Murat Yatagan will be talking about clear-cut identification methods for following up on all leads concerning the impact of Google’s quality algorithm updates on websites. With these methods, you will not only be able to understand whether your site has been impacted by Google’s Panda and/or Penguin algorithms, but will be able to get to the root of the issue. That means you will learn what to look into to discover potential quality issues on your site. These methods do not require any paid SEO tools and they are considerably more time efficient.

1. Identify Panda/Penguin on your websites
“Identifying whether your domain has been impacted by Panda or Penguin
without using any paid tool in 15 minutes”
Murat Yatağan
12th March 2018

2. Find me on Twitter or Linkedin: @muratyatagan / muratyatagan
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan
● International SEO Consultant
● 8 years of expertise on SEO and
UX since
● 5 years at Google (Search
Quality)
● Sr. SEO Manager @ GSG
● Startup Advisor
● Judge on UK + European +
MENA Search Awards since ‘16

3. Why are my rich snippets NOT showing up on SERP?
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

4. Reasons why a URL does not produce any Rich Snippets Results on SERP
1. Technical incorrectness: Structured data is not coded correctly using the
correct in-page markup on the page that the information applies to.
1. Wrong markup type: Structured data code is violating Google’s Structured
Data guidelines.
1. Quality issue with site: There is a general quality issue with your website.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

5. What can be done to check the technical correctness of your Structured Data?
Drill down to
specific errors
on Search
Console and fix
the mark up.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

6. What else can I do to validate my Structured Data implementation?
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

7. Make sure you did it right!
Apart from using SC’s Search Appearance report and SDTT to validate
that you are using the correct markup formatting, use the Fetch as
Google tool to make sure that you do NOT block your structured data
pages from Googlebot by using these:
● robots.txt
● noindex
● any other crawler access control methods
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

8. How can I check if my markup type is compliant with Google’s guidelines?
OK, you have fixed and validated your Structured Data markup implementation.
But there are still NO Rich Results on the SERPs for your page. Now what?
Familiarize yourself with Google’s Structured Data Quality Guidelines and
make sure your pages do NOT violate any of the policies mentioned here.
Let’s check the guidelines briefly together.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

9. Structured Data Quality Guidelines in a nutshell
● Follow Google webmasters quality guidelines.
● Provide up to date information.
● Provide original content (yours or user generated).
● Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the
page.
● Don't mark up irrelevant or misleading content, such as
unrelated content or fake reviews.
● Specify all required properties for your rich result type.
● Use the most specific applicable type and property names
defined by schema.org for your markup.
● If you mark up one item in a list you must mark up all
items.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

10. Examples of policy violations that will help you better understand SD guidelines
Learn common causes of structured data manual actions to fully understand policies.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

11. Structured Data is technically correct and implemented in compliance with Google
At this stage, insightful information about your site’s quality will be revealed.
- After you’ve made sure:
- your page’s Structured Data has been marked up correctly without
any technical issues
and
- your Structured Data markup and marked up content totally comply
with Google’s policies/guidelines
- BUT you still do not see any rich results on the SERPs
- This shows that your site has quality issues.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

12. The method we’ll use to reveal whether your site has quality issues is Rich results
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

13. A domain without any quality issues where we can’t spot traces of Penguin/Panda
Organic traffic from 90
days
Rich results organic
traffic from 90 days
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

14. This domain must have quality issues, as it has been heavily impacted by
Penguin/Panda for 75 days
Organic traffic from 90
days
Rich results organic
traffic from 90 days
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

15. How to monitor whether our domain might be impacted by Penguin/Panda?
For the same time interval (I recommend using 90 days to have a significant dataset) check whether
the ratio of your site’s total amount of organic traffic to organic traffic that is only driven by rich results
is similar to the ratio between the number of marked-up pages that are eligible to have rich result
on the SERPs and the total number of organic traffic generating URLs.
When these two ratios are similar, that means your site has not been negatively impacted by
Penguin/Panda and your site doesn’t have large quality issues.
The easier way is to KEEP monitoring your organic traffic and rich results organic traffic
development, so that you can easily CATCH an anomaly, which might reveal signs of quality issues
on your website.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

16. With this method, you can also see whether the Penguin/Panda impact has been
reduced
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

17. Check your crawl stats
Googlebot tends to increase its crawling just before the update!

18. Penguin/Panda’s impact on your domain can differ!
Organic traffic from 90
days
Rich results organic
traffic from 90 days
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

19. Evaluate Penguin/Panda’s impact on your domain: Is it severe or minor?
Organic traffic from 90
days
Rich results organic
traffic from 90 days
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

20. Remember, the quality issues are large when the difference between traffic types
is bigger
Organic traffic from 90
days
Rich results organic
traffic from 90 days
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

21. OK, but how to spot whether the algorithm update is Penguin or Panda?
Penguin
Check your backlink profile and see if you can spot a
remarkable amount of bad backlinks.
Panda
Check your pages for low quality content, a frustrating user
experience, bad internal linking or navigational structures.
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

22. Takeaways from this talk: Implement Structured Data and Monitor its traffic
● You need to implement Structured Data, not only because
your CTRs will increase and your pages will have a better
organic visibility on SERP
● But also because you’ll be able to do amazing analyses about
your websites’ overall quality in no time via basic tools and
dashboards
Identifying Penguin/Panda traces on your websites by Murat Yatağan at @muratyatagan

23. Thanks!!!
murat.yatagan@gmail.com
Murat Yatağan
March 2018