We recently told you about WPMU.org apparently getting hit by Google’s Penguin update. The site went from 8,580 visits (pretty standard for the site, having looked through the Analytics myself) to 1,527 a week later. It’s been hovering around similar numbers ever since, with a pretty clear dip right around Penguin time.

Do you think this site deserved to get hit by Penguin? Let us know in the comments.

We spoke with James Farmer, Founder and CEO of Incsub, which runs the site. Farmer maintains that WPMU.org engages in no keyword stuffing, link schemes, and has no quality issues. In fact, the site has actually done well throughout Google’s series of Panda updates.

Farmer tells WebProNews, “We did great after Panda, it was like that update recognized we were decent folk… you can’t win them all huh?”

“Apart from not being able to guess what Google was going to do in April, 3 years ago, we haven’t done anything wrong,” he says.

Last week, Farmer received some second-hand info from Google’s Matt Cutts, who reportedly spoke with the Sydney Morning Herald about WPMU.org. According to Farmer, Cutts provided three problem links pointing to the site. These included a site pirating their software and two links from one spam blog using an old version of one of their WordPress themes with a link in the footer. Farmer reported that Cutts “said that we should consider the fact that we were possibly damaged by the removal of credit from links such as these.”

It’s pretty interesting that if such links were the problem that it could have such a tremendous impact. It’s no wonder there have been so many discussions about negative SEO (competitors attacking each other with these kinds of tactics) since Penguin launched.

The site has over 10,400+ Facebook likes, 15,600+ Twitter followers, 2,537 +1s and 4,276 FeedBurner subscribers, according to Farmer. Apparently not enough to outweigh some questionable links from third parties.

“How could a bunch of incredibly low quality, spammy, rubbish (I mean a .info site… please!) footer links have made that much of a difference to a site of our size, content and reputation, unless Google has been absolutely, utterly inept for the last 4 years (and I doubt that that’s the case),” Farmer wrote in his article on the matter.

When asked how many links he has out there just from footers for WordPress themes, he tells WebProNews, “Given that we stopped adding links years ago, actually not that many at all.”

“However, the challenge is that given that we provided themes to a lot of multisite installs, which have since become overrun with splogs, there’s an enormous amount of links from not that many actual root domains,” he adds. “I’d guesstimate 1-2K, 99% of clearly low quality sites.”

We asked if he’s heard from other WordPress theme creators, having similar issues.

“Actually no, although that doesn’t surprise me that much,” he says. “Not many folk are as open as us, and in this field they probably have good reason to be. WordPress terms are very, very competitive so I wouldn’t be surprised if 9/10 competitors had something to hide!”

Like many webmasters, Farmer just doesn’t know what to expect from Google, in terms of whether or not Google will consider the site to be one of the innocent casualties of Penguin.

“I have no idea, I would love it if they did. I guess the thing I’m begging for is some sort of qualitative mechanism (NOT the manual webspam web, faster approach) that allows quality operators, like us, to survive and carry on providing Google users exactly the kind of helpful content they need!”

Google does have a form users can submit to, if they think they’ve been wrongfully hit by the Penguin update.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently told Danny Sullivan that Google considers the Penguin update a success, despite the large number of complaints from those commenting on blogs and in forums. Of course, the Penguin update, much like the Panda update, should be periodically coming back around, giving sites a chance to make fixes and recover. That also means however, sites will also have more chances to get hit.

We asked Farmer if he thinks Penguin has helped or hurt search results in general, outside of his site’s issues.

“Especially in the WP field they have gone wild,” he emphasizes. “For example our flagship site WPMU DEV – if you go to search for that now a competitor writing something ridiculous about us and copyright appears above our massively popular Facebook page. It even looks like our YouTube channel has been demoted. Crazy stuff.”

We’ve certainly seen some other questionable search results following the update, and others have complained aplenty.

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There some discussion going on in the webmaster/SEO community that Google may have de-indexed some free web directories. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld forum thread on the subject.

The thread begins with a post from user Sunnyujjawal, who says:

While checking some sites links I found 50% free submission directories are out of G now. Will Google count such links in negative SEO or unnatural linking?

Schwartz concurs that about 50% of the ones he searched for did not have listings.

He points to one example: global-web-directory.org. Indeed, I’m getting no results for that site:

I’m not sure about the 50% thing though. I’ve looked at a number of others, and haven’t come across many that were not showing listings (though I have no doubt that there are more out there). Either way, there are still a lot of these sites that are still in Google’s index. We do know, however, that quite a few of them recently received PageRank reductions with the recent update.

This discussion happens to come at a time when we’ve been analyzing Google’s quality guidelines, and its treatment of a certain directory, Best Of The Web, which sells reviews for potential listings, which appear with links that pass PageRank.

Other directories that follow a similar model, may be experiencing similar treatment from Google. In that same WebmasterWorld thread, user Rasputin writes:

I have a paid directory that I haven’t touched for about 3 years, only gets about 25 submissions ($10) a year – strange thing is, I just looked and not only is it well indexed but all the internal pages are now showing page rank – for a very long time they were all ‘greyed out’ after the google clamp-down on directories a couple of years ago.

No idea when it came back, certainly nothing I’ve changed and pretty unlikely it’s attracted natural links.

That’s pretty interesting.

User Netmeg adds:

I don’t think free or paid makes anywhere near as much of a difference as to whether or not the directory is actually curated for quality. Because if it isn’t, what other reason is there for it to exist other than to create links?

That’s a very relevant point, and that seems to be Google’s reasoning, based on this video from Matt Cutts from several years ago:

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Google’s Matt Cutts has put out hundreds of videos as part of his webmaster help series. I’ll assure you that nothing like what you’re about to hear has ever appeared in any of them.

Call it the anti-SEO help video of the decade, and if you’re a webmaster you can call it site suicide. You can laugh at this Matts Cutts parody video all you want, just don’t take any of its advice seriously.

“In addition to keyword stuffing, we look at links to porn sites. Not that many people tend to link that much to sites within the porn industry. That’s the sort of thing that’s going to be really rewarding for users, so link to porn sites. Could it be annoying? Yes, it could be annoying, but that’s perfectly fine.”

That’s one of the gems from this clever mashup from SEO guy Sam Applegate. He took (probably way to much) time to organize and analyze Cutt’s many videos and came up with this video on how to rank #1 in Google search. Except, as you may have derived from the last quote, this guide won’t have you ranking anywhere near #1.

“I do think that Bing or Blekko or Duck Duck Go are potentially doing illegal things like hacking sites,” says Cutts in fragments. Check it out below:

For his part, Cutts is aware of the video and his concern was with how much time it had to have taken its creator:

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To hear Google tell it, Google+ is growing into a major social network that will soon rival Facebook. The company loves to point out that more brands are adopting the social network and that the site now has over 170 million users. The question is, how many of those users actually participate in the social network by making posts or marking things with a +1? According to a new study from RJ Metrics, user engagement on Google+ is abysmal.

The study was conducted by downloading the public timelines of 40,000 random Google+ users. Of that number, only one-third of them even had any public activity. Of that one-third, the statistics don’t paint a pretty picture. The study looks at how much users post, how frequently users post, and how much attention the average post gets.

The chart above shows how likely users are to make another post given the number of posts they have already made. For example, a user who only has one post has about a 70% chance to make another, after which he or she has around a 76% chance to post another, and so on. The chart may seem to show good numbers for Google+, with users becoming progressively hooked the more they post. The study author points out, however, that in charts of other social networks these percentages usually quickly climb to over 90%.

This next cohort analysis chart shows the average monthly posts by a Google+ member as time goes on. The colors represent the month during which a user joined the social network. Though the average is still rising slightly, the declining rate in the average number of posts shows that user engagement is waning. This chart is very different from other cohort analysis charts for different social networks. The study points out, for example, a similar chart regarding Pinterest, seen below, which shows that platforms’ wild upsurge in popularity. Google+, which is slightly younger than Pinterest, shows no such surge, even at its outset.

The last graph provided by the study shows just how long Google+ users go between posting content. Users with only two posts average two postings per month and, despite more postings, the graph quickly averages out to around 11 days between postings. The study states that the overall average amount of time between postings is 12 days.

Users on Google+ may be hesitant to post much content because their posts do not garner much attention. The study reveals that the average number of +1′s on a post in under 1, at 0.77. Post replies and re-shares are even lower, at 0.54 and 0.17 per post, respectively. Most users might as well be talking to themselves.

So why does Google+ have so many members who don’t participate in the community? The answer may lie in how Google recruits users to its social network. The company has begun to integrate Google+ into every facet of its business. From Picasa to Google News, Google+ integration is becoming ubiquitous in Google products. This doesn’t sit well with all Google users (Wil Wheaton for example), who don’t want their useful Google products tied to a catatonic social network.

Since Google+ is so integrated with Google, any person with a Google account automatically has access to Google+, so pure curiosity might explain the social network’s rising membership numbers. Many Google users must log it to see what the platform is and does, only to find it empty and never log in again. Another reason for the poor engagement could be members who don’t post, yet use some of the tools Google+ provides, such as its much-touted Hangouts.

Though Google+ is not in any shape to seriously compete with Facebook, some niche communities have found Google+ useful. The large amount of storage that Google+ integration give Picasa makes the platform perfect for the photography community. Also, many members of the tech community find the network a good place to connect with like-minded people while avoiding the bustle and noise of other social networks. For the most part, though, Google+ members simply don’t share much at all.

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