With the boom of the Internet, many business owners and corporations have seen its potential as a powerful means of marketing and advertising. That is why majority, if not all, companies now have their own website to promote and showcase their different products and services.
But website owners know that it is not just important that they established a website. For a website to be considered successful, it should have a high ranking that it will always appear at the first few pages of search engine results pages (SERPs) of popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and more. For this reasons, companies employ the help of SEO experts to implement strategies that will improve the site’s SEO and ranking.
Some of these strategies include:
- White hat link building. Site owners find reliable and good quality sites where they can get backlinks. They can get backlinks by submitting guest posts to other sites in exchange of a link to their website, commenting to sites with good page rank that is related to the website’s niche and more.
- Content Marketing strategy. This is done by publishing keyword rich and good quality content on the website while observing the right keyword density
- Social Media Campaign. Website owners should not also dismiss the power of social media as a great tool for their Internet marketing. Links generated from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and more every time a site is mentioned is being considered by search engines as a valid backlink which can help a site get index faster and thus can improve a site’s ranking.
These are just some of the tools being tapped by SEO experts to improve a site’s statistics but continuous research must be done because search engines are constantly changing their algorithms in determining a site’s ranking. In fact, the search engine giant Google has launched a new metrics in determining a site’s positioning in the SERP and they call it Google Penguin.
What is Google Penguin? How does it affect a site’s ranking and what must site owners do if ever their site got penalized because of this new algorithm?
Google Penguin algorithm was launched last April 2012 and it aims to fight black-hat link building techniques being used by some website to increase their page ranking. It has affected 3.1% of the websites and it penalized spammy sites by removing them from search engine results or decreasing their page ranking.
Here are some of the most noticeable metrics that Google Penguin checks in a website:
- The new algorithm removes from SERPs, websites that has poorly written and copied content.
- It penalizes sites that use unethical SEO practices like unnatural outbound links, viral link building, link farm and the like.
- Google Penguin also drops ranking of sites that have over-optimized anchor text and contain links that are not relevant to the site.
- Keyword stuffing is also another bad SEO practice that Google Penguin monitors, where a site includes a lot of keywords in the website, in the title tags, alt attributes and the like to improve rankings.
If you are one of the 3.1% of the websites that got hit by the new algorithm, what must you do now to recover from the Penguin update?
- Use only white hat techniques for your link building strategy. Eliminate inferior links from the website and get backlinks only from good sites that are relevant to the niche of the blog.
- Use diverse keywords as anchor texts for your quality backlinks.
- Continue writing quality content for your website and avoid over-choking the articles with keywords. Observe proper keyword density and make sure that you only use keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche.
- Write interesting articles that are relevant to the users and will provide additional knowledge and information.
The Google Penguin update has made many SEO experts think differently with how they do their SEO campaigns. It has start a new era in the SEO field that makes companies re-think how they manage their websites.
But the bottom line is that companies have no reason to worry if they have been using ethical practices in improving their site’s ranking. As long as they only uses acceptable SEO tactics, then the Penguin will have no reason to remove their site from SERP.
Author’s Bio:
Abie is a freelance blogger and article writer and her current project is for a website where you can find reviews for the book, Sold Out After Crisis. This is a survival guide where you can get information about emergency survival food and the skills you will need to survive disaster.
