Google Penguin update was released on April 24 and since then I have been approached by few people saying their site traffic has been hit badly.
I always wondered, what could they have done and the first thing I go about asking is – were they spamming. Quite obviously no one said yes, but a quick glance at their activities and a look at their site will convince you, they may actually be doing it, maybe not intentionally.
Nothing in my opinion beats building organic traffic – writing original content, avoid link stuffing, getting better on social media, etc because sooner or later, Google will catchup with your techniques and always remember, they have better mind than yours. So NEVER CHEAT Google!
Hence, this week, I decided to give you a quick intro to what the Penguin Update is, what you should do to if you’re hit and what to take care.
Top 5 Posts on Google Penguin Update
1. First up, it’s Matt Cutts telling us about Google Penguin in this video
The point to note is, if you’re doing paid reviews, make sure that is disclosed and than there is few other tidbits on link spamming. So avoid doing it!
2. Coming second, this post by Saurabh Sharma talks about few points to avoid being hit by Penguin 2.0 update. Quite notably, he talks about the importance of Social Media. Undoubtedly, it is one of the most important medium to spread content and engaging.
3. Also, Shira Gal has some great tips on avoiding the Google Penguin penalty in this post. I agree with her on usage of multiple content types – Image and Multimedia to build your traffic. It does help in reducing the bounce rate of your site and getting users glued for a while. Great tips!!
4. This post by Pamela Vaughan gives us the lowdown on what to do if your site has been hit with the Penguin Update. And like each update, the stress on keyword stuffing is quite obvious. Add to that hidden links and cloaking. Her message, avoid doing those and you’re back to being the best online. Also, get the Authorship of your content.
5. Finally, here’s an humorous take on the entire Penguin Update by Barry Gibson. But then there are subtle messages on why the sites got penalized.
So that is it for this week!
Your Turn
1. Is your site hit with Google Penguin Update?
2. What steps do you recommend to recover, if anyone has been hit?
It seems the overriding message for Penguin is to Keep it real. Good advice for everything, actually.
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Yes and the key message is – do not try to fool Google.
Here’s our side of the story: http://www.fulltraffic.net/blog/85057/black-hat-still-winning-after-penguin-20/
Hey, this is a great point!! Am keen to know more.
But I guess, the people in Black Hat business will always have techniques to circumvent whatever Google does. On part of Google, at least they are striving to make it’s algos perform better if not the best.
The weirdest part is that we (all) continue to use Google as our primary search engine while we (all) know that it is manipulable. I did all the research for those articles using other engines too, like bing, duckduckgo, etc, and none show the same amount of spam in the 1st page. 1 or 2 spammy tops, while google shows over 5!
Or try and succeed?
Wow!! But like you say, we all Google for stuff and do not ‘search’ it.
And also, since others are less used, people do not try to manipulate them.
Yes, like always!
Or perhaps some of them are actually better with spam. Take yandex for example, they have a zero tolerance over spam, that’s why duckduckgo offers way better results, they work with yandexs’ results! I have even set duckduckgo as my default engine, but I still need to focus on Google because there’s where our customers are…
Maybe even Google needs a little bit of spammers so that they are a place for everyone. See that it earn $$ even from them. More the options, it’s merrier for Google
Until they outrank the good ones, people realize that they are not getting what they were looking for and bam, change. Hope that’s soon! Either that or Google fixes their issues fast so “regular people” can’t notice.
‘Regular People’ just do not notice and they might not even bother to search of other platforms. We live in such a fast paced world, people will just pick up what Google serves. Bing, other will have to offer something more to pull the crowd back. What that ‘something’ is needs to be seen.
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