How to Avoid Falling Foul of Google Penguin 3.0
The latest Google Penguin algorithm update 3.0, was launched on Friday 17th October but will continue rolling out over the coming weeks. It focusses on unnatural links and keyword stuffing.
The aim of the Google Penguin algorithm, the first version of which was released in April 2012, is to improve search results by eliminating or penalising links that don’t appear to be naturally built. This was the first update to the Penguin algorithm in over a year. The original Penguin update impacted 3.1% of all search queries and had a huge impact on the world of search optimisation. However, the decision as to whether a link is natural or manipulative is entirely down to Google’s interpretation and not anyone else’s including yours, although some are of course obvious, for example a link to an accountancy firm’s site from a sports shop’s site would not appear to be natural
To avoid falling foul of Penguin you should focus on quality content and clean up your link profiles. You should get rid of any unnatural or irrelevant links as soon as possible, including paid links, links to irrelevant discussion forums and links to non-industry specific directories.
If your rankings and traffic have changed since Friday 17th, you probably have been hit by the 3.0 update. Continue checking rankings and traffic over the next few weeks; if there is no change, you haven’t been hit, but if your rankings are improved, you have probably recovered from being hit by a previous Penguin update. The refresh helps sites that have already cleared up the webspam signals discovered in the previous Penguin update and demotes sites with newly discovered spam.
If you have been impacted, you need to identify the bad links and remove them. If asking the webmasters in charge of the source sites doesn’t work, use Google’s Disavow tool, though removal is preferable to disavowing a link.
It is likely that Google will roll out a few data refreshes over the coming months, so even if you haven’t been impacted so far, this is a good opportunity to review your existing strategy and protect yourself against future penalties. Moving forward aim to build better links on better sites through a strong content strategy and avoid keyword stuffing. Instead of building links think of how you can earn them which would give you the best and most natural links of all!
