Google Penguin Updated, What Do we Do Now?

If you were observant, you would have noticed what the picture of this post portray. You can see how ready the robots are to hurt any web spamming or over optimization. 

Recently, Google updated the penguin/panda to hunt down websites that spam to gain search engine recognition. In fact, the latest update was made to hunt over optimization. The question then comes in “What do I do now?”. Well, the truth is you can’t spam or buy your way to the top no more. Keyword stuffing, excessive use of heading and subheading tags, aggressive link building and the likes will hurt your rankings with no mercy. 

During the penguin update, Matt Cutt stated, “We don’t need to bother much about keyword phrases as we have integrated a system to do a lot of synonym work so that we can find good pages that don’t happen to use the same words as the user typed.”

“A lot of People do too much [i.e. excessive use of meta tags and headings that are keyword dense] to the extent that we regard it as keyword stuffing, and it hurts. I just want to ensure you do it in normal ways where regular people aren’t going to find it stiff or artificial. That tends to be what works best.”

You can watch this video to see how Matt Cutt explains how search engine robots crawl webpages to fish out search query ~

                  

If you were smart, you’d have noticed that what this means is that many of the search engine optimization tips we find online are now outdated. Even a site as big as WPMU.org (which was formally a PR7 site) was hit by the recent penguin update. So if a site as big as this could make SEO mistakes, we really need to pay attention to these updates to feel safe from these deadly robots? The question then arises, “How then can one promote a website without being labeled spam”. Well, gone are the days where you use keyword density in headings, images, and links as they would now be considered spamming in the eyes of Google.  You will have to work smarter now to gain any link juice. This simply means that;

1.       You don’t need to concentrate too much on certain keywords. Playing around related or synonymous terms is the new thing but should be done with care to avoid spamming and keyword stuffing. 

2.      Do not build links aggressively as you may loose your traffic and pagerank. I would suggest registering to use the GoogleAnalytic to monitor your site’s progress.

3.      Another way to getting more search engine recognition is to give more attention to Google+. It was also made mention of during the update that henceforth, popular posts from Google+ social network would be given good search preferences in search results. As we all know, the big G owns G+ and there’s nothing better than making the best use of it. 

Although, I do not more so much about using G+, but here’s an answer I gave to a friend who once asked me about the social media site and the reply I gave. I think it may be of use;

My friend said: What do you think about this G+ of a thing and how do you think it will affect other social networks? 

I replied: Well, I’m yet to learn the techniques to using it. G+ has a lot of registered users but I still hear a lot of people lay complains as to not knowing how to use the platform. It is a very powerful tool and for the fact that it’s owned by Google, it shall command respect. Since it's still a bit new to many, we need time to master its tools. From what I see, this social media site was born to overtake the popular Facebook and Twitter and we can tell that from the recent drop in Facebook’s page rank and the increasing number of inactive users.

My friend said: So, what then should we do?

I replied: Just like a driver driving his passengers in a bus, we just have to follow to his destination. That does not mean that we should abandon other social media networks but we have to give this G+ of a thing some good consideration and respect. From what I can conclude, getting more interactions to your page and posts on G+ would do so much good for your site too. I think people and businesses should start to embrace Google+ early and start building their network. The earlier the better.

In conclusion, we should all note that there are no smart ways to gaining link and dominating the search engine for now. You have to gradually build link and use keywords wisely.

I do hope we find the game going smooth in this post penguin era.

To your success.

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