Hey everybody.. we have an interesting question today from Ed in London
Ed asks how can you tell if your site is suffering from an algorithmic
penalty, or you are simply being outgunned by better content?
this is a really intriguing question so let's walk through some
other different things. You didn't ask about manual but let's cover that just because
that's the easy case. If you're hit by something that the direct action
from the [manual or] web spam team that directly impacts the ranking of your site
then go to webmaster tools and check out because
it could very well be the case that .. you know.. hey we thought that there was some
keyword stuffing or poking or whatever going on and that's a clear-cut case
you'll get a notification..you'll get a message and then you can start
to figure out..investigate..okay where can I start to improve things
or what can I change to make things better. The other reason to check WebMaster tools
is if there's some crawler error. We have seen sites that will
launch a new development web site that was previously no-indexed and they will forget to take
off the no-index tag or you know if there's 404
or you know we can't reach your site..those sorts of things..so look for crawl
errors..all that sort of stuff..okay so now let's get to the meat
of your question..he said if your site is suffering from an algorithmic
penalty or if you're simply being outgunned by better content. It's tough
because we don't think as much and really much at all about algorithmic
penalties.. mmm.. really the web spam
team writes all sorts of code but that goes into the holistic
ranking that we do and so if you're affected by one algorithm, do you
call it a penalty and if you're affected by another algorithm do not call the penalty
...that's a pretty tough call to make especially when the web spam
team is working on more and more general quality changes not necessarily things
specifically related to web spam and sometimes general quality people
work on things that are related to web spam and so deciding which
one to call which is kinda hard to do..so we typically just thinking about it
as the holistic ranking. Now we rolled out something like
665 different changes to how we rank search results in 2012
so on any given day the odds that we're rolling out
some algorithmic changes are pretty good ..in fact we may be rolling out a couple
if you just look at the raw number of changes that were doing..however
when we see an algorithmic change that we think will have a pretty big impact
we do try to give people a heads up about that. So for example,
the Penguin algorithm, which is targeted towards web spam or the Panda
algorithm which is targeted towards quality content on the web
whenever we have large-scale changes that will affect things then
we tend to do an announcement that oh yeah this changed or you should look on this particular
date and that can be a good indicator to know whether you're affected by one of those
sort of..jolting algorithms that has a big impact. What you've seen is
for example Panda has become more and more ah..
integrated into indexing and its had less of a jolting impact
in fact we've gotten it so that it changes the index on a
pretty regular basis and it's built in the index rather than rolling out on a certain
day and so it's less useful to announce or talk about Panda launches
at this point whereas Penguin is still.. you know..it's a switch
that flips or its something that search [will really know] in a discrete-time
and so we're a little more willing to talk about those and.. and let people
know and have a heads up.. hey you might be affected by the Penguin algorithm..so
in general if your site is not ranking where you want it to rank
the bad news is it's a little hard and difficult to say whether you'd call it
a penalty or not.. it's just part of ranking ..the good news is
it is algorithmic and so if you modify your site
if you change your site.. if you apply your best guess about what the other site
is doing that you should be doing or that it is doing well
then it's always possible for the algorithms to re-score your site or
for..you know.. ask to re-crawl and reindex the site and for us to re-start
ranking highly again..so its kinda tricky because
we have a large amount of algorithms that all interact
whether you call something a penalty or ranking change or
you know any of those things can be really hard to draw a fine distinction between
those different points but the nice thing is as you change your site
you can always ..see that these algorithms can
sort of rerun and reprocess the site and then the site can
regain in rankings many of the times. I hope that helps a little bit
as far as what to do .. and how to go forward with the site