How can I tell if my site is affected by a particular algorithm?

How can you tell if your site is suffering from an algorithmic penalty, or you are simply being outgunned by better content?
Ed, London

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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