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Tuesday, December 4, 2012

What Is Google's Penguin Update?

By Jessie McNeal


The Internet marketing community has seen some major changes over the last year. First Google released Panda and now Penguin. These changes have had a severe impact to the way Google calculates search results. These changes are intended to reduce spam and provide the user with the best results possible. Does this always work for webmasters? No. I've seen a lot of buzz from marketing teams where sites thought to be well developed have been impacted.

These changes are forcing business owners and SEO companies to re-think their marketing campaigns. These SEO teams have had to go back to the drawing board in some instances where well-ranking websites have all but dropped off the radar. In the past, webmasters focused on keyword density and the volume of back-links to their pages. With this update keyword stuffing and back-links were both affected. Some data suggests domains which had a similar keyword as anchor from various sources were adversely affected. This would suggest that using varied anchor text from reliable sources in the way to go.

These changes also centered on quality content. Unique and meaningful content is becoming more and more important to Google's approach. Cheap article creation aimed solely at back-links is not going to work going forward. Business owners and SEO specialists alike need to focus on well-written articles that create back-links the natural way. Creating great content is going to be the best way to garner attention from both the Google search algorithm and readers who want to consume what you've created and pass it along to others.

Social media continues its rise in the Internet marketing landscape as well. Around the same time of the release of Penguin, Google announced a new Google Analytics offering directed at social media monitoring. You are now able to track your traffic back to see how the visitor arrived and see a wealth of information about your campaigns. It suggests that using social media is becoming paramount for search marketing campaigns. They can be leveraged to promote quality content that gets natural attention.

It was a really busy year for both Google and Webmasters. It will probably be a few more months before the ups and downs resulting from these changes starts to stabilize. I sincerely hope those who promote spam were the worst effected by these changes. Hopefully it will take a long time for them to figure out loopholes in the algorithm and return to the first page. Of course Google isn't done with changes of this type. In fact, they've stated there is more to come in the way of promoting search results focused on quality, unique content. We can hope they change things for the better but also do their best to protect honest webmasters focused on search marketing.




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