Photo by Robin
When Search Engine powerhouse Google releases a new update (i.e. Google Penguin), the IT world goes mad.
The equivalent of celebrity spotting for Hollywood fans, Google’s releases spawn a whole host of conversations such as what name the update will have, what significance it will hold, and who came up with the new development for improving search engine returns and reducing spam.
For most of us, though, the name and inside leg measurement of the Google developer who brought the update about isn’t very important.
Beyond puzzling why Google’s updates seem to be named after animals.
We’ve had the Panda update, which launched in 2011, and was an algorithm designed to filter low quality content from its top search returns.
Now, we have been informed that Google have developed this capability even further, with a new update called ‘Penguin’.
Google Penguin. Right. Let’s ignore the name, and work out exactly what this means for us as website owners.
The implications of Google’s Penguin algorithm
Put simply, Google Penguin has been launched to help filter out rubbish content from proper, informative websites.
So while loads of companies for the past few years have been selling services to spin second-rate articles for us, for peanuts, in a bid to attract higher rankings by swamping keywords, Google has finally realised that this isn’t helpful in the constant battle to work out which sites are useful, and which aren’t.
Before Google tightened up their search algorithm, online businesses could pay thousands every month to have 200-word articles produced and published that took simple keywords and spun them in to oblivion.
While a real person looking online wouldn’t gain any benefit from these articles, they did serve to make the sites pass through Google’s automated ranking mechanism and manage to look like valid content – thereby pushing the site up the rankings and achieving a higher position on the front page of Google.
Penguin has been developed to stop this from happening, which is brilliant news for normal business owners like you and me.
Penguin now recognises that a few quality pages of great content on a site is more valuable to real people than thousands of similar news articles spun to hammer keywords.
So, what are the implications of Google Penguin, and what do we need to do?
For most of us, working well with Penguin in place is a no-brainer.
If we have sites that are tight, informative, and well laid out with useful content, we don’t have any action to take to make sure that Google recognises our site and returns it.
On the other hand, if there is any repetitive, obsolete, spun or pointless information in amongst our blog articles and static pages, it’s definitely time to weed it out in favour of updates that will really bring unique and helpful content to our customers.
Anything that’s just taking up space and not driving traffic to your site can be got rid of.
For Google now, a few pages of top-quality original material will be acknowledged more favourably than a site full of second-rate, spun pages of content.
Making sure we keep the Google Penguin happy
So for perfect optimisation now, we need to carry on doing what we have always done as committed website / blog owners.
Use our keywords carefully.
Write enticing headings.
(Please read that last sentence again – do you really write enticing headings?)
Write original content, updating our sites with choice information that will help our customers get what they want as naturally and easily as possible.
Be consistent, blog regularly, and make sure everything we publish is original and informative.
Job done!
The one thing that penguins (at least Google’s Penguin), and our website / blog have in common is that we’re all looking to provide value online.
And the great news is, we don’t need to pay a spinner or link builder thousands to get our site recognised as the informative, valuable and authoritative resource it is, for our customers.
Have you been hit by Google’s Penguin?
Please share your views in the comments below.
Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
I think many of the criticisms of the Google Penguin update come about when legitimate sites get hit by it. For example, a few years ago article marketing and press releases were legitimate ways of building links, nowadays they are more grey hat. So if you have an older site you can suddenly find it getting caught up in a Penguin update.
My view is that ideally Google should simply discount links that they don’t like but I guess they do have difficulty identifying them which is why they hand out penalties from time to time.