Earlier this week, Searchmetrics put out lists of winners and losers from Google’s Penguin update (when it was still called the Webspam update). After the lists were released, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke out about them, saying that they were inaccurate, because there had also been a Panda update, and that the lists were likely more indicative of that.
Searchmetrics has now updated the lists, acknowledging what Cutts had to say.
“I took nearly a huge set of keywords from short-head to medium and low search volume and looked at the current rankings from position 1 to 100 and compared the rankings to April 20th,” Searchmetrics Founder Marcus Tober writes. “In the data were also some glitches from the Panda 3.5 update which was going live from April 19th to 20th, Matt Cutts mentioned. But overall you see a trend of those domains which really lost visibility within the Google Penguin update.”
“A lot of these losers are database-driven websites – they mainly aggregate information and use large database systems to create as many pages as possible. Sites such as songlyrics.com, cubestat.com, lotsofjokes.com or merchandtcircle.com fall into this pattern. It makes sense that these sites will lose visibility,” says Tober. “Press portals and feed aggregators such as pressabout.us, newsalloy.com and bloglines.com were also affected, which makes sense from a Google point of view since these are the website types that are very often created by very aggressive (possibly overly aggressive) SEOs and often contain similar content.”
He notes that ticketnetwork.com and ticketcity.com fit the bill of Google’s efforts with automatic, and possibly spun content.
If you need to know exactly how to avoid getting caught by Google’s Penguin update, I’d start with the tips they give you. If you think you were unfairly hit by it, you can let Google know with a new form they’re providing.
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