Summary

• Don't overload you'r title with too many keywords
• Did you see a drop in your traffic after 24th April 2012?
• Leave 10 to 20 percent of the website pages un-optimized with short title tags
• Avoid excessive or unstructured internal linking structure

 

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In March, Google’s Matt Cutts announced that the search engine was working on a major algorithm change designed to penalise over-optimized websites. Then, on April 24, as the industry was still recovering from the Panda 3.5 and 3.6 updates, Google launched the Penguin Update, shaking nearly 3 percent of search queries.

 

What is Penguin?

The Penguin update is Google’s latest attempt to track and penalize illicit webspam techniques, such as keyword stuffing, link schemes, cloaking, and many others. Penguin also targets sites that openly violate Google’s quality guidelines.

 

How is it different from the Panda updates?

The Panda algorithm focuses on punishing sites with low-quality content, such as content farms. While Google has always been on the lookout for webspam, the Penguin update is the company’s most advanced weapon against such “black hat” practices.

 

Were you Hit by Penguin?

It depends. If you’ve seen a major drop in your search-related traffic from Google right after April 24, you were most likely affected by Penguin. Life after Penguin Unfortunately, Google hasn’t revealed the specific signals it uses to regulate websites under the new change; however we have a few ideas on the practices that Google considers webspam or over-optimization. In addition to following Google’s quality guidelines, start with fixing any issues brought to your attention by Google either via a message in Google Webmaster Central or an email about spam activity. It’s also possible Google is targeting sites with too many repeated keywords within the anchor text of their links. Avoid this problem by not repeating a keyword more than 20 percent in the anchor text of overall backlinks. Tools such as SEOMoz Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO can be used to find the anchor texts (and their numbers) that are being used on any site. Usually a company's name and/or URL should have the most anchor text links and when a keyword features more, it looks unnatural, or over-optimized. We also believe that Google might be comparing sites for particular keywords and industries. Sites with more links than average might be penalized as over-optimized webspam. Another webspam technique to avoid is creating too many pages featuring keyword rich content, and keyword rich title tags. Try leaving around 10 to 20 percent of the website pages un-optimized with short title tags.

Finally, stay away from an excessive or unstructured internal linking structure. Regardless of whether you were purposively spamming to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines, one thing’s certain: you will need to remove spam from your website if you want to bounce back from the Penguin update.

 

Article by Pierre Zarokian  http://www.submitexpress.com/