You may find “Google Penguin” a cute name, but it has since toppled the dominance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) such as black hat SEO and white hat SEO. The differences between these two is that white hat SEO sensationalize web content which can hurt potential and existing clients and marketers whereas black hat SEO focused on familiarizing with Google search tactics with lesser creativity than white hat SEO. Find our what is white, black and gray hat SEO here.
Google Penguin was first introduced on April 24th, 2012. It is designed to crack down and penalize ‘web spam’ such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, deliberate creation of duplicate content and spam link schemes. It is also tracking down to demote websites’ ranking to web pages that do not provide good user experience for online searchers.
Why would Google lower these websites’ ranking?
Imagine that you are in Google’s analytic team. Google makes money by providing relevant and quality information to those who use Google search engines. If the search results are irrelevant and consist of spam links, online searchers will switch to other search engines to find non-spam, accurate or believable information.
These spam links or websites are destroying Google’s reputation because it provides low quality content affecting user experience in searching for what they need. That is why Google has to constantly find alternatives to tackle content providers or online keyword enthusiasts who manipulate the search engine results.
Since the introduction of the world wide web, webmasters have been experimenting to bring their websites to rank higher on search engines based on targeted keywords. These are what they found to be working previously;
1) Linking from other websites even if they are not related or relevant to their website.
The content in these sites are usually not of high quality and have not done any test or research in the content. As long as it passes the criteria for Page Rank, the website succeeded to go up the ranks.
2) Same anchor text is being used to link back to the same web page URL. It can be done via internal linking (less weight) and external linking (more weight).
It has been known to be effective to use texts that best describe the page you are linking to. Usually they would also include keyword research to find out if there is any search volume and use the keyword term that has the highest search volume as an anchor text.
3) Buy links from sites that have high Page Ranks, and linking them back to their website. When a new website links to a high-ranking website, it will pass part of the Page Rank “status” to the new site. Page Rank is one of the factors that determine the authority of the website too.
Since the induction of Google Penguin, most of the SEO and page ranking concepts previously applied have no effect nowadays.
How to Win Google Penguin for your website ranking?
To those who have been hit by Google Penguin and may be doing black hat SEO, here is how you can recover and prevent from Google Penguin attack;
a) Remove any spam on your site immediately!
b) Create more high quality, creative content and replacing the low quality or rewrite content on your web pages.
c) Make sure that you review all your internal and external text links;
– Anchor text links MUST be diversed because it does not look natural if the same text links go to different website pages. Read more on “How to do Internal Linking Correctly“.
How to find out if you have been hit by Google Penguin?
i) I would suggest that you take a look at your Google analytics or other analytics services. Check according to the dates of the Google Penguin updates below. If you find out that your traffic amount is reduced after these dates, then your website is most probably hit by Google Penguin.
ii) Check with Google Webmaster tools (you must install it first before the Penguin attack) if they send you any notification.
iii) Continue to revise and refine your on-page SEO using Google Analytics and WebMaster Tools to improve your website.
Google Penguin Updates
1) 24th April 2012
2) 24th May 2012
3) 5th October 2012
4) 22nd May 2013 (latest, read Matt Cutts post on Google Penguin 2.0 here)
See video below by Matt Cutts where he shared what the new coming Penguin can do. Expect on new updates about Google Penguin 2.0 from Ascelade’s point of view.
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