A few days ago, nearly all of my sites (many unrelated ones in different industries, non-business as well, none of them cross-linked either) were penalized in Google. They no longer rank for their brand names. One site has some of the best white-hat link building I've ever done and has become extremely popular among visitors - one of my best successes ever. Fortunately, it brings in nearly 100 visitors/day and only lost about 10-20/day when Google knocked my brand name down from #1 to #20, plus many other keywords. I am not sure if this is Penguin, manual review or what, but it's unprofessional to simply block all these sites for days on end... Many of my sites haven't been touched in well over a year or more, not even link building activities. One of my personal websites I've had for over 5 years, that I haven't done any SEO on, was busted. Seems the only common denominator is that all my sites were in GWT or they were all hit by Penguin algorithm changes all at once. Ok, here is the stern warning to Google: Because of Penguin or whatever algorithm updates have been going on, I've personally searched on Yahoo and Bing more than I've ever done in my life. Just the other day, I couldn't even find the Urban Dictionary on Google when I searched for "Urban Dictionary". I've had problems finding other "very popular" sites as well. Now I got proof that I'm not the only one. Just go to Alexa and see some of the stats of Google's usage: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com . It's not a coincidence that Google's traffic peaked around April during Penguin's release and then fell into relatively heavy and steady decline... June was an extremely bad decline, which continues to accelerate. It appears that Google lost it's #1 traffic ranking for the first time ever during the past 2 months due to facebook. More than likely, the reason behind this is the Penguin. In addition, even Quantcast shows a similar pattern going on: http://www.quantcast.com/google.com . Though the data doesn't include June yet, there is relatively strong growth up until around April when Penguin was released. Then it seems that the trend begins to level off and "flat lines" into a possible peak. It may have even declined in June, but the data for June isn't there yet. Google's bread and butter is search and this small decline probably equates to tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue... I understand Google needs to update it's algorithms. It seems that Penguin was not tested thoroughly before it went live and the process of major ranking changes and knocking sites out of the rankings for days, weeks and months at a time was a bad idea. Sometimes it's best not to fix something that isn't broken. Sometimes it's best to implement changes slowly and monitor the effects. Sometimes it's best to look at the results and reverse a bad decision. I'm not trying to boast about anything, but I believe Penguin was a bad decision and I'm a white hat SEO guy who has many of my sites all screwed up in the rankings, not ranking for brand names, no communication and contact from Google about anything. I would like this fixed. On the flip-side, I'm not happy about popular sites like Urban Dictionary among a few others that keep going in and out of the search index for their brand name and me having to go to Bing or Yahoo to find it (since I'm too lazy to type direct URLs).
as there is only google and bing+yahoo, as long as google piss off less people that bing+yahoo do, they still in good shape and can care less about any particular of their algorithm injustice
So...any advice on what we can do to avoid this happening to others? I know there are tons of guros around, but no one is really giving out the real advices....whatever that means.
Yes, build your site for humans and real visitors and not search engines. The rest will take care of itself.