Okay, So SEO world went upside down in last couple of weeks. First Hummingbird and then Penguin 2.1. I was busy studying Hummingbird and before I could conclude something, Google gave us Penguin 2.1.
According to Google, Hummingbird is a complete change of an Engine ( Algorithm) with some old parts still in it ( as those old parts were doing good). There’s nothing official about Penguin 2.1 ( Means what its all about). This is the official news which we got from Mutt Cutts:
Penguin 2.1 launching today. Affects ~1% of searches to a noticeable degree. More info on Penguin: http://t.co/4YSh4sfZQj
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 4, 2013
And after that tweets, there were lots of speculations and lots of threads on black hat word ad other webmaster forums regarding ranking loss and how to deal with them. I waited for this dust and noise to settle before making a conclusion.
Actually there should be some studies before something concrete can be said. So lets begin with the first case study.
Contents
Payday Loans- Google’s Cross Check Platform:
I think Payday Loans and some other niches (spammed to hell) like this, serve as the best platform for Google to check if their algorithm is doing good or not. So When ever an update like this happens, Payday loan would be my own favorite niche to look for some foot prints of Google’s algorithm.
So I searched for “Payday loans” and Here’s what I see as top 5 sites:
As I said earlier, Its really hard to draw conclusion with just one observation. Still we get one point, Internal pages are doing better than Home page.
Lets dig a bit deep and see what Ahrefs says about these for sites ( I have left wikipedia.. seems not reason to take that forward):
Back Links – Site at #2:
Back Links – Site at #3:
Back Links – Site at #4:
Back Links – Site at #5:
 Summing it up, here’s What I see:
| Ranking | Total Back Links | Referring Domains | total Social Signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site #2 | 410 | 90 | 6 |
| Site #3 | 11 | 6 | 3 |
| Site #4 | 5.5k | 32 | 65 |
| Site #5 | 80 | 24 | 12 |
if you put a closer look at the above date, you see pages with few links are ranking so high on SERP for the term like “Payday loan”. Thats something to talk about and think about. Lets wait for next case before summing up the conclusion.