[Build Backlinks Online] Penguin Penalties: Do Webmasters Respond the Way They Should?

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Penguin Penalties: Do Webmasters
Respond the Way They Should?'

Posted by russvirante
Penalization has become a regular part of the search engine optimization
experience.Hell, it has changed the entire business model of Virante to building
tools and services around penalty recovery and not just optimization.While
penaltiesused to be a crude badge of honor worn by those leaning towards the
black-hat side of the SEO arts, it is now a regular occurrence that seems to
impact those with the best intentions. At Virante, we have learned a lot about
penalties over the last few yearsdiscerning between manual and algorithmic,
Panda and Penguin, recovery methodologies and risk mitigationbut not much study
has been done on the generalresponse of websites to penalizations. We have
focused more on what webmasters
ought to do without studying what webmasters actually do in response to various
penalties.
How webmasters respond matters
As much as we often feel a communion among other SEOs in our resistance to
Google, the reality is that we are engaged in a competitive industry where we
fight for customers in a very direct manner. This duality of competitionwith
Google and with each otherplays out in a very unique way when Google penalizes a
competitor. We learn a great deal in the following months about the competition,
such as the sophistication of their team (how quickly they respond, how many
links they remove, how quickly they recover), their financial strength (do they
increase ad spend, how much and on what terms), and whether they eventually
recover.
It is also important from a wider perspective of understanding Google's
justifications for particular types of penalties that seem sweeping and
inconsistent. Conspiracy theories abound regarding Penguin updates;I can't count
how many times I have heard someone say that penalties are placed to encourage
webmasters to switch to AdWords.
So, I decided to investigate the behavior of webmasters post-Penguin from a
macro perspective to determine what kinds of responses we are likely to see, and
perhaps even answer some questions about Google's motivations in the process.The
methodologyCollect examples: I collected a list of 100 domains that were
penalized by Penguin 2.0 last year and confirmed their penalization through
SEMRush. Establish controls: For each penalized site, I identified one website
that ranked in the top 10 for their primary keyword that was not penalized. Get
rankings and AdWords data: For each site (both penalized and control), we
grabbed their historical rankings and AdWords spend from SEMRush for the months
leading up to and following Penguin 2.0 Get historical link data: For each site
(both penalized and control), we grabbed their historical link data from
Majsetic SEO for the months leading up to and following Penguin 2.0. Analyze
results: Using simple regression models, we identified patterns among penalized
sites that differed significantly from the control sites.Do webmasters remove
bad links?
After a Penguin 2.0 update, it is imperative to identify and remove bad links
or, at minimum, disavow them. While we can't measure disavow data, we can
measure link acquisition data quite easily. So, do webmasters in general follow
the expectations of link removal following a penalty?
Aggressive link removal: It appears that aggressive link removal is a common
response to Penguin, as expected. However, we have to be careful with the
statistics to make sure wecorrectlyexamine the degree and frequency with which
link removal is employed. The control group on average increased their root
linking domains by 41 following Penguin 2.0, but that could best be explained by
a few larger sites increasing their links. When looking at an average of link
proportions, only about 22% of the control sites actually saw an increase in
links in the three months post-Penguin. The sites that were penalized saw a drop
of 578 root linking domains. However, once again, this statistic is impacted by
the link graph size of the individual penalized sites. 15% of those penalized
still saw an increase in links in the three months following Penguin.
So, approximately 22% of domains not impacted by Penguin 2.0 had more root
linking domains three months after the penalty, while only 15% of those
penalized had more root linking domains post-Penguin. Notice how small the
discrepancy is here. Webmasters responded differently only by 7% depending on
whether or not they were penalized. While certainly those penalized removed more
links, the practice of link building in general was very similarly affected.In
the three months following Penguin,78% of the control websiteseitherdropped
links or at least stopped link building and lost them through attribution. This
is remarkable. There appears to be a deadening effect related to Penguin that
impacts all sitesnot just those that are penalized. While many of us expected
Penguin to have a profound impact on link growth as webmasters respond to fears
of future penalties, it is still amazing to see it borne out in the numbers.

What I find more interesting is the variation in webmaster responses to Penguin
2.0. Some penalized webmasters actually doubleddown on link building, likely
attributing their rankings loss to having too few links, rather than being
penalized. We can tease this type of behavior out of the numbers by looking at
the variances in percentage link change over time.
The variance among link fluctuations for sites that were not penalized was .08,
but the variance among sites that were penalized was .38. This means that the
behavior of websites after being penalized was far more erratic than those that
were not. Some penalized sites made the poor decisions to greatly increase their
links, although more sites made the decision to greatly decrease their links. If
all webmasters responded uniformly to penalties, one would not expect to see
such an increase in variance.
As SEOs, we clearly have our work cut out for ourselves in teaching webmasters
thatthe appropriate response to a penalty is very much NOT adding more and more
links to your profile, because this behavior is actually more common than link
removal post-penalty. It is worth pointing out that it is possible that the
webmasters disavowed links rather than removing them. We do not have access to
that data, so we cannot be certain regarding that procedure. It is possible that
some webmasters chose to disavow while others removed, and that the net impact
on link value was identical, thus making the variance calculation false.Do
webmasters increase their ad spend?
I'll admit, I had my fingers crossed on this one. Honestly, who doesn't want to
show that Google is just penalizing webmasters because it helps their bottom
line? Wouldn't it be great to catch the search quality team not being honest
with us about their fiduciary independence?
Well, unfortunately it just doesn't bear out. The evidence is fairly clear that
there is no reason to believe that webmasters increase ad-spend following a
Penguin 2.0 penalty. Let's look at the numbers.

First, across our data set, no one who was an advertiser prior to Penguin 2.0
stopped advertising in AdWords in the three months after. Of the sites that were
not advertisers prior to Penguin 2.0, 10% of those not penalized ended up
becoming advertisers in AdWords, while only 4% of those penalized became
advertisers. Sites that weren't penalized were far more likely to join the
AdWords program than those that were.
It wasn't onlytrue that those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 were more likely to
sign up for AdWords; they increased their averageAd-spend,too. There was a 78%
greater increase in ad-spend by those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 than those who
were. Moreover, bidding shifts for those not impacted by Penguin remained
similar in two month intervals across multiple randomly selected three-month
differences, meaning that there appeared to be no related impact whatsoever.
We can safely conclude from this that there does not appear to be a direct,
causal relationship between Penguin penalties and increased AdWords spending.
Now, one could of course make the argument that better search results might
increase ad revenue in the future as Google attracts more users to a better
search engine, but accusations of a fiduciary motivation for releasing updates
like Penguin 2.0 cannot be substantiated with this data.Do they recover?
By the 5th month, approximately 24% of sites that were penalized were at or
above their pre-Penguin 2.0 traffic. This is an exciting outcome because it does
show recovery from Penguin is possible. Perhaps most important, sites that were
penalized and removed links on average recovered 28% more traffic in the five
months after Penguin than those that did not remove links. We have good evidence
to suggest at least a correlation between post-penalty link removaland traffic
recovery.Of course, we do have to take this with a grain of salt for a number of
reasons:Sites that removed links may have been more likely to use the disavow
tool as well. Sites that removed links may have been more SEO-savvy in general
and fixed on-site issues. Sites that did not remove links may have had more
intractable penalties, thus their lack of removal was a conscious decision
related to the futility of a removal campaign.
These types of alternate explanations should always be entertained when using
correlative statistics. What we do have good evidence of is that traffic
recovery is possible for sites hit by Penguin, although it is by no means
guaranteed or universal. Penguin 2.0 needn't be a death sentence.Takeaways
So, in a few weeks, we are likely to see another Penguin update, assuming
Google follows its late-spring release date.When Penguin hits, be readyeven if
you aren't going to be penalized. Here are some things you should be
doing...Know your bad links already. There is no reason to wait to be prepared
for removal or disavowal. While I personally think that preemptive disavowalis
likely the best practice, there is no excuse to just wait. Don't worry about
AdWords. There is no statistical evidence that your competition will surge
post-Penguin in any meaningful fashion. The competitors who might come to depend
moveon AdWords also have less organic revenue to invest in the first place. At
best, these even out. Don't double down. While we can't be certain that link
removal gets you out of penalties (it is merely correlated), we can be certain
that even a correlation doesn't exist for increasing links and earning recovery
post-Penguin penalties. Never assume. The behavior of your competitors and of
Google itself is far more complex than off-the-cuff assumptions like "Google
just penalizes sites to force people into AdWords" or that your business will
know intuitively to remove or disavow links post-Penguin.
Hopefully, this time around we will all be more prepared for the appropriate
response to Google's next big updatewhether we are hit or not.Sign up for The
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