We always wonder why Penguin update is way more damaging than Panda. Answer to that is straight forward. Panda targeted the quality of the sites content. Penguin targeted links. Most of the affected sites had good information even if the information was not best. But almost all of them had unnatural links. So the question does Google has the right to punish a site just because it has unnatural links?
Best way to punish such kind of links is to find the right links and devalue them. Also it is easy to identify terrible unnatural links and semi unnatural links. Comment Spam, buying links, too much article and directory links, counter links, word-press theme links etc should be considered highly unnatural. Those sites can be punished. But those who have unnatural links like limited blog links, friendly site links etc should not be punished. Now Google unleashed a new beast that can destroy good genuine sites. I have personally ordered my team to send 100s of low quality unnatural links to some good ranking sites as an experiment. Waiting to see what happens. Till now not much impact but we really want to see what happens when penguin update / refresh comes out. We expect those sites to go down if Google continues to go after uncontrolled artificial links. There is no defense for Google calling negative SEO doesn’t exist. We have purposely targeted less web savvy sites. We are confident the sites we targeted don’t even know what webmaster tools is all about. That way they won’t know what their links are and how to disavow any potential bad links they see. Google has given us the weapon and we want to see if it really works.
Panda on the other hand is the best algorithm Google can ever make. It targeted low quality pages that did not add any value to the Internet. We always wanted the best page to rank and Panda is the best algorithm update to fix that problem. We really want more updates like Panda that adds value to the Internet. Panda changed the way we see Internet it improved quality over quantity. It showed this world can do better with contents. Top class semantic identification of content quality. Amit Singhal’s post on Panda was one of the most enlightening post I ever read. It revolutionized the way Internet works. We want more updates like that not the sick and damaging Penguin which gives control to others to damage our sites.
Google cannot allow deserving sites to be damaged because it has unnatural links. We wanted to knock out 2 sites above one of our client sites. I will make sure we send few 1000 negative links to them. We don’t care if it works on not. I know it will affect them to some extent because that is what Penguin update is all about. Bad links to a site and the site is doomed though it might have some of the best pages in Internet.
I appreciated the excellent algorithm update that bing did recently. Their aim was to weed out bad sites not punish sites so that it increases Google revenue. It is no more in Google’s interest to use their old motto “don’t be evil” . In fact I can’t find that slogan anywhere these days. Now as larry page said in an interview “commercialization is Innovation” . They want to commercialize everything without giving any regard to users. Users like to see information not ads all the time. Google should remember 85% of internet users still come online for information not to buy products. Coming to some people’s arguments that Google has the right to do what they want because it is their search engine. That is absolute nonsense. Google has every right to do what it wants but it cannot allow others to control our ranking. That is a major offense by Google.
We are counting days and still there is no official word when the exact date Penguin update will be. But I am confident it will be anytime soon probably on the 1st year anniversary.