What Does Googles New Update: Google Penguin! Mean To You?
What does it mean when Google makes an update? Beside the fact that it comes with a spiffy name Panda, Vince, Caffeine, or Google Penguin. It means that they change the importance of different SEO building functions.
The mantra with Google Penguin seems to be: The Over Optimization Penalty. Or to put a positive spin on it… The Properly Optimized Reward. Let’s take a closer look at what this means. And what it means for you, your website and your Google rankings.
Over Optimization Penalty
SEO as you probably know stands for Search Engine Optimization. The idea that you can “Optimize” your site so that it ranks higher on the search engines, this holds true for Bing and Yahoo as well as Google. There are many things that you can do to Optimize your website. Some of them are Honest, Moral, White Hat, or Google Webmaster Guideline driven. Some of them are Dishonest, Amoral, Black Hat, or disregard the Webmaster Guidelines. Google Penguin, as well as Google Panda, were released to weed out the Black Hat SEO tricks.
Penguin was specifically released to weed out sites that are over optimized.
For Example:
| Link Building(the Art of getting HyperLinks or Hot Links on the Internet that link to your website) is commonly accepted as a good way to increase your Google Search Rankings. So that means that the more Links you get to your website the higher your rankings will be… Right? That used to be true but not anymore. |
While Google admits that having links to your site from other sites on the Internet does signify a sense of Authority and implies that your site must be good quality, if another site wants to reference you as a link on their site… However,
−> Google Webmaster Guidelines States:
- Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
- Examples of link schemes can include:
- Links intended to manipulate PageRank
- Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
- Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
- Buying or selling links that pass PageRank
In this example “Over Optimization” does not detract from the value of having Links to your site, but rather using “Schemes” to build links.
White Hat Search Engine Optimization
““White hat” search engine optimizers often improve the usability of a site, help create great content, or make sites faster, which is good for both users and search engines. Good search engine optimization can also mean good marketing: thinking about creative ways to make a site more compelling, which can help with search engines as well as social media. The net result of making a great site is often greater awareness of that site on the web, which can translate into more people linking to or visiting a site.” (Google Inside Search)
Meaning there are many things that you or a 3rd party vendor can do to increase your SEO on your site. But be careful not to abuse them.
Penguin Areas of Focus
- Spammy Link Building
- As covered above
- Lack of quality content
- Adding text to your site that is “Designed” to rank you on Google, rather than just writing good content that your readers would enjoy.
- Keyword stuffing
- Adding Keywords to your content just to increase your keyword density and rank higher.
- Hiding Text
- The act of trying to make your site “readable” and still keyword stuff by making the keyword text white on a white background.
Bottom Line
If you are designing your website or blog to be a good resource for potential clients, subscribers, and readers than you will not even notice the Google Penguin update as it applies to your site.
If you are building your site with the sole intention of it ranking high on the Google Search Engine, it is possible that your site will get penalized! Act accordingly.
This is good news for anyone that was hit by the Penguin. When Google makes updates like this it can hit webmasters like a ton of bricks, but it’s also good to see that they are offering some suggestions as to how to recover, and that like Panda, the Penguin updates should be able to show you if you’re in compliance or not with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.