Internet, SEO

Your Blog or Website Hit by The Penguin 2.0 Update?

Google-Penguin-UpdateAs we all know Google rolls out algorithm changes every so often to help improve their search engine algorithm. Love it or hate it, there is one thing you can always trust; the online forums, bloggers, and seo’s will all be evaluating the changes, good or bad. For me and many other seasoned seo’s I always look forward to these algorithmic updates. Why? Because, I know I am doing stuff ethically and for my work I will always be rewarded.

So here is a general overview of the Penguin 2.0 update

According to Matt Cutts on March 22 of 2013 the changes were implemented:

  • A refined “exact anchor text” rollout.
  • Advertorial links that violate Googles TOS.
  • Rewarding better quality sites with excellent content.
  • Hacked sites and detecting them better. This includes communicating better with hacked sites via WMT (webmaster tools).
  • Rewarding authority sites more.
  • Improving social signals that got “real” social signals.
  • Removing clusters of sites from all the same website. They would be pushed down to Google’s 2nd and third page so one site doesn’t dominate the entire first page of Google.

Here is the video released by Matt Cutts. Watch it because is very useful to learn what is going to happen during the next months in terms of SEO for Google.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg]

One key point I want to stress on Penguin 2.0 is the disavow links tool. Google developed this tool to allow webmasters to let Google know of sites that shouldn’t pass any pagerank and essentially should be devalued. What this did was actually cause Google to get a steady stream of links which should be devalued. This could mean anything from your competitors reporting “bad” links in your link profile to webmasters that might have been targeted with negative seo.

This is just a theory, but I would imagine that Google takes all the data and once they see a trend of sites selling links with dofollow (meaning passing pagerank) they’ll essentially put that site in a group which doesn’t make those links of any real value from people that acquired links from them.

So here is my two cents on Google’s latest update. Wait a couple weeks if you were dinged. Google is always rolling out updates and if they see an overwhelming number of negative searches for different keywords. Don’t make any drastic changes to your website or blog instead make sure you have not stuffed your keywords on your ranking keywords.

Consider evaluating your link profile. Are you using gray or even blackhat tactics. Shame on you. Mix up your anchor text with your websites url and brand name. This isn’t your homepage only but internal pages, as well. Consider focusing on building quality links slowly, but steadily. Improve the quality of content on your website or blog. Finally, consider getting real social signals from authority sites. This will help spread your links around more naturally, as well.

Lastly, if you’re hiring a seo company and you have been dinged consider hiring a different company or doing it yourself. Take a look at their prices and if it looks a little low and too promising it probably is. Just keep moving forward and build links correctly and you can bounce back from the latest Penguin update.

This is an article published on behalf of Mr. Garen Arnold who is the chief editor of BlogSetupGuide.com. His personal statement is as following: “Through my vast knowledge of creating niche blogs/sites over the years I write about many valuable blogging and SEO tips for newbies for their online ventures.”

If you have any questions, please ask below!