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I'm excited to present these case studies showing what appears to be Penguin recoveries for several sites. Penguin 4.0 officially launched on September 23, 2016 (although we don't know if Google actually put the wheels in motion a few days prior.) When Penguin first launched there didn't seem to be much change and I didn't […]

I have been getting a lot of questions about Penguin 4.0. This article will serve as a guide to everything we know on Penguin 4.0. I'll update it as more information becomes available. When did Penguin 4.0 launch? The announcement for Penguin 4.0 happened on Friday, September 23, 2016. However, it sounds like parts of […]

Note: This article was written to explain the issue of Penguin no longer demoting sites. I've written a full article here on everything we know about Penguin and will be updating this article regularly. This is HUGE news. If you have been awaiting Penguin recovery, there's a good chance you'll see some improvement over the […]

Note: This article was written to explain my early thoughts on Penguin. I've written a full article here on everything we know about Penguin and will be updating that article regularly. Jump to updated info on whether or not the disavow tool is necessary for Penguin recovery. For even more updated news, check this new post: […]

During Mozcon 2015, I sat in at the Google Penalty birds of a feather table and had some great conversations on penalties and algo changes. I was interested when Michael Cottam shared a story with us. He said that a client of his was doing some work on a Penguin hit site. When they used […]

There sure was a lot of drama last week as the SEO community discussed the comments left in this Whiteboard Friday posted by Moz. Paul Macnamara, whom I respect greatly when it comes to figuring out algorithmic issues posted this epic rant on Rae Hoffman's site in which he wrote about his concerns with Moz's WhiteBoard Friday. The […]

This last year has been agonizing for anyone who has been trying to escape the grips of Google's Penguin algorithm.  I have spoken with so many webmasters who have diligently been auditing links and waiting desperately for Penguin to refresh.  At one point last year I joked that I should create an email auto-responder that […]

Today, Google's Pierre Far, cleared up some of the confusion in regards to what is happening with the latest Penguin rerun.  He said that it was a refresh that was designed to help sites who had cleaned up and also demote sites with newly found spam.  A lot of people are confused about the difference […]

I am seeing a lot of confusion on the web in regards to Google employee Gary Illyes' statement that Penguin will be refreshing in the next few weeks.  According to an article on Search Engine Land, Gary said the following in regards to your disavow file: Gary also said that if you disavow bad links […]

I have had a number of questions about this recently so I thought it would be good for me to write an article that would help to explain what happens to your disavow file when you switch to https. Does changing to https mean that you are starting over with a fresh disavow file? If […]