There appears to have been a Penguin data update either yesterday or early today.
What makes me so sure?
Well, I set up a little Penguin trap. I built a one-page site, tuned for a nonsense term, and built about a dozen links to that page with the nonsense term as anchor text.
Then, I waited until it ranked #1 for that term...that took just a couple of days. The pages that linked TO that page all rank for that term, as well.
So, once my nonsense site ranked #1 for that term, I disavowed all links.
And waited. Till today.
BOOM. After not moving a single spot for the past month, it suddenly dropped 9 places.
Categories: Technical SEO
Michael Cottam
Michael is an independent SEO and GEO consultant based in Bend, Oregon, specializing in organic SEO, technical SEO implementation, and AI Overviews and ChatGPT visibility. Learn more on his LinkedIn page.
1 Comment
Natan Gesher · July 3, 2015 at 4:14 pm
This sounds like evidence of a re-crawl, as a result of which the information in the disavow files gets applied. Presumably the purpose of the re-crawl is so that they can then roll out Penguin (or something) with fresh data. This doesn’t sound like Penguin itself.
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