If your site was not hit by the recent Google penguin update, then it doesn’t mean you’re completely safe.
Remember the Penguin is still around and will always come back with more updates!
In 2011, it was the panda update that was aimed at upping the quality of content being served to searchers. Then in April 2012 came the penguin update that wants us to watch our backlinks and the kind of seo neighborhoods we trod on.
There’s no doubt that when it comes to search engines, Google rules.
That’s why it’s able to make seo experts lose sleep with only a single algorithm update.
Google has steadily been flexing its muscles in the seo arena, and when it does, we all have to pay attention.
Now, if you’re not very familiar with seo and how these search engines work, the penguin update may just frustrate you in your efforts to rank in organic listings and quickly grab those precious targeted customers. In this article you’ll find tips to help you stay in Google good books even after the latest Google penguin update.
Watch your backlinks
With the Google penguin update, we have to be careful when choosing our backlink strategies like never before. Watch out who is linking to you and ensure you only get links from trusted high quality content.
If you hire an seo company then, ask them where they plan to get backlinks for your site. Similar, if you join link networks be careful with whom you are exchanging links with. Google wants us to choose good seo friends.
Avoid bad links coming from auto-approve non-moderated websites, forums or blogs. Also stay away from those questionable link schemes.
There’re tools out there that can help you check which people are linking to you. One search tool is backlinkwatch
Produce sociable content
By sociable content I mean content that entices other people to share with their buddies on social media sites like google+ or twitter.
Google is looking for social signals and it’s using them to rank your content. That means the more people share your content the higher google will rank it in its search results.
Google thinks content which is easily shared by a lot of different people is naturally useful and so wants to present it to even more people by ranking it higher. Know your audience and give them content they’ll enjoy.
Google wants us to be more social and engage. They want us to leave comments on other people’s blogs, share content we find cool and also link out to useful content.
So if you find this article useful then don’t forget below to share with your buddies.
Stop over-optimizing
Many sites were hit by the Google penguin update because of over-optimization. It’s quite intriguing because Google has always encouraged us to do seo so that their spiders can easily crawl our content! We were all taught to make sure that our websites and blogs are perfectly optimized for the search engines. So what’s up!
Apparently, that has led to people engaging in all sorts of practices they deemed fit for seo and actually overdoing it. That’s over-optimization, and Google actually frowns upon that.
One such practice is using the same exact anchor text in all your backlinks. For example, if I want to rank my article on “premium wordpress themes”, I would ensure that all the backlinks leading to that article are anchored with the phrase “premium wordpress themes”. Google doesn’t want that!
I would also ensure that phrase appears almost all over on my article. Ah! Ah! Google doesn’t also want that! That’s actually keyword stuffing.
High Quality content still rules
Google is the biggest advocate of high quality content. If Google is trying to fight over-optimization, then it actually wants us to direct our energies on producing content that adds value. It doesn’t want us to go crazy on seo, forgetting to churn out masterpieces.
Remember Google profits by serving quality information to its users (the searchers). It will therefore continue rolling out subsequent updates to protect the credibility of its search results.
If we produce high quality content that information seekers find useful then Google smiles on that and thus ranks us higher. The Penguin is the hungriest in the Google animal kingdom. And it’s hungry for fresher, top of the notch content. Also remember the penguin isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Did you know that Google takes into account the ratio of no real on-site activity by any visitors compared to inbound links? That means that you might have thousands of links to your blog, but they’ll count for nothing if visitors actually do nothing once there. You can avoid this scenario by creating good content for your visitors.
Let’s keep producing high quality content!
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