SEO Wars: Episode V – Google Penguin Update Strikes Back!
Uh-OHHHHH, one of the engineers over at Google didn’t get pre-screening tickets to the Avengers and hit the ‘Destroy Everything’ button in the GooglePlex.
Ok, what the heck is going on?
Unless you’re just about to reach level 80 in Call of Duty and haven’t left your basement in a few weeks, I’m sure you’ve heard about Google’s new kick off, kick butt update called ‘Penguin’. Basically Google is on a search and destroy mission – seeking out websites that are up to no good. The scary thing is, it appears that Google doesn’t really care if the results in their search engine took a turn for the worse (at least for the time being) – they just want to prove who’s boss and make sure that everyone is playing by their rules.
Some areas that the Google Penguin update are monitoring, and ultimately penalizing websites for include the following:
- Cloaking
- Keyword Stuffing & Over Optimization
- Associations with Link Farms
- Junk and/or Duplicate Content
- Heavy use of Anchor Text
I was affected by the Penguin update – Is there hope for me?
Fear not my friends! All is not lost as the big “G” is giving you a chance to redeem yourself. For starters, play nice, clean up your site and pray to the Google Gods. Chances are, they will re-evaluate your situation. Keep in mind that anyone who has been penalized by the update has a chance for their site to get re-indexed and ultimately obtain their old rankings back. Here’s what Matt Cutts (head of Google Web Spam) had to say about this:
“If your site is affected by an algorithm, for the most part if you change your site whatever the characteristics are that are flagging or triggering or causing us to think that you might have keyword stuffing or whatever, if you change your site, then after we’ve re-crawled and re-indexed the page, and some period after that after when we’ve re-processed that in our algorithms, for the most part, your site should be able to pop back up or increase in its rankings.
Soooooo …. basically Matt – you’re telling us there’s a chance. Well, you know what they say, “50% of the time it works every time” so why not take a chance eh?
Anyway, to finish off. We all knew this day was coming. The era of crappy websites and shady SEO tactics are coming to a close. If you think that thin content and back links from herbal remedy websites will get you the results you want, I’m afraid your mistaken.