them scrapping the penalisation thing because I am all too familiar with being deliberately attacked by scum like the Affactive criminals with 10s of thousands of extremely bad links. Penalisation has created cottage industries of negative SEO sellers and "clean up" services.

Google is damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Agreed. However "Devaluing" might also refer to "links" as a concept within the algorithm rather than the actual links themselves. After all, it makes sense that Google would want to move away from anything that can be manipulated and links as a ranking factor are fundamentally flawed for the very reasons you point out.

[TheGooner]

It would be interesting to see the carnage if google stopped valuing spammy links, PBN's "Which many have been building for years perhaps now it will come back and bite?" and alike..

What do you think will happen?

Nothing major at all.

I think that it is impossible for Google to create algorithmic intelligence to quantify and value old links. As proof I point to the current SERP results that are worse that something a 10yo child could produce.

It's possible that huge rafts of new links that appear overnight MAY be depreciated (the spikes that you mention) but we are still a very long way away from developing machine intelligence that can accurately navigate the tangled web and determine good from bad from ugly from spam.

So to answer your original question : Do you think the next penguin update will shake up our industry?
No I don't think so.

[universal4]

This is an interesting discussion. Most any off-page seo methods can be manipulated in one form or another.

Links, likes (facebook's link program), tweets, retweets, shares, page impressions and actual clicks, can all be bought, and for that reason I think that we will continue to see shifting and changes in the way in which sites are ranked.

Rick
Universal4

[Muppet]

Agreed. However "Devaluing" might also refer to "links" as a concept within the algorithm rather than the actual links themselves. After all, it makes sense that Google would want to move away from anything that can be manipulated and links as a ranking factor are fundamentally flawed for the very reasons you point out.

Good point. I see what you mean and I did not interpret it that way! That would be interesting.

Machine interpretation of the content has to be the end goal. But it will be a long time before that is anywhere near as good as a human reading it, which is no doubt why Google pays thousands of contractors to vet the quality of their results and manually penalise sites. There are loads of issues with machine determination of quality content. For example, an article that is perfect for a child doing a school assignment is likely to be useless to a professor doing research. So not only do they need to consider the article, the language and its complexity, they need to consider the perspective of the person searching. They do that already to a certain extent but not particularly well IMO.

All this is a repeating cycle. Years ago search engines like Alta Vista and Yahoo tried ranking everything on content and that was so easy to abuse with keyword and meta tag stuffing and other tricks that along came this new company called Google who ranked using links as an endorsement of quality. Now that horse has been flogged to death and copied by other search engines, now people are speculating that they could be throwing the links out the window and going back to content. Give it another decade or two and I will not be surprised to see people with short memories coming up with this genius idea of using links to measure quality.

I gave up trying to second guess search engines and listening to anyone who claims to know what they are doing a long time ago because no-one knows anything for sure. Its a waste of time.

[universal4]

Machine interpretation of the content has to be the end goal.

I agree since the content a site owner has on their site is the one constant that owners can control, and since a site content is the piece of the product puzzle that any search engine ultimately delivers to the end user, is and has been the main thing we need to continue to focus on.

I agree that content alone factors were abused as per keyword stuffing etc, but maybe as AI continues to improve this part may improve as well.

Give it another decade or two and I will not be surprised to see people with short memories coming up with this genius idea of using links to measure quality.

/BS remark ahead

Ok I am looking for links from sites that will go live in 2020

Rick
Universal4

[wonderpunter]

I used the Google translate the other day out of curiosity.. I Used to use it over 10 years ago before i became fluent in Spanish, Then it could only translate words but not phrases, and definitely not understand what you are trying to say, Now however the AI has come leaps and bounds and understands misspelling and phrases even if you use the incorrect words it still manages to be fairly accurate.,. It's not a search algo but shows you what they can achieve.

A high ranking page should be judged in Googles algo by Google.. it Should be smart enough to understand instead of relying on a thumbs up from other sites, or on page SEO.. which is always manipulated.. Why should a quality written article be bottom of the pile because the guy with a table and 150 words has lots of paid links?

With penguin going real time then link buying may work but only for a few days.. right now it can work up to a year.. so many Junk sites around to prove that, wait for 2016... I wonder how many one page euro2016 sites will be dominating.. same for Super Bowl it's always the same.

Unless google ceases to evolve I think that we might see some big changes this time.

[xecutable]

I agree with most opinions here. I've never seen so many people complain about results lately, even though not involved in any online business looking for things. In fact it has come to my attention that a lot of information that I look for, appears on page 2.

I agree that Google will never achieve a perfect algo, and if we had ANY sort of search engine, this wouldn't matter. Just like most of you use a few browsers, as they all have different strengths and weaknesses, I'd prefer to have a few engines to use, each with their flaws and advantages.

As long there's only "one flavor of ice cream' i can't see it make everyone happy. Is anyone even investing into SE development anymore? Im wondering how Yahoo and Bing haven't shutdown yet.

To answer to the question directly, I doubt anything will change this year or even next.

[universal4]

Was searching for a bunch of tech stuff yesterday, and sure enough found it faster on Bing.

(odd thing is, one of the things I was looking for had to do with android and Bing still won out)....lol

This is not always how it works but has been working that way more and more in recent weeks.

Rick
Universal4

[lolTRICKEDu]

I actually find that Google has become quite a bit better on many things. For example when I search for 'south park episodes' the other day, they showed a list over the latest ones, with titles, season, number and dates aired. Same with football results, just typed in 'panthers vs redskins' and info about the game, as well as link to youtube video of the highlights came up. Very convenient.

Now I agree that in the gambling realm google seems to struggle a lot, but some of the terms I am targeting have gotten these 'answer boxes' in its results and this seems to cut into my CTR quite a bit (as I am not in first place), so in that regard I hope they still leave these terms as they are, heh

[TheGooner]

I actually find that Google has become quite a bit better on many things. For example when I search for 'south park episodes' the other day, they showed a list over the latest ones, with titles, season, number and dates aired.

Same with football results, just typed in 'panthers vs redskins' and info about the game, as well as link to youtube video of the highlights came up. Very convenient.

Good point. I've also seen similar results when you search for films - you will get local cinema listings too.
Very helpful.

But I think it's correct to point out that these results are not an example of machine intelligence. They are 'curated' results created by an army of Google employees that are tasked with generating good results for very common searches and money searches.

They define the terms and some special sources to be referenced when those terms are hit. When a trigger is hit with a search term then special processing is done and results are pulled from verified news / results sources.

These special results ARE very good - it's just all the other 99% of search terms (especially in our fields) - where there is just a dump of websites that have "gamed" the algo and are just rubbish.

I agree with most opinions here. I've never seen so many people complain about results lately, even though not involved in any online business looking for things. In fact it has come to my attention that a lot of information that I look for, appears on page 2.

Interesting - I'll have to try skipping to page 2 or 3 a few times and see how that works out for me.
Thanks.

[xecutable]

Interesting - I'll have to try skipping to page 2 or 3 a few times and see how that works out for me.
Thanks.

And people used to say that the best place to bury a body is on page 2 on Google

[universal4]

And now I am wondering if we should be worried that X seems to know how to get rid of bodies.....lol

Oh no they might change the algo, bury that sucker a few pages deeper.....lol

Rick
Universal4

[RacingJim]

The ultimate goal is surely to get the best written, most useful content to the top, but I think AI has got a long way to go before they can start to discount other important trust signals such as links from authority sites. A few more years and maybe they will have it nailed.

They have already leaned towards good content and more lengthy articles, but sometimes I've seen people take the **** with the article length, trying to game the system by making a 6,000 word article for something where someone is looking for an answer to a question, i.e. something that might take 10-30 seconds.

Google has to factor in user-intention always and try to figure out what the user wants and give it to them, so article length and depth should not always be the main factor - getting the right answer for the user should always be the end-goal. People have rarely got 20-30 minutes to sit and read a thesis on something.