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What is Google Penguin?

Thursday, August 23rd, 2012

 

The Land of the Penguin, Everything is Black and White

 

Over the past year or so, Google has pushed some major changes in the form of an algorithmic update called Penguin (and just before it, another called Panda) that had a pretty single-minded purpose; to draw a line in the sand and call everything on the wrong side of the line ‘black’. Penguin actually changed almost nothing about the rules of good website marketing (though Panda did) — Penguin’s (very nearly) single purpose was to punish specific kinds of link-building behavior.
 

Google refers to the links it punishes as “questionable”. According to the law of the Penguin, a “questionable” link is one that:

  • Has anchor text that is an exact match to the anchor text in the majority of your incoming links, particularly if the content that is linking is low-quality content.
  • The link comes from an auto-approve, non-moderated blog — again, particularly if the content on that blog is of lower-than-average quality.
  • OR, the link comes from a web site that has a significant number of outgoing links and no real traffic to speak of. (BuildMyRank, anyone? BuildMyRank deindexed)

 

These things seem relatively banal and minor, but if you’re a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) wonk, you’re already wincing. You can see between the lines that most links that may have been the SEO-baseline before Penguin are now out:

 

  • Autoblogs? Nope.
  • Site directories that few people use (i.e. a lot of them)?  Useless.
  • Even ubiquitous SEO toolbox items like optimizing for a specific keyword on each page got hit
    • now you must spread your keywords around on every page or you’re flirting with the Google sandbox.

 

Paradigm Shift

 

The result of the Panda / Penguin double-punch has been profound across the field of SEO. It’s no longer about ranking as high as you can, as quickly as you can. It’s not even about deep research into your competitor’s backlink structure so that you can out-backlink them in an Olympic-style speed-back-linking event.  (If you did SEO… Read the rest

SEO before Penguin: The Glory Days

Monday, August 6th, 2012

seo google penguin SEO before Penguin: The Glory Days
Not that long ago, it wasn’t all that difficult to optimize a website for a search engine. Before there was Penguin or Panda, there was color. Or rather, there were shades of gray – areas that weren’t quite white-hat but weren’t black-hat enough for Google to penalize you for using them.

SEO wasn’t easy, per se, but it was easier.

The rules were more simple:

  • Post decent content.
  • Optimize your content for high-traffic, low-competition keywords with selling connotations.
  • Don’t use obvious black-hat techniques like link-bombing.
  • Build backlinks to your website. The more the better.
  • Pack your keywords as dense as Google will let you (about 2% for most niches).

There were obviously details for each of these rules, but by and large, you could become an ‘SEO expert’ in a matter of weeks if you dedicated yourself to learning them. It might take a while to actually optimize a website, but it could actually be done by a single person working just a little overtime full time for a few weeks.

The most difficult parts of ‘old style’ SEO were producing content, some folks even outsourcing to writers off shore, like in India and the Philippines that spoke (or rather wrote) English just well enough to get Google to understand what they intended their topic to be.  You could outsource an article overseas, and while with most of this content any English-speaking human that read it would laugh and click away, the search engine spiders didn’t mind the off syntax, so it worked.

Link-building was largely a matter of using automated systems that could mass-produce backlinks for you and hiring more outsourced link-builders to create those links that couldn’t be automated. SEO companies in the US often did the ‘hard’ work of producing quality content – the pieces that you expected people to read and that you put your company logo on – while they outsourced other content.

Then along came Penguin and before that its older brother Panda, and everything changed.  Since we’re going to focus specifically on the Penguin update next week, let’s do a little bit of ‘in-between’; the… Read the rest


 
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