A Guide About The Google Penguin Update
Since the Panda update in February 2011, Google rolled out one of its most talked about algorithmic changes on the 24th April. Because it impacted so many websites, it has been talked about so much, especially since it caused many to lose rankings and in the process, most of their web traffic.
Needless to say, this can be catastrophic for most businesses that heavily relies on traffic referrals from Google. What exactly was the “Penguin update” and were so many websites affected?
To find information, most of us use Google in some way or another and it is Google’s job as the leading search engine to make sure that the results that it produces are relevant and of a high quality. Maintaining faith in Google and continuing to use the service are the users in that way. Webmasters that were over optimising their websites, building spammy back links and generally abusing the Google guidelines in order to rank better within the organic search results is what the latest update was said to target. To make sure that sites that over the years had been gaming the system somewhat, would be penalised by the algorithmic filter and demoted in the search results is the reason that Penguin was implemented. The 3.1% of search queries which was said to be affected by the update, considering that Google receives hundreds of millions of search queries every day, it means that it equates to millions of websites being penalised.
The Penguin update is not a manual penalty which is worth noting, where a human has followed say a spam report and taken action. Based on certain criteria which assesses whether or not a site has been over optimised or been building spammy back links, the Penguin update is an algorithmic update which filters out sites.
Just after the 24th April, if you lost pretty much all of your websites traffic from Google then it is pretty likely that you were hit by it. Sites appear to retain their page rank and continue to be crawled and indexed which is one thing that is noticeable. It could be that these sites have now been devalued meaning that the links that were pointing to your site previously have also been devalued if you obtained many low quality links or paid links. A penalty is what this can appear to be but in fact is purely a natural drop in rankings due to a devaluation of those incoming links.
The future of marketing of your site, for us, is clear. You will need to start adopting a different approach to your online marketing if you have been affected by the Penguin update.
Cited reference: best site
