Google's Penguin - Consequences for Domainers

GiftedDomains · Apr 28, 2012

Google just flushed many keyword domains down the toilett. At least here in Germany its a disaster, From those websites who really lost a lot of positions or simply vanished, were nearly all keyword domains. Nearly no brands were punished.

Consequence: prices for keyword domain names will go down and domainers will have a hard time. Google is simply giving up his bonus for keyword domains.

Google already indirectly warned us last year,
(check out 2:23)

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI"]How important is it to have keywords in a domain name? - YouTube[/ame]

and now its happening slowly but surely.

---------- Post added at 05:47 AM ---------- Previous post was at 05:38 AM ----------

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0St9B1kmJ2g"]Hitler's Reaction to the recent Google Penguin update (04-24-2012) - YouTube[/ame]

druon · May 1, 2012

I hope after some weeks google will fix the problems by the penguin.
One of my sites(PR3 and waiting better PR on new PR update) has been kicked out of results.

SK1990 · May 1, 2012

JB Lions said:
Taking a quick look at the site, it's a shit site, no real coupons on it. There are lots of other real coupon sites out there, so that one really has no chance.

You should check out his interview on Domain Sherpa. He is making ~$50k per month off his coupon network.

Domain Sherpa Interview with Andrew Hazen:
http://www.domainsherpa.com/andrew-hazen-couponsinfo-interview/

carob · May 1, 2012

enlytend said:
Not any more - having exact-match anchor text in all your backlinks has become a huge red flag.

People are saying this but what is the source? Deduction from observing a list of sites? Or something Matt Cutts said this week?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html?
I see there Matt Cutts mentions onpage keyword stuffing and also gives an example of a site creating dubious outbound links that do not fit in the context they appear in when you look closely. But I do not see a direct reference to inbound links (also discussed at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356), and he says

The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.

Some are saying this is the worst update ever:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/30/google_penguin_update_breaks_search_results_some_say/

An online petition has already been created by webmasters who are unhappy with the Penguin update.

It reads:

With the recent Google Penguin update, it has become nearly impossible for small content based websites to stay competitive with large publishers like eHow, WikiHow, Yahoo Answers and Amazon.

Countless webmasters have seen their livelihoods vanish overnight. In a recent interview, Sergey Brin came out against 'Walled Gardens' of the likes of Facebook... Ironically, the Penguin update has created a similar garden that only admits multimillion dollar publishing platforms.

On [a] personal level, this update has ruined small online businesses, passive incomes and families' livelihoods worldwide.

Ben42 · May 1, 2012

SK1990 said:
You should check out his interview on Domain Sherpa. He is making ~$50k per month off his coupon network.

He sure was and many people jumped on the bandwagon (Me included), but I think these are the sites that maybe hit the hardest by the update and are going to eat away at Googles profits.

---------- Post added at 04:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:09 PM ----------

New headline:

"Google Sandbags Self In Penguin Update."

SK1990 · May 1, 2012

Ben42 said:
He sure was and many people jumped on the bandwagon (Me included), but I think these are the sites that maybe hit the hardest by the update and are going to eat away at Googles profits.

---------- Post added at 04:19 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:09 PM ----------

New headline:

"Google Sandbags Self In Penguin Update."

I'm sure they're paying a pretty hefty fee to advertise for that term lol.

Ben42 · May 1, 2012

Well google isn't even in the top 7 for the term. Thats pretty bad, but maybe they aren't a Search Engine anymore.

enlytend · May 1, 2012

People are saying this but what is the source? Deduction from observing a list of sites?

Yep. And monitoring results for lists of keywords.

Think about it: If you're linking to another site, how likely is it you'll use carefully optimized anchor text to make that link? Maybe you would, but what if there are 20,50,200,500 different sites linking to that same site (or page)? They won't ALL choose the same anchor text unless someone "engineers" it. They also won't all be followed links. Natural linking will include links with your site name, your url, single words, long strings of text and the infamous "click here", and there will be a balance of followed and nofollowed links.

Domainace · May 2, 2012

Ben42 said:
He sure was and many people jumped on the bandwagon (Me included), but I think these are the sites that maybe hit the hardest by the update and are going to eat away at Googles profits.

His game with Google was ending before he even gave that interview. Several of his sites were deindexed at the time (I checked), and he did mention that he was looking at alternative and paid traffic sources.

Generally, you can be fairly sure that when someone goes public with a great way to game Google, the window of opportunity has already passed.

I am also sure that Google has opened countless new opportunities for clever web spammers, and that there are people profiting hugely from Penguin as we speak. A year or two down the road, when they are being interviewed on Domain Sherpa, you can be equally sure that they've already made their gains and are moving on to the next step.

Google's updates are like a butcher using a chain saw to cut up a side of beef. A lot of good product gets lost, and the stuff that remains isn't very pretty.

---------- Post added at 09:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:50 AM ----------

enlytend said:
Think about it: If you're linking to another site, how likely is it you'll use carefully optimized anchor text to make that link? Maybe you would, but what if there are 20,50,200,500 different sites linking to that same site (or page)?

That has always been one of the SEO advantages of targeted keyword domains. People often use the URL as anchor text, and Google picks up on the keywords in it. In fact, with a keyword domain, it would be odd to not have the keywords used frequently in anchors.

eyedomainous · May 2, 2012

Infovell's 'research engine' finds deep Web pages that Google, Yahoo miss
http://phys.org/news140110066.html

"According to a study by the University of California at Berkeley, traditional search engines such as Google and Yahoo index only about 0.2% of the Internet. The remaining 99.8%, known as the "deep Web," is a vast body of public and subscription-based information that traditional search engines can't access." [This was in 2008]
Here is an April, 2012 Deep Web Primer from Clark University that put the deep web at 500X the size of the surface/Goog web.
http://www.clark.edu/Library/iris/types/deep_web/deep_web.shtml

The rapid expansion of the deep web, now also into The Cloud, dwarfs Goog's limited efforts to index it through the measures you cite.

Beyond the untouchable deep web content, the dominant mass consumer interface content format online is now video. Search engines can read a vid's keyword tags, but can't see into the contents of the video itself.

If you can't find 99% of the web's text content, and are blind to 99% of the web's dominant video contents... then Search Sucks and Content IS NOT King!!

As a domainer, I recognized search sucks, and the cards are constantly being re-shuffled to stack the deck against me... so I stopped fighting for a 'position' to maybe get a few crumbs a month... from the "1%"

So No, when I say clients I don't mean "merchants with affiliate programs". I don't do affiliate programs, or adsense. Though I have my own (invite only) affiliate program.

I believe domainers need to create their own ecosystem. Independent of search engines. We have enough 'property' to build an alternative world in cyberspace, but the 'cooperative tribe' evolution thing has a ways to go, IMO.

We're still a bunch of 'lone wolfs' in the wilderness... fighting each other for snaps at the low hanging fruit on the "search" tree.

JB Lions said:
Confused on some of the stuff you just posted.

"90% of website content is invisible to Google"

Where are you getting that stat from? My sites would be the exact opposite. Also, Google can see some of that, from Matt Cutts - "Googlebot keeps getting smarter. Now has the ability to execute AJAX/JavaScript to index some dynamic comments.”

And when you say clients, I guess you're really meaning merchants with affiliate programs, right? And I don't understand why Google wouldn't be able to read your site, unless you're using all javascript? I have affiliate sites, using things like PopShops but I use PHP and Google can see all of that.

For this: "Also, Content Is King is a myth" In the end, quality sites/quality content are going to fare better and usually ride out the algo changes.

As far as domains. A good domain is a good domain. An algo has nothing on that.

enlytend · May 2, 2012

That has always been one of the SEO advantages of targeted keyword domains. People often use the URL as anchor text, and Google picks up on the keywords in it. In fact, with a keyword domain, it would be odd to not have the keywords used frequently in anchors.

Of course. Anchor text matching a domain name in itself wouldn't be a problem as it would be assumed to be a site name/brand name, but it could still be part of a link profile that has other suspicious signals ... Of if the site has odd groupings of perfect keyword links that don't match the domain. Like what JC Penney got caught doing. Links with their domain name i.e. their brand name/company name would never have raised any suspicions (unless they fit some other unusual pattern.)

InvisionTech · May 2, 2012

So, how many of you have uninstalled all those SEO plugins from your websites and disabled keyword permalinks? :D

Fonzie · May 2, 2012

alien51 said:
Unless of course, your mission is to convert Domainers, into a Matt-Cutts-disciple all-righteous website developers who make meaningful contributions to the improvement of humanity.

You don't understand the role Matt Cutts plays.

He isn't an evangelist.
He is a strategist.

I don't know how old you are, but if you're over 30 and were a reasonably early adopter of the internet, you too remember search before G came along.
It sucked.
It fucking, fucking, fucking sucked.

G figured out that when people used search engines, they wanted something that the larger world wide web wasn't necessarily serving up (at that time). Page devised an elegant way to filter for quality, in addition to a clever way to gather and index information.

Google was born, the exodus to it was almost immediate. Because the visibility it offered to businesses became a fully monetized commodity advertising product once internet saturation exploded, it strongly incentivized people to figure out what was going on and manipulate it with made-to-order content.

From the outset, G's objective has always been to deliver the sort of quality content that users want. As mentioned earlier, this sort of business intelligence isn't developed by domainers doing what domainers do, since the domainer model doesn't care about users. Users aren't something domainers have to think about, but its something Google must focus on relentlessly, since their prominence is built on the rubble of several early iterations of search that didn't.

Once upon a time, a wise man told me that one of the greatest skills any person can have is the ability to objectively think like his competition. Most people think in terms of their own experiences, their own narratives, then make assessments on how their competition might react on those terms. Really, it's the opposite. You have to figure out your competitions experience, your competitions narrative and figure out what conclusions they will draw on the basis of their own internal dialog, then react to it before they can.

Its hard to think like other people and decipher their reasoning but once you learn to do it, you start to understand why people do what they do. It hasn't been very hard to keep a step ahead of Google, so long as you understand it and work with it, rather than stomp your feet, chant a few dogmas and try to 'trick' it.

lennco · May 2, 2012

Fonzie said:
You don't understand the role Matt Cutts plays.

He isn't an evangelist.
He is a strategist.

I don't know how old you are, but if you're over 30 and were a reasonably early adopter of the internet, you too remember search before G came along.
It sucked.
It fucking, fucking, fucking sucked.

G figured out that when people used search engines, they wanted something that the larger world wide web wasn't necessarily serving up (at that time). Page devised an elegant way to filter for quality, in addition to a clever way to gather and index information.

Google was born, the exodus to it was almost immediate. Because the visibility it offered to businesses became a fully monetized commodity advertising product once internet saturation exploded, it strongly incentivized people to figure out what was going on and manipulate it with made-to-order content.

From the outset, G's objective has always been to deliver the sort of quality content that users want. As mentioned earlier, this sort of business intelligence isn't developed by domainers doing what domainers do, since the domainer model doesn't care about users. Users aren't something domainers have to think about, but its something Google must focus on relentlessly, since their prominence is built on the rubble of several early iterations of search that didn't.

Once upon a time, a wise man told me that one of the greatest skills any person can have is the ability to objectively think like his competition. Most people think in terms of their own experiences, their own narratives, then make assessments on how their competition might react on those terms. Really, it's the opposite. You have to figure out your competitions experience, your competitions narrative and figure out what conclusions they will draw on the basis of their own internal dialog, then react to it before they can.

Its hard to think like other people and decipher their reasoning but once you learn to do it, you start to understand why people do what they do. It hasn't been very hard to keep a step ahead of Google, so long as you understand it and work with it, rather than stomp your feet, chant a few dogmas and try to 'trick' it.

Why are you so angry?
You act more like Archie Bunker then Fonzie.

carob · May 2, 2012

enlytend said:
Of course. Anchor text matching a domain name in itself wouldn't be a problem as it would be assumed to be a site name/brand name, but it could still be part of a link profile that has other suspicious signals ... Of if the site has odd groupings of perfect keyword links that don't match the domain.

Yes I agree, the reason I raised this is there seemed to be a risk of hysteria about the possibility of keyword domains getting penalised and so losing value.

I'd put the possibilities this way:

1. Positive. Keyword domain has advantage in placing site in relevant search results just by association (seemed to be so with Yahoo).

2. Neutral. Keyword domain does not have inbuilt advantage, except that links to the site's domain naturally include the domain's keywords. If linking text is valued by search engine when not flagged as a suspicious pattern, then this helps the site.

3. Negative: Keyword domains get penalised and demoted because it is assumed that they all are seeking unfair advantage and are attempts to rank well without good content or links.

Really, choice 3 sounds unlikely to me - if it was true, would you see a flight from top generics to brandables?

It's quite possible domainer-type sites on keyword domains have been getting progressively demoted as their content gets reassessed or the advantage under choice 1 above disappears. I don't know, and I'm not even sure what the definiton of a domainer is or how much I want to generalise about "domainers".

DU · May 2, 2012

lennco said:
Why are you so angry?
You act more like Archie Bunker then Fonzie.

I think he's roughly the same age as me.

The older generation are robbing us blind with their "I got Mine" attitude and the younger generation are just a bunch of whiny complaining know-it-allers who are going to do their best to follow their baby-boomer parents' "I'm all right jack" mantra.

That's part of anger, I'm sure. But don't confuse the use of the word "fuck" with anger. The internet used to suck, it fucking sucked. Really.

He's also a little wrong because before Google was AltaVista which was a good search engine. Alltheweb was also around and was the quickest by far.

Google lucked onto some decent ideas but were more dependent on the failure of Digital to realize the long term profitability that it could have brought them (selling instead to Yahoo, I believe).

Other than that minor point, his post is very good.

firefly · May 2, 2012

I go away for a while and everyone starts swearing in the general forums. I might have to start spending more time here again for the lulz. :D

DU · May 2, 2012

firefly said:
I go away for a while and everyone starts swearing in the general forums. I might have to start spending more time here again for the lulz. :D

I did it with "quotes"

You are more than welcome to go to the LeBron thread in the adult break room and take out your aggression there

GiftedDomains · May 2, 2012

come on guys, don't you say fuck or shit or suck, when you are out with your friends in a bar or something? these words describe situations better than any other word sometimes.

for instance when your website losed its first page position and your income drops from 100$ a day to 1$ a day, you say "fuck!!!!!!!",
you don't say "oh this is very bad, google you are bad"

don't exaggerate now with the dos and don'ts

---------- Post added at 01:03 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:52 AM ----------

Once upon a time, a wise man told me that one of the greatest skills any person can have is the ability to objectively think like his competition. Most people think in terms of their own experiences, their own narratives, then make assessments on how their competition might react on those terms. Really, it's the opposite. You have to figure out your competitions experience, your competitions narrative and figure out what conclusions they will draw on the basis of their own internal dialog, then react to it before they can.

I think more important is to "obejctively think like your customer or potential customer". For instance my main job is trading with steel products and exporting it to other countries. I don't think much about my competition. Of course i check their prices and their presence, But what i do much more is to put myself in the position of the potential customer and think about what i would like to have from a supplier and under which circumstances i would place an order with a supplier, if i was that customer. Then i try to offer all those conditions to the customer.

This worked good for me.

enlytend · May 2, 2012

3. Negative: Keyword domains get penalised and demoted because it is assumed that they all are seeking unfair advantage and are attempts to rank well without good content or links.

Agreed - there's no way they will penalize keyword domains by themselves. Brand names won't be penalized and the domain representing your brand could still be a generic phrase.

Up until recently you could put up any kind of crap on a keyword domain and it would hit page 1 on domain alone. Parked pages even used to rank (before that little gravy train was derailed.) Much as it was fun for those who were able to take advantage of it, it wasn't a good thing for search integrity. Google lives and dies by being in the search integrity business (or at least putting on a good show of it

). There were a lot of complaints.

Domain names will continue to have value for search, whether they are a generic phrase or something which is more obviously a brand. It's more likely to come down to context.

I think the keyword anchor text penalties which MIGHT have been part of Penguin are separate from domain-name-as-ranking-factor issues. Of course if you bought hundreds of low-value links with your domain's keywords as the anchor text ...

---------- Post added at 08:25 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:19 AM ----------

defaultuser said:
The internet used to suck, it fucking sucked. Really.

He's also a little wrong because before Google was AltaVista which was a good search engine. Alltheweb was also around and was the quickest by far.

It sucked, but in a fun sort of way. There were no "techno-nots" sharing the road - ah, the good old days

. Archie, Gopher and WAIS, anyone ???

Ben42 · May 2, 2012

The internet before google was all about AOL keywords, they never quite figured out how to monetize the internet. Searching the internet wasn't that bad, we really didn't know any better.

Googles success is its minions of players making a modest earning from adsense. The first 3 or so comments here are positive and then once the update becomes public the next 790 or so comments are all terrible from some very upset webmasters.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Google has a huge responsibility with it's power. It could cause an internet economic collapse if it messed up well enough. I'm not saying this is currently the case, but when millions of clicks get diverted in one swoop there will be a cascading impact, not only for those web developers, but their advertisers, and that filters all the way down to factories, jobs, and whether you can afford the $10 car wash or not.

firefly · May 2, 2012

From the outset, G's objective has always been to deliver the sort of quality content that users want.

That may have been the case in the begining but it certainly isnt anymore. That changed the day G became a publicly traded company. The bottom line became just as important, if not more so, since they now have shareholders to answer to.

Their mantra of "do no evil" is tempered somewhat by the influence of economics moreso now. Their definition of quality lies somewhere between qaulity content and that bottom line. Google of today is not the google of good intentions that started out. Don't let yourself be fooled by the lines they have been touting from the begining - those lines are blurred now.

DU · May 2, 2012

firefly said:
Their definition of quality lies somewhere between qaulity content and that bottom line. Google of today is not the google of good intentions that started out. Don't let yourself be fooled by the lines they have been touting from the begining - those lines are blurred now.

Also, from an SEC / Audit standpoint, I'm pretty sure their Ad Clicking business has to be segregated from their search business. I'm pretty sure that even the dumbest regulator might spot a conflict of interest.

Searches are changing. It's a lot more about identifying yourself as a business than it ever has been. Ratings/Social media are being discredited... I wish I had thought of Angie's List. That thing's a freakin' gold mine of informatin - it has to be.

carob · May 2, 2012

Ben42 said:
Google has a huge responsibility with it's power. It could cause an internet economic collapse if it messed up well enough. I'm not saying this is currently the case, but when millions of clicks get diverted in one swoop there will be a cascading impact, not only for those web developers, but their advertisers, and that filters all the way down to factories, jobs, and whether you can afford the $10 car wash or not.

Interesting point. If the same people are still searching for the same stuff, what may occur is a transfer of customers to other service providers that are further up in search results. Unless of course searchers actually find stuff by Google Maps or Google listings of local servies, or by friends' recommendations... or Adsense ads... or some other new method.

No doubt some of the recent demotions will have site owner hiring in SEO services so for some people they are a blessing, and for those who just went up in search results and are keeping quiet about it.

Peter · May 2, 2012

eyedomainous said:
Also, Content Is King is a myth... as 90% of website content is invisible to Google, and other search engines, as its in data bases, behind java-script, in flash and so forth.

That may have been true 5 years or so ago but no longer. Adobe and Google have worked together to help make content within flash documents available. Although not perfect it is indeed possible. Again Google have blogged about this in the past. The same goes for javascript.

The database comment is irrelevant. Users dont interact directly with a DB either Google acces sit the same as users do.

Ms Domainer · May 2, 2012

*

I guess I come from a generation where we reserve the f-bomb, etc. for extraordinary circumstances (stubbing a toe, for example) and in private.

I have always felt that people who cuss all the time simply have a limited vocabulary and are unable to find the "right" word for the situation.

I'm not saying I never cuss, but I try to keep my bombs to a minimum.

It's a generational thing, I suppose.

Penguin hasn't really affected me because I don't do SEO, certainly not blackhat stuff.

I don't know if this is related to Penguin, but Google deleted one of my blogs recently--I think someone reported it--but I appealed and won. The funny thing is: no ads on it at all and plenty of content and not at all controversial. I guess you never know what will send someone over the edge.

When using any free platform, one is at the mercy of the "benefactor."

*

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