The Evolution of Google Penguin Algorithm Updates

Penguin: The History The original Penguin algorithm arrived on April 24, 2012, and was aimed at rooting out and penalizing websites with low-quality links and too many keywords. Alongside the Panda algorithm, Google wanted to reward sites with valuable, relevant links, and penalize sites that had built unnatural links solely to increase their search rankings. Penguin initially affected around 3.1 percent of all search queries and had a significant impact on how webmasters approached SEO, causing many to shift towards unique content. Penguin 2.0 made further tweaks to the algorithm, affecting around 2.3 percent of all search queries. Similarly, Penguin 3.0 built off the tweaks made in the previous updates. Penguin 1.0 The Penguin update is Google’s latest crackdown on what it terms webspam: Techniques used to boost PageRank without providing value to visitors. Launched on April 24, the update affects 3.1% of searches and targets sites that abuse Google’s existing quality guidelines. So far Penguin’s main impact has been on websites that rely on link networks for traffic. Using exact match anchor text, especially if the links are bought rather than organic, is a red flag to Google, as are spammy comments using exact match link signatures, guest posts on irrelevant websites and low-quality article directories, and links from sites that contain dangerous or dishonest content and links. Penguin is not an attack on the use of SEO. Instead, it is the latest phase of Google’s war against webmasters who abuse links and rely on other on-page SEO tricks. The search engine behemoth believes that real people’s enthusiasm for content is the best indicator of quality. This means that social signals and sharing are becoming more and more critical to PageRank. Providing your visitors with high quality, unique content that offers useful information that they’ll want to share is thus becoming more and more important; this is the only type of SEO content that’s going to pay off for you in the long term. If your website focuses on providing engaging, fresh content for visitors, then you have nothing to fear from Penguin. Avoid future problems by focusing your link-building efforts on getting high-quality links from influential websites in your niche or industry. Think link quality rather than quantity. Links are the natural consequence of an engaging, content-rich webpage rather than a tool to be manipulated. Google has very helpfully released specific guidelines for its Penguin update. It advises websites to avoid the following: Hidden on-page text and links that exist only to boost rankings. Cloaking or redirects that mislead your site’s visitors. Sending automated queries to Google to boost rankings. Keyword stuffing and hidden keywords that are there only to fool the search engines. Multiple domains or subdomains with duplicate or irrelevant content Doorway pages and pages created for affiliate schemes that have little or no original content. Pages that contain phishing links or install viruses and trojans. Note that there is nothing in the guidelines to concern websites that exist to please their visitors. However, if you feel that Penguin has unfairly punished you, Google has provided an online form for complaints about the effects of the update. Google’s latest push against webspam is not going to be its last. The days of building traffic via link networks and paid links are over: Websites now have to earn their links by merely being link-worthy. The search engine wants SEO to be transparent and honest. It is guaranteed to continue its war against websites and SEO experts who try to game its algorithms. Ultimately the Penguin update is good news for honest webmasters and quality websites and blogs. Focus on providing unique, engaging content on a regular basis and make it as easy to share as possible with social network buttons. The more attractive your website and its content to real people the more it will rise in the rankings. What Sites Got Hit? Google’s most significant updates often knock webmasters for a loop. Even with hints beforehand that Google was planning an update targeting over-optimization, no one knew what to expect before Penguin came about. Since Google doesn’t tell us exactly what they’re doing- or even what they’ve done, after the fact – it leaves SEO experts to analyze their changes to sort out what happened to the algorithm and what ranking factors are most likely to get you into trouble. Now that the Penguin update has been launched, it is easier to see what Google was targeting, but the only way to know for sure is to study a large number of sites and look for a common thread between those that were impacted by the update. Microsite Masters has done the research and published the results on their blog. They found two factors that the penalized sites had in common: Targeted anchor text: Every single site they found that was penalized used keyword-optimized anchor text for at least 65% of their incoming links. Yes, that’s right–every single site. Links from irrelevant sites: Almost half of the penalized sites had no links from other sites in the same niche, and over 70% of the penalized sites had less than 30% of their links coming from related sites. What to do About the Penguin Update? The mere mention of an update to Google’s search algorithm is enough to inspire fear in the hearts of many internet marketers, bloggers, and webmasters. For those who make a living off ad revenue and affiliate sales, being ranked highly on Google is critical to success. Being de-indexed by Google has been referred to as â€Å"internet death.† When a site is de-indexed its content becomes invisible to search users, which translates into traffic almost wholly vanishing. The following advice will assist you in avoiding such a nightmare situation. Calm Down; It’s Not the End of SEO When the update known as Penguin was released, many anxiously awaited to see the impact it would have on their traffic. A good number of these people were just now recovering from Google’s previous algorithm update, Panda. While the aftermath of the previous update was nothing short of cataclysmic, Penguin seems to be much milder in comparison. This is likely due to many webmasters learning from the lessons taught by Panda. The main focus of this update appears to be backlink spam and keyword stuffing. Avoid Black-Hat Backlinking Services Even before the release of Penguin, Google sent a strong signal that paid backlinking services will not be tolerated. It did this by de-indexing BuildMyRank.com, one of the most successful and popular of these services. This sent shock waves across the SEO community and signified things to come. Google designed Penguin to more effectively weed out sites with backlink profiles determined to be unnatural and intended to game the system. Never use automated software and services to build vast amounts of low-quality links in a short amount of time. Penguin sniffs these out like a shark smells blood. This kind of linking strategy is blatantly unnatural and will almost guarantee a stiff penalty. Instead focus on backlinking methods that Google views as natural, such as guest writing on blogs and websites that fall under the same niche category as the content you are trying to rank. The Death of Exact Match Anchor Text Penguin has made it clear that link diversity is essential for surviving Google’s wrath. This is especially true when it comes to choosing anchor text. The majority of the sites punished by Penguin had one thing in common; the blatant exploitation of exact match keywords. This was once considered perfectly sound SEO strategy for dominating specific keywords but has since become tainted by black hat services spamming irrelevant anchor text to exploit Google’s algorithm. Keyword anchor text can still be used but in smaller doses. A general rule of thumb is to have exact match anchor text make up under 50% of your total link profile. Keyword Stuffing A former holy grail of SEO has now become detrimental to success. Stuffing a whole host of keywords together and producing sloppy, low content articles will now prove toxic to your traffic. Google views this as a blatant act of spamming and punishes it severely. The safest route is to pick just a few keywords and strategically place them throughout your content. Make sure your keywords do not seem forced or out of place. Do not treat an article as filler to place keywords. Content should always be relevant, interesting and grammatically correct. Your keyword ratio should be between 2 to 5 percent of the entire article. Penguin 2.0 The world’s biggest search giant released the Penguin 2.0 update on May 22, 2013, and this latest transformation of the Google search algorithms further improve the quality of the results delivered. The latest update is aimed at clearing spam off the Internet by penalizing websites which attempt to artificially increase their standing in the search results by using black-hat SEO tactics. This update focusses in particular on elements such as keyword-stuffed anchor text and aggressive link building strategies. Webmasters who might have been over-optimizing their content may be looking at a sudden drop in traffic since the release of the latest update. If your site has been hit by Penguin 2.0, then you will need to think about taking a new direction in your search engine marketing campaign. Which Sites Are Affected by Penguin 2.0? The latest update focusses heavily on links and anchor text, and the ratio of your site links will determine whether your website benefits or gets penalized. In particular, websites containing links with keyword-stuffed anchor text have been hit the hardest. If the content of your website includes large amounts of anchor text with exact-match key phrases, then it looks very unnatural in the eyes of Google’s crawlers and your traffic will likely suffer as a result. Any website which has made use of aggressive link building campaigns may be adversely affected by Penguin 2.0. This includes sites containing backlinks from other websites deemed low quality in Google’s eyes and sites which contain a lot of other outgoing links. Additionally, having an excessively high percentage of keyword-rich incoming links will hurt your website. Other bad places to have a high percentage of your backlinks include webpage footers, blog comments, unrelated websites and other pages which are also penalized by Google. Those who have brought links before will almost certainly find that the vast majority of their backlinks appear on such sources. How to Survive Google Penguin 2.0 For the most part, the things which have constituted good SEO tactics since the first release of Penguin back in 2012 should still work. Google has not changed its policies; it has simply become better at enforcing them and making sure that less and less spam and otherwise junk content makes it into the search results. While ideally, you should have already discontinued any black-hat SEO tactics long ago, it is even more important now to change your strategy if you haven’t done so already. If your website has been severely hit by the latest algorithm, then it may be time to completely redo your content as well as entirely change your search engine marketing strategy. Now is the time to ensure that your website is filled with quality and original content that human readers want not only to read, but also to share with others. Content that gets social signals is exactly what impresses Google and, in some cases, it may even end up going viral. The modern Internet is very much about social media and it is an inescapable fact that any successful website is successful due to the very fact that its visitors are the ones promoting the site by sharing content that they like on sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Any webmaster should also do their bit to encourage the sharing of content by providing social networking buttons to accompany suitable articles and other pages. When it comes to link building, you need to be looking for natural links rather than having more links on irrelevant or otherwise unsuitable sources. Going after the cheap and easy links is only going to hurt your business in the longer term. Instead, focus on getting links on other sites which deal with relevant niches and industries. People should be clicking on those links because they want to learn more about something or they want to read references supporting another piece of content. Finally, ensure that you have content creation and marketing strategy. This needs to be something that you are one-hundred percent committed to. If you are running a blog, ensure that it is updated frequently and consistently to encourage your existing readers to come back regularly while also attracting new ones. This will also help to encourage social signals and natural, organic traffic. When it comes to dealing with social media, it is important not to ignore important social signals. Social media is about interacting with your readers by responding to their queries and comments and getting involved with the community that builds up around your business and website. Google wants to reward popular websites which draw in traffic organically rather than that those which put every effort possible into manipulating the search engines. In conclusion, make sure that you abandon the old strategies of search engine optimization if you haven’t already. Focus on your human readers and customers – that is what today’s SEO is all about. What Was Punished by Penguin 2.0? Google Penguin 2.0, released in May 2013, is the latest major version of the search giant’s algorithm in a long stream of updates which focus on penalizing over-optimized content and, in particular, many of the link building strategies which were once deployed by the vast majority of search engine marketers. Whether you are doing much of the SEO yourself or hiring a company to do the work for you, it is essential that you pay close attention to Google’s webmaster guidelines as it is becoming increasingly difficult to artificially manipulate a website’s standing in the search results. The following takes a look at seven of the most prominent ways to get yourself booted out of Google’s indexes. 1. Keyword-Stuffed Anchor Text Anchor text refers to the clickable text representing a hyperlink. Traditionally in search engine optimization, anchor text contained keywords designed to artificially increase the ranking of a webpage in the search engine results. Search engine marketers have often optimized their anchor text in such a way that it contains keywords associated with the contents of the page linked to. However, using the same anchor text to excess will ultimately flag your website as over-optimized and, not only this; it also annoys your human readers. You should overcome this situation by diversifying your anchor text to include a wider variety of keywords to avoid repetition and make it look more natural within the context of the content itself. 2. Paid Links Google’s dislike of paid links is certainly nothing new, but its latest algorithm updates are getting better and better at determining which links have been paid for. Link buying often means that you end up with backlinks plastered all over the Internet often accompanied by content which is completely irrelevant. Do not forget that your ranking in the search engines is becoming increasingly heavily influenced by the content of the websites that link to your own. Paid links represent a completely artificial way of manipulating the search results and, if you use link buying services, there is a high chance that your website will be kicked out of the Google indexes within a matter of months. 3. Link Stuffing Internal links are meant to guide human visitors to other pages on your website which they may be interested in. When used with this intention in mind, internal links are useful if not essential to any user-friendly and easily navigable webpage. However, it is poor practice to have too many of these internal links as it makes your website look over-optimized both to your visitors and to the search engines. Be particularly wary of using drop-down menus and the same anchor text in your internal links. 4. Keyword Stuffing Aside from its use in anchor text, keyword stuffing in the other content of a webpage is also something that many search engine marketers are guilty of. In spite of constant condemnation from Google, many people still seem to believe in things like the myth of keyword density. In reality, however, paying attention to keyword density inevitably leads to over-optimized content of questionable quality. Stuffing your content with keywords will not help to increase your search engine ranking and, these days, it is more likely to get your site penalized. As with your anchor text, diversify your keyword usage and only use them in such a way that they blend in naturally with the rest of the content. 5. Invisible Text Webmasters hoping to manipulate the search results with minimal effort sometimes use invisible text containing a list of keywords and phrases. Using CSS, this text is the same color as its background thus hiding it from human readers while remaining visible to the search engine crawlers. Unbelievably, many webmasters are still using hidden text on their sites in spite of Google have been easily able to uncover this method and remove offending websites from its indexes. 6. Duplicated Content While there is nothing wrong with posting your content for which you own the copyrights across multiple websites, it is important to remember that Google doesn’t like this. Publishing unique content is a must, and this has long been the case in spite of many people still not paying attention to this fact. Worse still, content theft remains a major problem on the Internet with unscrupulous and lazy webmasters stealing content to post on their sites or to use in their marketing campaigns. Google is becoming increasingly better at detecting such sites and those posting stolen content can expect not only to have their website de-indexed but also to have it taken down entirely. Penguin 3.0 One year after the Penguin 2.1 update, Penguin 3.0 has finally arrived. Google recently confirmed that the most recent update to the algorithm started rolling out on Friday, October 17. So what’s different about Penguin 3.0? How do you know if you’ve been affected, and how do you recover if you’ve been hit? Penguin 3.0: What’s New? The new algorithm helps sites that have cleaned up their webspam signals since the last update and demotes sites with newly-discovered spam. Penguin 3.0 is a worldwide update which will be rolled out throughout weeks. It’s aimed at further improving search results by punishing websites that violate Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google has stated that it’s an algorithm change, not merely an update. Most SEO experts predict it will affect a similar number of websites as Penguin 2.0, but the full impact will only be known in the coming months. Google is not in the habit of revealing precise details, but when it has been fully rolled out, we’ll probably receive some form of official announcement. Do You Need to Take Action? If you’ve previously used dubious SEO strategies to improve your search rankings, you will have already been hit by previous Penguin updates. However, if you’ve since taken the appropriate measures to clean up your link profile and publish more relevant, quality website content now is the time to check your rankings and your organic search traffic data. If you’ve noticed any sudden drops in rankings, it’s likely you’ve been affected by Penguin 3.0. There are no quick fixes, but with a little effort, you can recover. You may have to wait until the next algorithm update to see if the changes have made a difference, but it’s still wise to act now. Steps to Recovery If you’ve been affected, it is most likely because of too many unnatural links pointing to your website. You can track down all your inbound links with tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs. So what qualifies as a poor-quality link? Links on article directories and link farms Any paid links, apart from advertisements Irrelevant links posted on forums or social media Too many exact keyword-match anchor text links Once you’ve used one of the above tools to source the origins of your inbound links, you need to contact the relevant webmasters and ask them to remove your links. If they refuse or can’t remove them, you can use Google’s Disavow Tool. The Bottom Line However you’re affected by Penguin 3.0, you need to continue to build better links on more authoritative sites and avoid stuffing your content with too many keywords. This can only be done by producing original, relevant, and high-quality content that people want to link to. If you are unfamiliar with how to compose such content, outsourcing an experienced content writer is an easy and inexpensive alternative. This is the best way to avoid being affected by the Penguin algorithm in the future.