In April 2012 Google did it’s Penguin Update Noticeably affected the rankings of 3.1% of all queries.
In May 26th 2012 then rolled out Penguin 2, affected .1%
Recently on October 5th Google released Penguin 3 affecting .3%
Saying it will further lower the impact that low quality links have on a sites rankings. The definition of “Noticeably affected” is decided, stating that basically means a change to the rankings of a site that is in the top 5 results. So the percentages above are, in our opinion, lower than the actual affect. If you consider two factors.
1) That a “query” is different from the “sites affected”.
a. The number reported by google to be at least 500 times lower considering there are at least 5 sites above the fold for each query.
2) That there are sites that are affected that are below the fold (which is 99% of the entire internet).
So the affect is Drastically larger than Google is claiming, but it’s Google so who’s going to argue. I’m certainly not, I’m just going to be sure to include those variables in discussions with upper management about why our site was affected by an update that Google claims to only impact .1% when they say “are we in that .1%, and if so why, are we doing something terribly wrong”. Then the explanations about how we were #8, but now we’re #13 for our biggest term and Google doesn’t consider that to be “Noticeable” “Above the fold”, nor did affect all our “queries” in the same way, the majority of the long-tail phrases are fine.
What an explanation, and who’s word are they going to take. We shall see, yet again. Thankfully our local map rankings are still in tact.