Move over Panda… there’s a new Google update in the algorithm called The Penguin Update

In today’s internet world everyone wants to have their website on top position on Google. But as we usually say no one knows Google’s exact algorithm or what Google is ready to penalize. All we can do is take what we know and apply its principles to the best of our ability. It has recently been announced that Google will start to penalize websites that engage in over-optimization practices. Due to which it has introduced The Google Penguin Update.

What is Google Penguin Update?

The Penguin update is basically Google’s Web spam Algorithm which was launched on April 24. It was a change to Google’s search results that was designed to punish pages that have been spamming Google. If you’re not familiar with spam, it’s when people do things like “keyword stuffing” or “cloaking” that violates Google’s guidelines.

In this algorithm Google will start to penalize websites that engage in over-optimization practices like:

Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing is using too many keywords in text, images, and navigation links

If your keywords are similar for all three, you will most likely see a decrease in rankings because it does not look natural.

• Title tag
• URL
• Inbound anchor text

Unnatural Linked Profiles –Google announced it would be de-valuing administrative links which come from common sites linked to each other or from irrelevant sites. Years ago, it was a normal SEO practice to buy dozens of keyword-rich urls and create mini-sites that linked to each other. According to Google, this is over-optimization and website owners could face possible penalties or even de-indexing.

Link Balance – Any technique done excessively will be categorized as over-optimization. It is suggested having varying article directory links, blogs, Social Bookmarking and others to make it more natural.

Content Calendar – New content tells Google your site is relevant and it contributes to the freshness factors, which is one of the more recent Google algorithm updates.

Cloaking – One major thing you need to avoid (or in hindsight, should have avoided) is cloaking, which is basically just showing Google something different than you’re showing users.

How To Recover From Google Penguin Penalty?

Since this was targeting web spam, you need to remove any spam or unnatural links you might have. In some cases, Google may have sent messages to you about spam activity in the past. We need to correct anything that Google has flagged as spam with your site. If nothing’s been flagged — and you’re sure it was Penguin that hit you — then correct whatever you can think of that might be spam-like.

Within Google Webmaster Central, there’s the ability to file a reconsideration request. However, Google says this is an algorithmic change — IE, it’s a penalty that’s applied automatically, rather than a human at Google spotting some spam and applying what’s called a manual penalty.

Because this is an algorithmic change, Google has no plans to make manual exceptions. Webmasters cannot ask for reconsideration of their site, but we’re happy to hear feedback about the change on our webmaster forum. There is, however, a new form that you can use to report errors, if you think you were caught by mistake.

TIPS -

1. Socialize content: Create informative, shareable content and socialize through Twitter, Facebook and other relevant sharing sites.
2. Blog post exchange: Connect with like-minded businesses and contribute blog posts, opinion to one-another’s blogs.
3. Facebook cross-pollination: Reach out to other relevant businesses on their Facebook page and interact on a regular basis.
4. Invest more time and resources in social media: Visitors behavior has changed in the couple of years. People don’t rely just on Google search anymore but more on their friends and network to make recommendations and see what products or services they like.
5. Blog more and blog regularly: Writing content that is useful for end users will not just increase your reader base but force search engines to crawl, index, and rank your site. After all, engines need good content just as badly (to be relevant to their searchers) just as you need their “free” traffic.
6. Create more videos: Any business can educate their prospects through video and videos don’t need to be high cost studio material. YouTube can be a great source of traffic. Also, video creates a one-on-one engagement with your audience.
7. Completely fill out and optimize social media profiles: Start with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Be prepared to publish just enough updates to keep it feeling fresh and active. This is the baseline social media minimum. Those profiles will appear in Google/Bing’s organic search engine results. Link to them on important keywords from a non-landing page/funnel entry page as high up on your main website as possible. Ask partner businesses to link too.
8. Be famous locally: Target to a small, hyper-local radius using Facebook and LinkedIn ads. Even massive deployment to small populations won’t cost very much media spend at all. There is no reason for you local brand to be invisible.

Google also lists few “basic principles”. These are:

1. Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

2. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

3. Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or Page Rank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

4. Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.