It appears that yesterday, April 24th, saw the first launch of Google’s recently announced Over Optimization Penalty. The news scared a lot of SEOs and started a flood of whining on forums. You can always tell who has a bit of a guilty conscience when Google starts talking about an update focused on eliminating spam. Luckily, when we first heard about it we went nuts collecting pre-change information for future analysis. Since the first launch of an update is usually the most severe we are going to start reviewing our data to see what sites moved and try to get a decent idea of what this change is about. We collected data on both our clients and the sites that they compete with. So far it seems our clients are ranking better than they did before as the spammers get taken out. <knock on wood> We’ll see how this shakes out. Remember, don’t knee-jerk react to an algo update. Let it shake out and then come up with a calm, clear plan of action.
Check out this list of winners and losers. Pretty interesting.
