About six-months ago, Google unleashed a major update to Penguin, the Penguin 2.1 update.
The earlier feedback from that update was that is was a big impact to webmasters and mostly SEOs who used links in an aggressive manner.
So I posted a poll asking you how you did with the update. Being that six-months later there has been no reports of a new Penguin refresh or update, I figured I post the poll results today.
We had over 2,800 responses to the poll, and 70% said they saw a drop in Google referrer traffic after the update. So 70% seemed to have been negatively impacted by it. While only 7%, or just about 200 people, reported their sites recovered from a previous Penguin update with Penguin 2.1. 6% said they saw an increase in traffic, where one site goes down, another benefits. And 17% said they saw no change at all before or after.
Here is the pie chart:
Again, we are still waiting for a Penguin refresh for over six-months. I think we are due one soon.
Google Penguin Updates:
- Google Penguin 2.1 on October 4, 2013
- Google Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013
- Google Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012
- Google Penguin 1.1 on May 24, 2012
- Google Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012
Disclaimer: Please see my poll disclaimer post before coming to any conclusions on these results.
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.
Note: I am offline today and this post was pre-scheduled to be automatically posted. So if I am delayed in responding to issues or comments, I apologize in advance.
