This latest update has been named “
Penguin” and the main objective of the change is to specificallytarget
webspam.
To quote Matt’s words:
“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.
We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm
represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and
promote high quality content.”
If your site’s search engine traffic went down significantly since
that date then your site is most likely being penalized by Google for
not following the quality guideline.
A lot of you may remember that the last time a high profile and
significant algorithm change occurred was around February 2011 and that
was given the moniker of “
Panda”. Back then the Panda
algorithm tweaks were aimed at penalizing sites with poor quality
content – especially content associated with content farms like article
directories.
Although the Penguin update is believed to chiefly be aimed at
webspam, a lot of the general rules of thumb regarding what makes a
quality website in the eyes of Google still apply.
The main thing which all website owners and creators should keep in
mind is that Google is always tweaking their search algorithms because,
as a global multi-billion dollar a year business, it’s in their
interests to provide accurate and quality search results to their users.
Matt Cutt’s even says that Google wants to provide search results which will enhance the experience of the user.
How will the Penguin update affect your sites?
For starters if you have created and maintained a solid site with
original and quality content which has been organically rising up the
rankings, then you won’t have much to worry about.
By “organically” we mean that you have been steadily creating quality
content which has been indexed by Google and over time it has naturally
risen in the search rankings.
However, if you have tried to take shortcuts and employed what are
known as “black hat” techniques to try and fool Google into ranking your
site above the higher quality competitors, then you will probably see
some significant drops in your rankings and traffic in the coming
months.
Examples of “black hat” techniques which may have worked in the past
but will, over time, cause more harm than good to your site are things
like:
- Unnatural and excessive back-linking
You might have noticed by simply checking your spam folder in your
WordPress administration panel to see how much garbage your Akismet
plugin filters out of your comment area.
All of these spam comments are from people (or automated robots) which
leave comments with links going back to their site in the hope that they
will be able to build a significant number of back-links. A lot of the
time the comments are totally irrelevant and out of context to the topic
at hand which makes them very unnatural.Another technique spammers
employ is to try and leave comments with links going back to their sites
in forums. There is also a variation of this method whereby the
spammers create forum profiles and place links in their profile without
ever leaving a comment.Whereas previously the technique of building huge
numbers of back-links may have been effective in increasing search
rankings, this type of tactic is now being targeted more readily by
Google and it may be something they are addressing in the Penguin update
too.
- Poorly written articles which don’t make sense because of bad grammar
In the effort to write as many articles as possible in the shortest amount of time, some people use what are known as article spinners.
That is, they will often try to recycle existing articles which they’ve
found on the net, by using a spinner to reword the article so that
Google doesn’t detect any duplicate content.
The end result of sites which are primarily built using such a technique
is that they are grammatically illegible and quite useless as far as
being informative goes.Google is constantly introducing intelligence
into their search engines and crawlers to spot things like this and
penalise sites with such qualities by demoting them in the search
rankings.
- Keyword stuffing
“Keyword stuffing” refers to the unnaturally high frequency of keywords
which are placed on a page. The reason why people do this is that they
hope to get a better ranking for their chosen keywords by exhibiting a
large number of those keywords on their pages.
Quite often, when you read a page of a typical spammy website you will
find that the content actually doesn’t make any sense because the post
was written specifically to contain as many instances of a keyword as
possible without any regard to the quality of the content itself.
The above are just some of the “black hat” techniques which spammers
and wanna-be Internet millionaires employ in order to short circuit the
work needed to succeed online.
However, with algorithm tweaks such as Panda and Penguin and future
updates, these techniques will soon be as toxic as kryptonite was for
superman in terms of the success of your website.
What to Do if Your Site Got Penalized?
If your site got penalized by the penguin update then you should try the following:
- Carefully read Google’s quality guidelines
- Make the necessary changes to your site
- Log into your Google Webmaster tools account and submit a request for reconsideration
