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Hey everybody.. we have an interesting question today from Ed in London

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Ed asks how can you tell if your site is suffering from an algorithmic

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penalty, or you are simply being outgunned by better content?

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this is a really intriguing question so let's walk through some

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other different things. You didn't ask about manual but let's cover that just because

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that's the easy case. If you're hit by something that the direct action

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from the [manual or] web spam team that directly impacts the ranking of your site

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then go to webmaster tools and check out because

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it could very well be the case that .. you know.. hey we thought that there was some

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keyword stuffing or poking or whatever going on and that's a clear-cut case

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you'll get a notification..you'll get a
message and then you can start

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to figure out..investigate..okay where can I start to improve things

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or what can I change to make things better. The other reason to check WebMaster tools

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is if there's some crawler error. We have seen sites that will

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launch a new development web site that was previously no-indexed and they will forget to take

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off the no-index tag or you know if there's 404

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or you know we can't reach your site..those sorts of things..so look for crawl

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errors..all that sort of stuff..okay so now let's get to the meat

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of your question..he said if your site is suffering from an algorithmic

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penalty or if you're simply being outgunned by better content. It's tough

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because we don't think as much and really much at all about algorithmic

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penalties.. mmm.. really the web spam

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team writes all sorts of code but that goes into the holistic

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ranking that we do and so if you're affected by one algorithm, do you

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call it a penalty and if you're affected by another algorithm do not call the penalty

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...that's a pretty tough call to make
especially when the web spam

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team is working on more and more general quality changes not necessarily things

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specifically related to web spam and sometimes general quality people

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work on things that are related to web spam and so deciding which

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one to call which is kinda hard to do..so we typically just thinking about it

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as the holistic ranking. Now we rolled out something like

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665 different changes to how we rank search
results in 2012

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so on any given day the odds that we're rolling out

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some algorithmic changes are pretty good
..in fact we may be rolling out a couple

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if you just look at the raw number of changes that were doing..however

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when we see an algorithmic change that we think will have a pretty big impact

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we do try to give people a heads up about that. So for example,

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the Penguin algorithm, which is targeted towards web spam or the Panda

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algorithm which is targeted towards quality content on the web

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whenever we have large-scale changes that will affect things then

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we tend to do an announcement that oh yeah this changed or you should look on this particular

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date and that can be a good indicator to know whether you're affected by one of those

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sort of..jolting algorithms that has a big impact. What you've seen is

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for example Panda has become more and more
ah..

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integrated into indexing and its had less of a jolting impact

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in fact we've gotten it so that it changes the index on a

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pretty regular basis and it's built in the index rather than rolling out on a certain

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day and so it's less useful to announce or talk about Panda launches

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at this point whereas Penguin is still.. you know..it's a switch

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that flips or its something that search [will really know] in a discrete-time

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and so we're a little more willing to talk about those and.. and let people

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know and have a heads up.. hey you might be affected by the Penguin algorithm..so

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in general if your site is not ranking where you want it to rank

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the bad news is it's a little hard and difficult to say whether you'd call it

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a penalty or not.. it's just part of ranking ..the good news is

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it is algorithmic and so if you modify your site

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if you change your site.. if you apply your best guess about what the other site

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is doing that you should be doing or that it is doing well

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then it's always possible for the algorithms to re-score your site or

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for..you know.. ask to re-crawl and reindex the site and for us to re-start

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ranking highly again..so its kinda tricky because

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we have a large amount of algorithms that all interact

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whether you call something a penalty or ranking change or

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you know any of those things can be really hard to draw a fine distinction between

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those different points but the nice thing is as you change your site

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you can always ..see that these algorithms can

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sort of rerun and reprocess the site and then the site can

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regain in rankings many of the times. I hope that helps a little bit

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as far as what to do .. and how to go forward with the site