While some webmasters were cleaning up the mess after Google Panda update in March, 
Google rolled out Penguin update (Google Webspam Update) on April 24, 2012.
What is Google Penguin update?
According to Matt Cutts, the head of Google webspam team, Penguin update is intended to decrease rankings for sites that they believe are “violating their existing quality guidelines.” The purpose of this update is to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.
Matt Cutts stated that Penguin update only affects 3.1% of queries in English, as well as other languages such as German, Chinese and Arabic. However, many believe that the impact can be greater. While some websites were hit badly by Penguin update, many quality websites are the winners of the update. Their rankings move higher and their traffic increases dramatically.
Since 2010, Google has released different updates which are social signal update (2010), Panda update (2011) and now Penguin update (2012). Why Google keeps doing this? The reason is quite simple. In order for Google to stay on the top of the market, it is vital that they help searchers find sites that provide a great user experience and fulfill their information needs.
Is your website at risk of Google Penguin update? Here are several things you should check:
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- Does your website have too many ads but little content above the fold?
- Do you stuff keywords in your content?
To know the ideal keyword density of a page, watch Matt Cutts’ video:
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- Do you add anchor text links in irrelevant content?
- Do you have spun content that is not human readable and nonsense?
- Do you have cloaking (showing different content for search engines and users) in your website? Matt Cutts explained cloaking in an easy understand way in the video below:
- Do you have duplicate content all over the place? Chris Crum wrote a great article on how to deal with duplicate content. An easy way to reduce duplicate content is to use 301 redirect for the duplicated pages. You should also be careful about content syndication. Make sure whoever syndicates your content includes a link back to your original source.
So what should you do to thrive for Google Penguin update?
It is actually quite simple. Try to avoid SEO “magical tricks”. Do whitehat SEO. You need to spend your time and resources to create high quality content and good user experience to better serve your customers and visitors. If you follow the advice, you are on your way to build a solid online business that will last for many years.
Contact Mary Wang via email at GoldenVisionTraining.com
