Tier-one operators feel brunt of Google's Penguin 4.0, study finds
William Hill, Paddy Power and Ladbrokes among the biggest fallers in search traffic following the real-time algorithm update
William Hill, Paddy Power and Ladbrokes were among a host of UK-facing brands to have lost as much as a quarter of organic search traffic in October following Google’s latest Penguin update, EGR Marketing has learned.
According to research carried by digital marketing agency Stickyeyes, the search engine’s Penguin 4.0 algorithm resulted in a number of tier-one operators – which also included Sky Bet and Coral – recording the biggest falls in monthly traffic.
Sports betting affiliates appear to have been the biggest beneficiaries of the update, with Stickyeyes reporting Oddschecker gained 13% growth in traffic, while OLBG recorded a 130% increase.
However, while the UK’s biggest operators lost the most traffic, they still remained by far the most visible brands.
“The most recent Penguin update is a watershed moment for Google and their fight against spam and manipulative link building techniques, Mike McDougall, organic search director at Stickyeyes, said.
“The fact that it’s now real time and will be iterated constantly as a permanent part of the algorithm will put even more pressure on companies to follow best practices.
”Brands shouldn’t get complacent or think that this marks a slackening in Google’s vigilance, really this change ushers in a new phase in the fight against spam and it’s only going to get tougher for brands not willing to play by the rules.”
Penguin 4.0 was rolled-out by Google across all languages in September, two years after the last update, and is now a real-time signal within its core search algorithm.
The update means Penguin’s data is refreshed in real-time, leading to faster visible changes once it has recrawled and reindexed a page. It also devalues spam by adjusting the ranking of the offending page, rather than the whole site.
Penguin was first introduced by Google in 2012 and was designed to downgrade sites utilising black-hat SEO techniques and the use of link spam to manipulate search rankings.
The original update led to substantial drops in search visibility for many egaming brands when it was first introduced.
“Those brands that have bigger profiles and a greater legacy of building links during some of the ‘darker’ days of SEO will have found it tougher to get their profiles in order, Michael Hewitt, content marketing manager at Stickyeyes, added.
“[Affiliates] have much smaller legacy link profiles and have more agility to get their sites fit for modern SEO purposes. The sheer volume and scale of the bigger operators profiles has put them at a natural disadvantage as evidenced by the results of the study.“