How Google’s Penguin Update and Some Fast Links Tanked Our Impressions

The recent changes to Google’s search algorithm, widely dubbed the “Penguin” update, may be aimed at improving search results and reducing webspam, but they’ve struck fear in the hearts of some SEO practitioners–and shone a new light on the different signals a company’s web presence can present in order to catch and maintain prime rank real estate.

We here at Corporate Performance Artists ran into an interesting case just recently, involving a new site, a viral event, and link signals gone wild.

One of our clients ran a very simple offer–sign up at the site, get a free gift. The campaign was picked up by many deals and coupon sites, resulting in a wild proliferation of links cropping up in a very short amount of time.

So, when we checked our stats, we saw a dramatic decrease in impressions. After we scraped ourselves off the floor, we got to thinking…and delving into every metric we could examine.

Turns out, one deals site in particular had featured our offering, giving us beaucoup links. The deals site was a wordpress installation, and had category pages that offered the full post–not an excerpt. We identified a large number of links to our site were being indexed here.

It struck us how this must look to Google–a relatively new site very quickly amassing a large number of links. So we sprang into action.

We contacted the deals site owner, who was more than happy to nofollow the links to our site. Almost immediately, we noticed an upswing in our impressions–not yet where we feel they should be, but the trend looks good.