(credit: national geographic)
Google Penguin 2.0 Update Background:
May 25 saw the implementation of the long-awaited Google Penguin 2.0 update.
Google started cleaning up the quality of content pulled into their search engine going back to the Panda update in 2011 which targeted low quality websites; ones with duplicate content, thin content, scraped content.
2012 heralded the blackhat spam update, Penguin, targeting those websites which were full of spammy links and redirects, and the ones where users were served pop-ups and pop-unders and redirects to porn websites and websites offering Viagra pills.
Penguin 2.0 update leads on from this, in an aggressive way, detailed below.
What Are The Main Factors?
The Google Penguin update is a fairly standard update that was aimed at reducing the webspam within the Google results. There have however been some highly documented factors that the Google Penguin update specifically targeted.
Google have publicly stated that the update was aimed at reducing web spam techniques utilized by many SEO’s, and the factors above clearly demonstrate that they have tried to attack web spam and low-quality content.
About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice.
What can you do to improve your sites Page Rank post-Penguin if you notice your rank has dropped significantly?
>>Clean up your website. Remove old, duplicate ads, broken links, photos that are too big and load slowly.
>>Check the backlinks you have - do they help or harm your ranking? Use the Google disavow tool to remove backlinks which do not serve you in a positive way.
>>Avoid having too many ads above the fold.
>>Verify your website with Google by using an exact-match domain (for example, make sure you have an email address which matches your domain name, such as info@mydomainname.com from http://www.mydomainname.com) and get verified now.
>>Have a responsive website design: if your site takes a long time to load, revise this to make sure it loads faster. One way to do this is to use CSS to ensure that whichever device a visitor uses to view your website is an optimised experience.
>>Stop using paid links that pass PageRank - you will receive a penalty notice from Google if you continue to use paid links to make your PageRank higher.
These are just some of the Google Penguin 2.0 updates. Even if you do just one of the suggested improvements your PageRank will thank you.
Ruby Binns-Cagney is a successful self-published Author at smashwords.com and at Amazon.com for Kindle.
