I must admit. It has been awhile on me posting on this blog. Actually my last post was about the Panda update and how EHow got dinged. So as many people know now, Google has finally rolled out their over-optimization/webspam algorithm update that they officially named the Penguin Update. It is funny how naming these updates that destroying people’s rankings (sometimes as collateral damage) after an object (in the last few by Google – animals) make it better. Kind of reminds me on how we name hurricanes!
Like any update there are winners, losers, and some sites that get stuck in the dragging nets! Let’s talk about why this has happened and how to fix (or reduce exposure) shall we?
April 24th, Google stated that the update would be rolled out “in the next few days”. Like Panda, this was predominantly a quality content update. The goal of this update was to reward higher-quality sites and kill pages that were spamming (in their opinion) Google. The sites that got hit were guilty of some or all (or none) of these top offenses:
- Content spun using spinners
- Content that was thin or low quality – Overall does it bring value to a visitor?
- Questionable linking practices such as cross linking.
- Over on page optimization such as keyword stuffing. – Anybody still do that?
Google also announced that the Penguin update will be rolled out in all languages simultaneously (something they did not do with Panda), and it will affect an estimated 3.1% of queries in English search (Panda affected 12%). Not sure if you remember but our trustworthy friends at Google said 3% for panda and oh yea it was four times that! Thanks guys! Penguin is like panda as it is algorithmic based so this means that reconsideration requests won’t work. You must remove the SPAM, clean-up your site and then wait for a “data refresh” and a recrawl which could be weeks or months!
Penguin is panda rev’d up but is really looking for very noticeable SPAM and sites that are playing in the VERY gray area of link building. Panda is more of a low content algorithm smack. Let’s not forget that panda is still out there and just went through another update just last month.
I hand it to Google though as they have always been constant with their advise (surely, not the sites they are targeting). Create high quality content and focus on a positive user experience is what they have said since the beginning of all of this. Quite frankly, it is good advise.
Let’s Assume You Got Clipped
And you feel that your site was caught in the filter innocently (I call this collateral damage), Google has a form you can fill-out. I also highly recommend that you check your Google Webmaster Tools account (for any messages). The buzz in the SEO world is that Google does not send messages on this one so make sure you check you WT often. It was also suggested you use the Google Webmaster Help Forum to inquire about your site. Be careful though as you will be required to give your URL in question!
Most big brands did not get dinged on this as they (bigger brands) tend to have the same characteristics like longer average visits and lower bounce rates, general high quality content, tons of social signals, a naturally built inbound linking profile.
I would check the following if you were hit:
- Does you content provide helpfulness? Would it make a new visitor become a returning visitor?
- Is your back link profile natural?
- Are your back links natural and have a high level of exact match in the anchor text?
- Get you content to a better “authority” level. Better quality.
- How is your bounce rate? 40% or less please.
- Time on site above 3 minutes?
- Social signals such as tweets and shares need to be maximized if possible.
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