Google Penguin: What it Means for You

Posted by Andrew Wilson in Blog Promotion, Ideas and Tips, Social Bookmarking

Google's latest update, the Penguin update, has taken the search world by storm. For many in the internet marketing industry, this update has hit them even harder than the infamous Panda update. The Google Penguin update also has a nickname: The webspam update.

Google Panda was designed to increase the quality of results. It did this by adding artificial intelligence and adding factors like the percentage of the page that was taken up by ad space. While sites that used a lot of low quality link strategies did get hit by Panda, it wasn't nearly as severe as Penguin.

TIP! When optimizing your site, think of the search engine as a matchmaker. The search algorithms look for sites with the most similarities to or cohesion with the most popular and reputable sites.

The Penguin update targets low quality link strategies specifically. If you're building your links by using a lot of low PR backlinks, chances are your site is affected by Penguin.

More specifically, here are some of the major ways Penguin could have affected your site and what you can do about it.

Low Quality Link Strategies

Low quality link strategies include:

- Article marketing.

- Spun content.

- Blog commenting, blog comment spam.

- Web 2.0 Profile Links.

- Forum signatures.

- XRumor Blasts

If the majority of your links are made up of any of these link sources, your site is going to hurt pretty badly after the Penguin update.

Instead of using these tactics, now is the time to switch to tactics that Google likes more. That includes things like distributing infographics, doing guest posts and directly asking for high quality links.

Duplicate Content: It's Not Just "Content With the Same Words"

Webmasters know that the title tag is the most important tag in SEO. That's why they'll often create similar pages with similar content, so they can target similar keywords. For instance, let's say you run a website about cooking Chinese Noodle Soup. There are three main keywords you're targeting:

1) Best Chinese Noodle Soup

2) Chinese Noodle Soup Recipe

3) How to Cook Chinese Noodle Soup

Although you're not technically creating duplicate content, the fact is that you're splitting up the quality of your content among three pages. You're "over optimized" (in Matt Cutts' words) and Google is able to penalize you for it now.

Social Signals Increase in Importance

Google's social signal readings are increasing in importance. That means having a strong Twitter following, Facebook following or Google Plus following is going to help you even more than before.

TIP! Having an appropriate title will increase traffic to your site. The placement of keywords in your title has a huge impact on determining where a search engine will place your site.

Keep in mind that Google can tell the difference between fake likes (E.g. buying 1,000 likes for $5 on Fiverr) and real communities. They can read sentiment, measure the authority of your followers and more. Don't try to fake a community ?€" Build a real one instead.

Diversify Your Linkbuilding

TIP! When building and optimizing your site, your HTML coding should be kept as simple and straightforward as possible. All of your tables, forms, and other site elements should be designed using only the most basic codes.

Don't have just one or two linkbuilding tactics that you use over and over and over again. Instead, diversify your link sources. Make them look as naturally spread out as possible.

The bottom line with this update is to stop using spammy techniques and focus more on quality content and quality relationships.

TIP! Here is an idea for search engine optimization! A search engine must work to find specific information from anywhere on the internet. This task is enormous due to the quantity of information that a search engine will come across on the internet.

If your rankings did take a big hit with Google Penguin, it might be time to consider other marketing channels besides just SEO. One traffic source that is working really well for a lot of people right now is Facebook.

To find out how to get massive traffic via Facebook check out "Double Your Likes".

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