Google’s Panda and Penguin Updates May Raise Site Values

We’ve all seen the many, many posts, articles, tweets, and rants about Google’s Panda and Penguin updates. It’s true that the basic intention of these updates (according to Google) was – and is – to improve the quality of the content that seems to proliferate exponentially on the Internet, thereby also improving the websites that host it, thereby improving search results.
Theoretically.
It seems to be working out that way, for the most part. But what I find interesting is that I’ve seen a ripple effect from Panda and Penguin extend into the website brokerage industry, and it’s been both a blessing and a curse.

Ranking is More Difficult – And so are Website Sales

Late last year, while at Rhodium Weekend, I spoke with a few other website brokers about what we’ve all been seeing in terms of volume. We all pretty much agreed that finding quality businesses to sell seems to be a bit harder this year than it was last year, or the year before.
But I’ve also noticed that although the quantity has dropped somewhat, the quality of sites coming up for sale has actually increased.
One reason for this may be that Google is effectively taking out low-quality sites. (Obvious statement of the year award, here I come!) The thing is, we often think about this in terms of Google trying to increase the quality of their SERPs, and what that means for how we position our websites.
It’s a bit of a tricky proposition, but what it could also mean is that while Panda and Penguin can be seen, in some instances, as destructive updates, Google could actually be making our businesses more valuable.

Short-Term Drops Lead to Long-Term Gains

When a market overvaluation is discovered, a subsequent result may be a stock market correction. The market declines 10 to 20 percent, people lose money, and then the market slowly rights itself, regaining what was lost, and then some.
A similar phenomena takes place quite often when a new Google algorithm update is announced. Some sites may drop a few spots in the SERPs, while others nearly drop off altogether. As time passes, and both the intentions and the true effects of the update come to light, the SERPs adjust, and many sites regain at least a bit of their footing.
I’ve seen the same thing happening with online businesses in the wake of Panda and Penguin.
The short-term effect of these updates has been to actually reduce the value of some businesses as buyers see online business as being risky (read: subject to the whims of Google). But upon closer inspection, I find that what Google has effectively eliminated from their SERPs are the “websites that make a quick buck” as opposed to the “online businesses.” A main difference is, online businesses typically have profiles that lend themselves to more stability, which is a positive feature for buyers.

Good Ol’ Supply and Demand

By eliminating thin content sites, Google has effectively reduced the supply of sites for sale. This, in turn, will put upward pressure on the higher-quality sites. Couple that with the fact that these updates are forcing website owners to turn their money-making websites into something that looks more like a business with a lower-risk profile, and the possible results are higher valuations. There’s no denying these updates hurt a lot of people, some of whom were collateral damage or simply following bad advice (that also just happened to be the wisdom of the day). But if you survived these updates, congratulations! Your site is now more valuable.

The Downside in Both SERPs and Sales

It’s true that a lot of the people who experienced negative effects of Panda and Penguin were cutting corners. But some of those people never knew those corners were being cut. They were just following the path of the original corner cutters – very loud SEO “experts” who preached some of these tactics, or if they didn’t preach them, they at least practiced them (which is more damning). I definitely think there is a need to be sympathetic to those who were victims of their own ignorance.
In addition, I’m not a fan of the total brand bias Google now seems to have. I think it makes it so difficult for a small startup to get traction without a huge budget. And while this can be good to keep the low-quality businesses and sites out, it’s also sad, as I’m sure many projects simply don’t make it because they have trouble gaining that initial traction against their larger, better-funded competitors.
Not only do those sites have more trouble ranking and competing, they have more trouble building their value to be sold later on, whether that’s an initial goal or not.

High Quality Can Mean a Higher Price

Google will continue to evolve and update its algorithms, and we’ll all just have to roll with the punches. But it’s possible to try to head off any issues by ensuring your site’s content is of high quality, and that your link building efforts are following best practices. Ride out the updates, stay competitive, and you may find yourself able to demand a higher price for your business.


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2014 Year In Review: A Look Back On What Happened With SEO

Every year, we say how much has changed in the industry – and every year, we’re right.

It never ceases to  amaze me how much SEO constantly refines itself to more sophisticated Google guidelines and smarter, savvier searchers. Think about it: Since 2011, Moz has counted more than 83 major algorithm updates to the search engine giant.

That’s 83 times we’ve had to change our tactics in three years! Can you think of any other industry that has gone through that much fluctuation? Unlikely.

So, as part of the end-of-year trends, let’s take a look back on everything that went down this in 2014.

January
Expedia was the first big brand of the year to get reportedly hit by a penalty for unnatural link building. Rankings plummeted, and Searchmetrics suggested the company lost 25% of its visibility in Google because of the penalty.

Matt Cutts put the hammer down on guest blogging, urging any SEO using this tactic as a way to build links to cease fire of suffer the consequences.

Rap Genius is finally back on Google after getting doled a manual penalty in late 2013 for link schemes.

Google announced a new Googlebot user-agent for crawling mobile content. “Googlebot-Mobile” was retired in place of the standard Googlebot, causing webmasters to update their robots.txt and technical structure of their site for mobile optimization.

February
In late 2013, Google moved to 100% secure search, thus taking all of our keyword data with it. By February, Not Provided had topped more than 80%.

March
Webmasters started chatting about an update after seeing fluctuations in Google’s search results. Google never confirmed an update, but SERPs.com (among many others) noted a heavy increase in Google’s index volatility.



Google redesigned its SERPs for desktop users, removing underlined hyperlinks, increasing the font size slightly for title tags, and changing how ads are displayed.

April
The Heartbleed bug was revealed. Google, Rackspace, AWS and a host of security software used by millions of websites were affected, causing serious privacy concerns among anyone who uses the Internet.

Vic Gundotra, head of Google+ and Google’s social efforts, announced his departure from Google. Many questioned what this would mean for Google+ and its integration into organic search results. TechCrunch got word from multiple sources that Google+ will no longer be a product, but a platform, thus ending competition with Facebook and Twitter.

May
Panda 4.0 rolled out, the next wave in targeting sites with low quality content. Ask.com and RetailMeNot were among the big brands affected by the change.

eBay is the latest big brand to get hit by a (speculated) manual search engine penalty in addition to the Panda 4.0 update. eBay later suggested that this cost the business $200 million in revenue.

June
Authorship photos in SERPs listings were removed. Many questioned if this was the end to the entire program itself.

Google hosted its main event of the year, I/O 2014, where it announced news about the company and its future vision, including a new, consistent design across Chrome, Android and the web, an updated visual element to search, and wearables. You can read more about all the announcements at Verge.

July
Google added another animal to the algorithm apocalypse, releasing a local search algorithm update dubbed “Pigeon.” This update drastically changed which factors Google looks at when determining local rankings, including stronger ties to traditional web ranking signals.

Matt Cutts announced he was going on leave from Google, planning to return in October, and leaving his web spam duties behind. People panicked but were, on the whole, supportive.

Groupon ran a study showing that 60% of its direct traffic was actually organic search traffic, proving something many SEOs had long thought about their own “direct” traffic. Following that experiment, Conductor updated their 2013 study of web traffic, claiming that now 64% of all web traffic was from organic search.

August
Google announced that it would begin using HTTPS as a ranking signal, encouraging everyone to move from HTTP to HTTPS. This was seen as a sign that Google is trying to take this whole Internet privacy thing seriously.

We all saw this coming: Two months after the removed authorship photos, Google abandoned its Authorship program, which aimed to provide a stronger tie between content writers and content publishers.

The blogosphere was all abuzz over an influx of negative SEO extortion emails in which someone claimed they’d ruin your site’s rankings unless you wired them $XX amount of money.

September
Dentsu Aegis Network, a multinational media and digital communications company, acquired Covario, one of the largest search agencies in the United States. Rio SEO, Covario’s software business, was not a part of the deal.

Searchmetrics released their 2014 SEO Ranking Factors. High quality content, strong page architecture, and user signals saw the biggest increases in affecting ranking, while keyword links and social signals both decreased in value.

October
Authority Labs released one of the most comprehensive organic CTR studies. It segmented out desktop and mobile clicks, branded and non-branded keywords, and search intent (e.g. informational vs. transactional).

Google finally refreshed Penguin, the algorithm filter that targets web spam, over optimization and unnatural links. This was particularly noteworthy because it meant that everyone who was hit by the last Penguin and submitted a reconsideration request could finally get the opportunity to be reinstated into Google’s good graces.

Microsoft laid off Duane Forrester, Bing’s longest-serving face to the SEO community, not to mention the darling of the industry, having just won Search Personality of the Year.

Just a day later, Cutts decided Google web spam hadn’t crumbled in his absence and extended his time off until 2015. Speculations of a pending retirement ensued.

November
Google ditched its Local Carousel for hotels, restaurants, nightlight and entertainment. The SEO industry rejoiced.

Mobile became even more important to SEO as Google rolled out the mobile-friendly search label for mobile search results and a mobile friendly test tool in Google Webmaster Tools. This was the beginning of Google experimenting with a new ranking algorithm for mobile friendly sites.



December
Bing released its version of Panda, and frankly, did a better job at outlining what it actually considers good content.

Stone Temple Consulting released an extensive Twitter engagement study of more than 4 million tweets. One of the big findings was that time of day had little to no impact on “retweetability.”

What a year, right? I know I didn’t get it all, so what did I miss? What else monumental happened in 2015?


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