Google Penguin is an algorithm established by Google that was intended to decrease search engine rankings for websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and capture excessive spammers.
During the first launch of Penguin, Google announced that changes in the algorithm would lower the rankings of websites that break its guidelines in terms of quality and existing rules. They emphasized that their focus has always been on penalizing webspam, and the new Penguin algorithm update is simply a further step in decreasing webspam and encouraging high-quality, informative, and well-written content.
The latest update, 2.1, has caused extensive damage to some sites while other sites have thrived.
Our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and use white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.
The Top 10
There are several steps that may be taken in order to recover from bad rankings caused by the update and prevent the recurrence of damage during future Penguin updates. Here are the top 10 steps you should know for recovering from the possible penalties and dangers of encountering Google Penguin 2.1.
1. Remove the damaging links and refrain from using them in the future.
2. Remain vigilant to the addition of unnatural links to a site. There is no point in recovery if you do not plan to continue to target the offending links.
3. Links should not be the focus of the articles. A “link building” mentality helps promote spam. Often, fluff links are included that do not link back. Instead, focus efforts on creating superior substantive content that naturally promotes link sharing.
4. Focus your efforts on popularizing existing backlinks. One way to popularize existing backlinks is to feed links with social votes. After the 2.1 updates, users who consistently order social signals on live articles outperform users who used very minimal social signals or none at all.
5. Minimize the number of new links as much as possible over the next 30 days; build rankings slowly.
6. Eliminate the most common sources of spam, e.g.
- Comments in forums with exact match anchor text links
- Biographies of forum users containing exact match anchor text links
- Blogroll spam
- Spammy directories
- Blog comment signature spam
7. Take advantage of the domain operator in the disavow file.
8. Vary your keyword choice from article to article.
9. Pick targeted keywords and then build longer key phrases around them by adding extra words. Submit no more than 2 articles for the same set of combination keywords.
10. Reduce the number of posts for each keyword. It used to be suggested to create 10 articles focused on each group of keywords (using the same anchor keywords 10 times across 10 different articles). You might lessen the impact of the 2.1 update by cutting down the posts to 5-6 for each group of targeted keywords (5 combinations related to their keywords, 5 different sets, and 1 article for each set of keywords).