The Google Update That Didn't Happen
There was a Google update I was waiting for all year long that didn't happen.
The Google Penguin penalty was never rolled out in 2015.
Here's why it's such a big deal. If your site gets "Penguin slapped," you have to do as much link clean up as you possibly can - but here's the kick in the pants - you won't know if you've done ENOUGH clean up to start ranking again until the Penguin penalty is put back into the algorithm, implemented, and used.
Now you see why it's a big deal, to me possibly even bigger than the mobile-friendly algorithm update and Phantom.
If your site, or your client's site got hit by this in 2014, you don't need me to tell how brutal this year was. You already know. With no new Penguin rollout, there's no re-evaluation of the site, and no way to tell if the domain got back into Google's good graces, which really sucks, doesn't it?
Google told us repeatedly throughout 2015 that Penguin was coming. It would be rolled out sometime. By the fall, we were told to expect an update before the end of the year.
About two weeks ago, we were told by Google to forget about any update happening this year. They threw in the towel on trying to get it to run in real time in the search formula.
I think they should have continued the old way by putting it in manually, running it for awhile, and giving sites a chance to recover some rankings. But since the data engineers couldn't get it to run real time, they just didn't bother at all.
And THAT bothers me. The economic impact on a website that's been pushed into the mud is big. Sure, you can do PPC to get some traffic back, but that's a money sink you may or may not be able to afford.
So now we're waiting for 2016, to see when the march of the Penguin will occur. I hope it's very soon in the new year. There are a lot of folks waiting to see if they've worked hard enough to get back into search results again.
Want to learn more about Penguin, and how to recover from it, as well as lots of basic and advanced SEO skills and techniques? Join me in an SEO workshop soon!
Or, get your SEO training online now from Invenio.
Until we meet again, stay between the ditches on all four wheels!
All the very best to you,
Nancy
Image courtesy of flickr.com
