Penguins & Pandas: The Black and White World of SEO
Last year’s Panda update left webmasters around the globe flapping as they saw their traffic plummet with no idea why. A little investigation and some points in the right direction from Google highlighted that the issue was likely down to duplicate to low quality content and sites could no longer rely on spammy content tactics to gain rankings and traffic.
Now a second black and white critter has struck, this time hitting the spammier link building tactics out there, such as link building on networks, over optimised anchor text profiles and links in sidebars. This update has been named Penguinby Google’s finest and has once again got webmasters chasing their tails having seen drops in rankings and traffic.
Why Would You Suffer the Wrath of the Penguin?
The Penguin Update was originally named the ‘webspam update’, and was an effort by Google to remove sites from the search results that were using spammy tactics, both on and off page. It struck on the 24th/25th April, so if you saw a traffic drop around then it’s more than likely it’s affected you. The key things which seemed to have been targeted are:
- Aggressive anchor text approaches
- Link schemes
- Article marketing and comment spam
- Keyword Stuffing
- Cloaking
If you or your SEO company have participated in this kind of activity at any point in the past then you may be at risk and need to look at correcting any of those legacy issues. You’ll be able to establish whether it’s the Penguin that got you, as your graph will look like the one below, with a drop around 24th/25th April:
Penguin Recovery Options
If you saw your rankings or traffic drop around 24th/25th then there are some particular things you should be looking at:
- Correct Spammy On Site Problems: over optimised internal anchor text, duplication, keyword stuffing and dodgy outbound links should all be removed.
- Analyse your Link Profile: go through the links pointing to your site with a fine toothcomb and categorise them into the good, the bad and the ugly.
- Assess Your Anchor Text: over optimised anchor text profiles can suffer from the Penguin bite, so if you have a lot of links pointing to ‘exact match’, keyword rich anchor text then you need to change tack and try to update/remove those links.
- Remove Bad Links: any links coming from sites in bad neighbourhoods should be removed as soon as possible
- Remove Sitewide Links: sitewide links (or ‘blogroll’ links) seem to have been hit by Penguin, particularly those using keyword anchor text. If you have a lot of these in your profile, you should try and get them removed or updated to a more branded anchor text.
All in all, the Penguin update has targeted what it perceives to be spammy websites. If you’ve suffered, you need to do a thorough analysis of your site and its links and evaluate where the issue lies. The update is an algorithmic one, so if you have been hit you’ll need to undo whatever factors have taken you over the ‘tipping point’, a reconsideration request won’t have any effect on this one.
It reinforces the importance of doing good quality, white hat SEO which can provide you with a sustainable, longer lasting result. Google are steadily phasing out the sites successfully gaming the search results, and sooner rather than later you won’t be able to cut any corners.
If you’d like any advice on how to recover from the impact of the Penguin Update, or would like some guidance on your SEO activity then feel free to get in touch or complete the form on the right hand side of the page.