Most recently on April 24th Google announced a new update to its search algorithm called “The Penguin Update”. Here is what Google said,
“We’re launching an important algorithm change targeted at webspam. The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality guidelines. This algorithm represents another step in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content”.
The search update is not something that should worry legitimate SEO Firms but it does warrant concern for all those black hat SEO agencies and consultants who use automation and link schemes as a way to acquire a high ranking within Google. In fact the penguin update should come as a relief to website owners everywhere who have rightfully invested their precious time and energy into updating their website consistently with relevant and meaningful content.
Google’s Penguin Goes Into Hibernation
Google wants to provide the most relevant and meaningful websites to their users for any given search. The problem is that with black hat SEO comes link schemes, automation softwares, auto blogging systems, and beyond which make Google’s job of evaluating the quality of a website more difficult. Google must sort through thousands among thousands of poor websites to find the good ones that deserve a high ranking. So how can you ensure that Google finds your website to be of a high quality?
1). Create high quality and relevant information via a blog several times a week: When you produce high quality content for your website visitors first then Google will reward you with positioning in their “Current News SERPs” as well as with a higher website ranking overall.
2). Do not participate in black hat SEO techniques which include link wheels, link schemes, or automation of any kind: The Panda feeds on link wheels and poor website content. As long as you don’t feed the Panda it shouldn’t bother or attack you.
3). Check your website for misspelled words, punctuation, and grammar: You don’t have to be a grammar expert by any means but double checking content on your site for grammatical errors is advised. Just have the intern do it.
4). Target only 2-3 keywords per unique URL: URL mapping is an SEO strategy in which you target specific keywords per a specific page of your website. The strategy is that it is much easier to have one URL become the dominate page for 1-3 keywords rather than the dominate page for 5-10 keywords. By targeting only 2-3 keywords per page you will find the content on your website to be of a much greater quality merely because you are not keyword stuffing.
5). Interlink pages of your website with one another when a visitor has something to gain from traveling to another page: When the opportunity presents itself to hyperlink a keywords phrase to another page of your website for the purpose of providing more answers and valuable content to your visitor then do so.
As long as you continue to work by legitimate means on your website then search engines including Google will reward you with higher keyword rank positions. To send the Panda update packing for a long winter simply continue to produce quality content on your website.