Got affected by recent Google algorithm Updates? Been struggling to know what to do in the aftermath of Penguin Update over Google’s search results?
So, let’s get a recap of what’s been happening ever since Google released its latest search algorithm.
The Launching of Google’s Penguin Update
Last April 24, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts had finally announced that they have rolled out its latest search algorithm update that was once called the over optimization filter and then called webspam algorithm update and was finally and officially called the Penguin Update.
Google’s Penguin Update was designed to better catch people spamming its search results or purposely doing shortcuts to rank pages higher that are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.
The Impact of Penguin Update
Had gone live for all languages at the same time, Google’s Penguin Update was reported to have impacted about 3% of search queries.
For the last few days, many webmasters have seen their sites being coldly blasted from Google’s search results. Many had observed that their search-related traffic from Google had dropped significantly within a day or two before Google’s launch of its Penguin Update on April 24. Many had also seen that there was also a major decrease in their rankings.
Mostly pages/sites that were affected had done what Google says as doing webspam techniques, pages/sites that attempt to propel its rankings through things like:
- Keyword stuffing
- Link schemes
- Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects or “doorway” pages
- maliciously create pages by phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other malwares
- Purposeful duplicate content
- An Attempt at Recovery
Now, there are many forum discussion and articles all over the web mentioning of post-penguin recovery strategies. Overall, these all say that those who were hit by Panda Updates must remove all spam elements (like unnatural links) from their web pages as well as only use white-hat SEO methods. You may also read our previous article about SEO Guidelines to Consider for Over Optimization Penalty.
Specifically, according to an early analysis on the sites hit by Penguin, one common theme appears to be a severe lack of natural links, with sites participating in unnatural link schemes.
If you have done:
- buying links with exact match anchor text
- comment spamming, commenting using signatures that uses exactly identical anchor text or using exact match anchor text for keywords you intend to highly rank
- linking via guest posting on questionable sites (sites filled with low-quality articles)
- linking from article marketing sites and dangerous sites
Then you are in violation of Google’s publisher guidelines.
The Release of Google’s Penguin Feedback Form
Google says that reconsideration requests won’t help with Penguin Update as it ‘s an algorithmic change (a penalty that’s applied automatically).
However, if you think that your website was mistakenly flagged, Google had rolled out a new form that you can use to report errors.
According to Cutts’ tweet, Google had launched a Penguin Feedback Form where you can report to Google if you think your site should not have been hit by this update. This form is headed “Feedback on our recent algorithm update (“Penguin”)”.
In the form, there is a link for people who thought if Google missed some spam to submit a spam report.
Then, for those whose site was affected by this algorithm update on April 24th, 2012, and don’t think it should have been affected, there are fields where you can input more details like your URL of a page affected by the update, query which shows non-ideal results and comments.
Last April 27, Google Google also rolled out Panda 3.6 Update, a small and almost unnoticeable Panda refresh because only few sites were affected.
So, that’s the latest happenings so far from Google’s Penguin Update. Keep posted if you want to stay updated on the latest algorithm updates of Google!
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