Back in April, Google rolled out a big change to their algorithm (or method of ranking individual sites) which all SEO’s in the industry branded the ‘Penguin Update’. In short, this update meant sites would be punished for having unnatural links.
Google’s punishment would be to demote a large number of brands within search results or, in some extreme cases, banish them from its index all together. So as you can see, this little Penguin was kind of a big deal to those of us in SEO!
So who has been hit by Penguin? Well, some of the brands to have suffered most are those that have dominated the search results for a long time through generation of ‘paid’ and unnatural links. In particular, the effects have been felt on brands working in the finance and insurance markets such as Compare the Market (CTM).
This chart shows the overall search visibility of Compare the Market. As you can see a massive downward spike occurred in April due to the Penguin update.
With such dominance in the market over search results, brands like this have now became the most volatile to Penguin. After conducting some competitor analysis here at MEC, we’ve seen the effect this has had primarily on CTM - which can be seen in the search visibility chart above.
CTM jumped from page 2 to position #2 (June - September) by responding to the Penguin update effectively.
As you can see from the screenshot above CTM were ranked outside of the top 10 in June, suggesting Penguin got them where it hurts! However in September, CTM responded spectacularly by moving up to position #2.
How have they done this?
Using CTM as a specific example, it appears that these brands have ‘cleaned up their act’ impressively through some meticulous back-link cleansing.
CTM have removed a large proportion of their links in September as part of a back link cleansing process.
As you can see from the chart of new vs. lost links above, CTM have lost a large number of their links in September. Instead of ‘lost’ I would hazard a guess that these have been ‘removed’ by CTM to counteract Penguin.
The links that have been removed are those that Google said Penguin would punish brands for, such as low-authority directory links, paid banners, footer links etc. A summary of the key Penguin factors and how brands like CTM have responded are demonstrated in the table below:
| Key Penguin Factors | How this has affected CTM | CTM’s Pro-active Response |
| Duplicate Content | CTM have been demoted for having the same articles posted on a number of sites | CTM have generated unique content on new sites |
| Anchor Text Diversity | Most of CTM’s links were all the same and all short tail (e.g. “home insurance”) | CTM have used longer variations of keywords in their links (long tail) CTM have removed a majority of banners that only target exact terms (e.g. “home insurance”) |
| Link relevancy | CTM had a large number of links on irrelevant sites | CTM have removed all these links and created new ones on more relevant home insurance blogs |
| Keyword stuffing in internal & external links | A large proportion of CTM’s content was stuffed with keywords to gain rankings | Spammy articles have been taken down and new articles have been written by individual bloggers. |
CTM have responded to Penguin by generating stronger content, stuffed with fewer target keywords and ensured all links are long tail (e.g. “home owners insurance” no “home insurance”). CTM have also removed a large proportion of un-natural banner links.
With major brands showing they can recover from Penguin in such a short space of time like this, it gives the SEO industry extra incentive to maintain performance for clients, as long as we keep ourselves updated with Google’s every move.