We're getting quite a few site review requests and SEO consultancy requests recently for people that have been hit by a sudden drop in traffic. Because there has been quite some news about Google's Penguin and before that its Panda update, people are blaming those. In our perspective, whether you're blaming Penguin, Panda or another update from Google isn't really that interesting if you're not an SEO. What matters most is: you've lost traffic, how are you going to get it back?
Why you'd want to know the update that caused it
The idea is that if you know which update caused your traffic to drop and you know what that update targeted, you only have to fix that specific issue and your rankings will be magically restored. The reality is that it's really not that black and white. Quite often now people blame one update, but if we look at the SearchMetrics stats for their domain, they've had a gradual decline over the last few months with a bigger decline in recent weeks. If we based our actions solely on what Penguin targeted (and that's not even really clear yet within the SEO community) we might be missing other issues.
There were other updates that didn't get named by Google in the same way but had a huge impact in some countries. We've seen sites with over-optimized anchor text being hit from the beginning of the year already, but suddenly people now attribute that to Penguin. The end result for you as a site owner: it doesn't matter.
You need to fix all your issues, not just the ones that this specific update "targets".
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