Josh Rich, Create the Movement
David Martin, Create the Movement
Josh Rich, Create the Movement: All right. Welcome to Create the Movement podcast –Dev Room Edition. I’m Josh Rich. With me is David Martin.
David Martin, Create the Movement: How you doing guys?
JR: Today, we will discuss the new Google update. One of two, apparently, as we just found out recently. There was ‘Possum.’ Which is an unofficial, underground update.
DM: No official Google comment, yet.
JR: No comment for Google. Yes. Today where’re talking about Penguin 4.0. If you want to introduce that a little bit, David?
DM: So, this is the real-time update. It’s supposed to make things a little easier, and also a little harder – all at once.
A Look Back at Previous Updates
JR: So, some background. Since 2002-ish there’s been four major updates. 2004-ish. Panda was the first one. And then Penguin, and then Hummingbird, and then Pidgeon?
DM: And Panda.
JR: Pigeon.
DM: Peguin?
JR: When did Pidgeon come in?
DM: I don’t think there’s a Pidgeon.
JR: There’s two birds because
DM: I thought it was Hummingbird and Penguin.
JR: There’s four though.
DM: Yeah. Panda, Hummingbird, Penguin,
JR: Pidgeon.
DM: Is it Pidgeon?
JR: Yeah, it’s Pidgeon.
DM: You’re right.
JR: Yeah, yeah. We’ll go with that. So, you might want to Google that while where’re doing this. So, occasionally Google will update their updates. Which is what they just did with this latest one. So, David, you want to give us a little background on the original, and what we have now?
Penalties
DM: So, the original led to just – penalties affect this entire site. It was supposed to crack down on spammy link building. Essentially, it was supposed to keep you from going to, and running through GSA and building 10,000 links at once, and shooting up in the rankings. But it shut down a lot of what SEOs do. And it also led to a lot of offhanded, unintentional penalties, I think. Because part of the reason for this new switch.
JR: Right. And so, one of the things we talk about a lot, a lot of SEO-people talk about too, is the value of links and bad links. Whether Google really penalizes bad links, or not? Because if they truly do penalize you for creating all these bad links, then what would stop you from sabotaging your competitor with a bunch of really crappy links?
DM: Right.
JR: So, this comment made this back and forth, “Oh, they really do penalize you.” “Oh, no, they really don’t” We know that do to some extent, but the debate has always been well, how much? How seriously do they take that? And
DM: How hard is it to get?
JR: Yeah, exactly. How intense is the boogie monster? You know? How bad is that? We never really know. Obviously, Google touts it as this colossal thing. That we’ll catch anyone and everything. But, we know that’s not true.
DM: Right. It’s just to their benefit.
JR: Yeah. They want to make it seem like it’s bigger and badder than it really is.
DM: You don’t have to catch the people who are too afraid to try.
JR: Exactly. Yeah. That’s well said. Well said. But, anyways, this new update, the way it used to work it would it put on a refresher. Right? So, every so often it would update.
DM: Basically algorithm updates like maybe once a year, twice a year you’d get a refresh for your site.
JR: So, if you were in the penalty you had to wait for a fresh start. Or, on the flip side of that, if you were doing shady things, you were kind of in the clear until it refreshed.
DM: Right.
JR: So it kind of worked both ways. But if you got penalized then you’re screwed because you’re waiting for this ambiguous time that you don’t know. “Oh, there’s an update. Thank God. I can finally get out of the penalty.” But now, it’s all live.
DM: In real time.
JR: Real time.
DM: Every time they crawl your site new metrics are applied. Which just makes it very interesting.
Disavow Your Bad Links
JR: Which means you can get penalized way faster. You can get a new penalty every day. But, on the flip side, they also made a lot more easy to disavow links within one master tools.
DM: And the cool thing too, going along with what you said, that penalty doesn’t apply to your entire site anymore. It only applies to the affected page. So, you’re not going to have your entire site just disappear from existence. Just the pages that are spammy, or that Google found doing some black hat or shady things, are removed from the search engines. Which is ideal.
JR: Way nicer. A lot of times whenever Google will do an update, or an update to an update, the SO world flips outs. Sites go down left and right. We don’t know what to do. It’s like Armageddon.
DM: It’s a mad dash.
JR: I feel like the forums that we’ve seen, no one’s really freaking out about it.
DM: Most people, you don’t think it would be everybody, but everything I’m reading people are seeing positive movements. Which I don’t how everybody can move up, but it seems like they are.
JR: Maybe that just means that the people that are actually doing SEO are moving up.
DM: Moving up, which makes sense.
JR: Those old site, which just have the good domain authority from way back when.
DM: Right, yeah. They’ve been around since 2000.
JR: They’re just going to rank well.
DM: Exactly.
JR: So, those are moving down. But the people that are actually doing work are moving up. It’s kind of a cool thing to see because this is, not that I’m like an industry veteran, but this is the first time that I’ve seen people have a fairly positive reaction to a Google update.
DM: Right. It’s definitely interesting.
JR: Now, granted, this is only a week old?
DM: Yeah.
JR: So, we’re still not seeing any – I’ve not seen a single case study done on this. Or anything like that. So we don’t necessarily know the full extent of the implications of this updated. But our initial reaction is that it’s kind of good. Like in a way you can almost be a little bit riskier.
DM: Be a little a bit more loose on the trigger. You can go for those links that might have been a little bit riskier before, because, if you get that penalty you can just disavow the link. And there you go. Just time lost. You don’t lose that site.
JR: Yeah, Yeah. So, if you disavow it really quick if do get penalized for it. And you only lose that one page linking, not your whole site.
DM: Right.
JR: So you can play it a little loose which is nice. One thing that I’m really curious about, and I don’t know if you’ve seen anything about it, is what this means for indexing.
DM: I have no idea. I’m very curious as well.
JR: Because logically, I would think that if it’s crawling your site and seeing what links you have in real time, then it’s going to index those links good or bad. That would mean that we don’t have to wait for that indexing lag.
DM: I would think so. But it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.
JR: Exactly.
DM: Because I don’t know how they determine where those links are located in real time. I don’t know. It’s interesting to see. I’m curious for when those case studies are come out.
JR: Because I read a few articles on this and no one’s even mentioned indexing. That was my first thought because you’re checking all this in real time. Okay, well that’s great. [] trying to ping in on pingbomb, or trying to paste from an indexing service. It’s just going to be there. It’s going to be great. Maybe if I can disavow a link, why can I not submit links that I have?
DM: Right.
JR: These are all the links that I just created. There you go. Give me those.
DM: I’ve always thought that was interesting. Then I guess the whole point is you would encourage backlink building if you could submit your backlinks to be indexed.
JR: Right.
DM: So, I guess I answered my own question.
JR: But, still, that remains to be seen.
DM: What effect that will have
JR: On the indexing.
DM: It could be gigantic. It could mean that the SEO work you do today you directly see tomorrow. Which is just
JR: Never happened before. That would be huge. That my friends is Penguin 4.0 in what, seven minutes?
DM: A very quick breakdown. We’ll probably have a blog come out about it sometime soon. Keep your eyes out for that if you’re into reading.
JR: Definitely check that out. That’s all for now friends.
