MATT CUTTS: 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 if you are simply
being outgunned by better content?"
This is a really intriguing question.
So let's walk through some of the 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, a direct action
from the manual 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, hey, we thought that there was some keyword stuffing
or cloaking 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, OK, where can
I start to improve things or what can I
change to make things better.
The other reason to check out Webmaster Tools
is if there's some crawl error.
We have seen sites that will launch a new development
website that was previously no indexed,
and they forget to take off the no index tag.
Or there's 404s, or we can't reach
your site, those sorts of things.
So look for crawl errors and all that sort of stuff.
OK, so now let's get to the meat of your question.
You 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.
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 you not call it a penalty?
It'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 kind of hard to do.
So we typically just think 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 change are pretty good.
In fact, we might be rolling out a couple
if you just look at the raw number of changes
that we're 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 could 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 integrated into indexing,
and it's had less of a jolting impact.
And in fact, we've gotten it so that it changes
the index on a pretty regular basis.
And it's built in into 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-- it's a switch that flips,
or it's something that starts rolling out at a discrete time.
And so we're a little more willing to talk about those
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 rescore your site or for us to recrawl and reindex the site
and for it to start ranking highly again.
So it's kind of tricky because we
have a large amount of algorithms that all interact,
and whether you'd call something a penalty or ranking change
or 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 re-run
and reprocess the site.
And then the site can regain in rankings many of the times.
So I hope that helps a little bit as far as what to do
and how to go forward with the site.