Google has been busy lately! We just talked about how Hummingbird launched, marking one of the biggest algorithm changes for the search engine in ten years. Now, we’re going to talk about Penguin 2.1, a update to the webspam monitoring side of things that affects about 1% of search results and allows users to find even more streamlined results when they search for something.
The latest Penguin update affects SEO in a number of ways, so if you specialize in managing websites and optimization efforts, you need to pay attention. Current knowledge indicates that Penguin targets the same things that its predecessor did. It’s just more in depth and goes into more detail when weeding out sites that violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. In particular, this update targets low quality and spammy links primarily. It also punishes sites with paid links that aren’t marked as nofollow.
Any SEO tactic that could be considered “black hat” is also the target of this update, so no shady business! You won’t be able to get away with it. Posting on forums and blog comments excessively without contributing anything worthwhile can also get you penalized, especially if you consistently use the same keywords in your links in the signature area. These attempts at getting backlinks aren’t effective and will see your site drop in rank thanks to this update.
Backlinks in excessive numbers coming from one site via site wide links will also result in your site being punished. If you notice this happening to you, contact the site who is linking to you in this way and ask that they remove the repetitive links and only keep one. Other backlinking problems that send up red flags through Penguin 2.1 include widget links and link exchanges. All of these tactics can negatively impact SEO in a major way. So why not play it on the safe side and just avoid them altogether? You’re not going to get away with them. And Google penalties can be very difficult to recover from so why go through all the hassle?
It’s a much better idea to follow the quality guidelines Google has created. They tell you what you need to do to optimize a site in a way that they will recognize and uphold. So why not actually do what they tell you to? You’ll save a lot of headache later on and actually see your SEO efforts work for the long haul.
[schema type=”review” url=”https://www.affordableseofl.com/” name=”What is Google Penguin 2.1 and How to Deal With It” description=”Google has been busy lately! We just talked about how Hummingbird launched, marking one of the biggest algorithm changes for the search engine in ten years” rev_name=”Google Penguin 2.1″ author=”Affordable SEO Tampa FL” pubdate=”2013-10-15″ ]