Do Panda, Penguin and Unnatural Links affect the whole site or just part of the site?

Penguin: Penguin usually affects a site on a page and keyword level. Let's say that you have a page called example.com/greenwidgets/ and you have been building links to this page all containing the anchor text, "green widgets". If Penguin affected you, then it would mean that this particular page would no longer rank well for "green widgets". Penguin generally does not affect an entire site. However, quite often when sites have been affected by Penguin, they have built many anchor texted links, possibly for many different keywords all to the homepage. This can mean that the homepage will not rank for a number of terms.

Unnatural Links: A manual unnatural links penalty can affect the entire site, or just a page, or even just one keyword. Sometimes a site can be penalized and be totally removed from the Google index. Other times, the site can still be in the index but not be shown in the first 10 pages for any of its keywords. Or, sometimes the penalty will not be as severe and may only affect one or two keywords.

Panda: Panda can affect an entire site, or sometimes one section such as a news blog on the site. Panda does not tend to affect just single pages of a website. If you have a site that has some good content, but a lot of thin and duplicate content, then the Panda filter can cause the entire site to have trouble ranking, not just the thin and duplicate pages.

Google Penalized Mozilla Only One Page Out of 22 Million

We announced yesterday that Google punished Mozilla over user generated content. Today, we tend to learn that it absolutely was a extremely, very little penalty that solely compact one page out of Mozilla’s ~22 million webpages.

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, additional to the Google thread explaining that this manual penalty was applied in a very granular manner. In fact, it solely compact one page on Mozilla’s name, blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about.

Besides that being an improbable range of spammy comments on one page, it's disconcerting to check however confused Mozilla’s webmaster was over Google’s penalty notification. Don’t get Maine wrong, i'm an enormous fan of Google obtaining additional elaborate in their Webmaster Tools penalty notifications. however as you'll be able to see from our coverage of the penalty and Mozilla’s questions about the penalty, it appeared that this was a trifle larger than simply impacting one page on this huge web site.

This is an identical scenario as once the BBC was punished, and it clothed to be a penalty on one page.

Mozilla Penalised by Google for Over User Generated Content

In summary, Google told Mozilla that it has some type of spam issue that was so bad as to generate a penalty. But, Google didn’t explain what exactly this spam was, so that it could be easily removed. Worse, Google may have already removed some of the spam from its own listings, so that a publisher like Mozilla can’t even locate it using Google search.

Not only does this sound crazy, but it also sounds familiar. Last month, the BBC received a similar warning, one about having unnatural links. A puzzled BBC rep took to the forums to ask for help, since the message didn’t explain more in detail and the site has so much content. Eventually, Mueller answered that the warning came from having one single page that was deemed having unnatural links pointing at it and that “granular” action was taken.

Mozilla hasn’t been penalized — only specific parts. It could be a single page. It could be a range of pages. While that sounds reassuring, that the entire site wasn’t hit, the uncertainty over just how much or little was “granularly” effected adds a whole new worry.