For all you eagle-eyed website owners who monitor your Google search engine results, you may have noticed a change in the results over the last 4 weeks. This will be the effect of the latest roll out of Googles algorithm changes, which they have affectionately termed ‘penguin’
So what is Penguin looking for and will you be penalised?
The biggest risk factor to your results page for any of your keywords is lots of low quality link spam. If you’ve been merrily adding links, with the same anchor text time after time then the likely hood is you’ll be over-optimised and penalised. Or similarly if you have been putting links in ‘bad neighbourhoods’ (i.e. websites that are just there to help SEO) then again you will be found out. So what actually makes a good link? well we’ve been talking about this for ages and its as simple as the 4 steps below:
- A link placed on a respected website, in relevant content that talks about your product and service is a good link.
- The article, or content piece actually provides value to the user, they actually get something out of the information – REALLY important
- The keyword, and links, are not repeated time and time again on the same page.
- Links must come from a variety of different sources, Social Media provides a great platform to achieve this.
So if you are not following these rules, then watch out – you might be targeted.
What else can you do to help your website succeed?
If you’ve already been hit, or want to avoid being penalised in the future, here are some other things you need to be checking out:
- First, take a look at your analytics, can you see any traffic patterns that really stand out, does that highlight a problem to you?
- Go over your website again, is there any duplicate content / low value content. If there is can you get rid of it or no index it.
- Do check the quality of your links, audit where the links are coming from, and do something about it!
- Check your site speed, does it load quickly enough, this is a ranking factor often overlooked
- Make sure your on page foundations are solid and not over optimised.
- and now for the big one