Penguin 3.0 And How It Can Impact On Your Website
October 17 saw the release of the latest update to the Google algorithm which has a direct impact on the way in which your website is indexed by the search engine giants. As with every update there is a certain sense of trepidation for website owners as you never know what it is going to do to your website with some people winning and being pushed up the rankings whilst others plummet down the pages in an instant. How it affects you depends on various things that you have done with your search engine optimization, so it is useful to know what their plans are for this update to see if you will be a winner or loser.
Penguin 3.0 is not even a major upgrade, well it is major compared to recent upgrades that have been a bit of a damp squib, and it mainly follows along the same lines as the initial Penguin update which targeted the use of spam and spam sites. The idea here is to allow genuine sites to flourish with real links rather than being swamped by those that use link farms just to play the numbers game and to artificially enhance their ranking. These websites will often have poorer quality information and be of less use as they will tend to focus on earning money through advertising or other means with genuine websites suffering and scrambling around for the scraps that are left.
However, this targeting of spammy links started last year and there were certainly a lot of complaints by website owners that they spent a lot of time trying to clean up their sites, and links, only to not really be rewarded by any major change in their ranking. Google have apparently realized that this is an issue and have directly addressed it here with 3.0, so websites that have indeed cleaned up their previously poor links can now see that their websites have indeed improved their ranking rather than still languishing down those results pages.
The problem here is that this update is gradually being rolled out over a number of weeks, so it may be some time before website owners see any difference in their positioning and that does leave people trying to second guess Google and what the outcome may be. It can easily be the case that some owners will believe that their websites are fine as nothing has happened only to discover in a couple of weeks time that they have dropped down the pages and this can be due to just a handful of bad links associated with their website. On the flip side, people may suddenly discover that they have moved up the results pages quite considerably even though they have done nothing, but then the chances are that they have either done a clean up earlier or they never had bad links in the first place and are being rewarded as others are being punished.
What does Penguin 3.0 mean for your website?
What this update basically means is that you need to pay close attention to the links and to make sure that your website is not seen as being spammy in any way, shape, or form. Clearly you are better off using a company that is established in the SEO world and who is capable of producing results that do not contravene the rules and regulations as set out by Google. The websites that have been hit hard by Penguin 3.0 are mainly those that used either black hat techniques, which are completely illegal, or gray hat techniques whereby they pushed the laws but did not break them, until now.
It makes more sense from a business, and long term, point of view for you to think of SEO as being something that has to be developed over time rather than an instant fix. Companies that used spam link farms to boost websites were looking for a short term fix that may very well have worked before, but now will only lead to your website being subjected to penalties that will basically force your website into oblivion. Do you really want to wake up and see your hard work marketing that website having been destroyed while you sleep just because a company used the wrong links?
What you need to do is to hire a company that are experts at search engine optimization who will look at the work that has already been done on your website, including looking at the links, and then take appropriate action immediately to make sure that you survive not only this update, but any future ones as well. It is certainly well worth taking the financial hit now to get your SEO sorted out to prevent any future issues than just hoping that you will somehow squeeze through an update without being hit as Google does not make mistakes like that.
Do both yourself and your website a favor and give us a call on 815-468-1524 in order to arrange an appointment for one of our team to discuss your needs and to assess your website. Everything will be explained in crystal clear fashion allowing you to see what has to be done to your site to make sure that it can blossom and grow rather than you living in fear of it vanishing from sight in an instant.
