'Net Features : penguin

Working in a Post-Penguin 2.0 Web

Michael Garrity — Tue, 28 May 2013 19:45:00 GMT

Late last week, Google launched its most recent algorithm update in the form of Penguin 2.0. There was a lot of speculative discussion leading up to the release about just what changes this new Penguin would reveal.

For now, less than a week since Penguin 2.0 rolled out, the actual effects of this update are obviously still pretty obscure and unclear, but already some trends have begun to emerge that hint at what exactly is changing for search engine optimization professionals and content marketers.

So, what exactly will it mean to work on the Web and practice search engine optimization for your website or blog in a post-Penguin 2.0 world? Keep reading to find out.

Authority Matters (More)

Google is going to be paying much closer attention to your credentials, so if your site is considered an authority in your specific niche, expect to see that pay off in the form of higher rankings on the search engine.

Changing the Way We Guest Blog

One of the biggest things that Google seems to be interested in targeting are sites that have a lot of outbound links pointing at just one website, as opposed to various links to many different authoritative websites. This will (or should) have a major effect on the way that content marketers and bloggers choose the websites that they write guest blog posts for. With this in mind, writers should make sure they select sites that don’t link to low-quality sites and are unquestionably relevant to the site that they intend to link back to in their posts. Of course, this should be a common best practice for all guest bloggers already, but with the genesis of Penguin 2.0, those that do publish non-relevant links and content together on a regular basis will feel the sting with regards to devaluation of their own blogs.

The Advertorial Question

Advertorials tread murky water when it comes to the black hat/white hat ethics debate, but most people don’t consider this type of content to be “bad,” per se. That being said, it is sort of frowned upon, and Google likely won’t be recognizing those who publish advertorials as true “authorities,” and they should not be expecting link credibility from the search engine if they publish them.

The Death of Content Spam

Google has finally tied a direct penalty to the much-maligned art of content spam. This obviously means that any sites that “feature” user-generated content spam will be hurt on the SERPs as a result. Webmasters should take note and check their sites, and particularly their blogs and comments sections, to seek out things like multiple https or terms like “free shipping” to uncover (and then remove) content spam. They can do this by using a database crawler tool or Google’s site:domain.com “words go here” feature. (It should be noted that especially capable spammers might make it so that their efforts can’t be discovered without performing a Google search.)

Enough with the Over-Optimization

Sites that use their navigation, header and/or footer areas to include more keywords as a way to rank higher for those terms, or sites that add a superfluous amount of header and footer links for those keywords, will be working in vain now. In fact, they may even end up penalized by Google for their slightly spammy over-optimization efforts, and nobody wants that.

Keeping Ads in Check

In order to keep websites and domains from being landing pages for a bunch of ads, Google has started handing out penalties to sites that put too many advertisements above the fold. Of course, the famously vague company doesn’t exactly tell us what “too many” really means, but it’s at least enough to go off of for now. Just make sure you keep it down (down below the fold, that is).

An Increase in Clusters

Despite the fact that Google likes to have as much variety as possible on the first page of the SERPs, it looks like the search engine will be displaying more clusters of multiple pages from the same domain. The catch, of course, is that the domain and its pages are of a high quality in the first place.

Crawlability is Key

Crawl errors that diminish the spiders’ ability to scan your website to determine its authority, and thus ranking position, will now have a greater impact on your overall SEO efforts. Crawl errors affect a site’s strength and authority, and that will become a bigger problem on the post-Penguin 2.0 Web. Fortunately, you can go into Google Webmaster Tools, check your crawl rate and uncover any issues the spiders may be having, so that you can get on top of correcting them ASAP.

7 Ways to Build Authority on Google+

Allison Howen — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:00:00 GMT

As the looming Penguin update (version 2.0) hovers overhead, search professionals are left wondering how the unknown changes to Google’s search algorithm will impact their company’s digital visibility.

While Google always holds its cards close to its virtual chest when it comes to its search algorithm, Matt Cutts (who is in charge of Google’s webspam team) has announced in a recently released video that the company is looking to give special ranking boosts to sites that are authorities in a specific industry, community or space. Although Cutts doesn’t define how authority will be determined, one could speculate that the company’s social network, Google+, could be an influencer.

This scenario wouldn’t be surprising at all, especially because Google has been incorporating its social network into a variety of its products, including its search engine, for a while now. So in the case that Google+ does indeed become a factor in determining authority, one question remains – How can a brand build authority on Google+?

1. Grow Your Circles

A brand with 20 followers on Google+ doesn’t come off as very authoritative in its niche. That said, building a fan base on this social network can be challenging, especially for companies whose fan base spends the bulk of its time on other social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. However, there are ways that brands can increase their popularity on Google+.

Start by growing the people within your circles, which is a tactic that is frequently used on Twitter. By doing this, your brand’s name and Google+ profile is being put in front of new people, which influences them to return the favor. And the more people a brand adds to its circles, the more likely it is to receive higher follow back numbers (keep in mind that not everyone will follow you back). While you can add anyone to your circles, this strategy is most effective when targeting relevant people. To do this, brands should search for influencers within their industry, as well as for contacts that they already have on other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even email lists.

Furthermore, if you already have an active audience on a social network like Facebook or Twitter, make sure to promote your Google+ profile with your audience on these platforms. You can even tease exclusive Google+ content in order to persuade your audience members to make a profile and follow your brand on Google+.

2. Post Fabulous Content

Content is, and will always be, king. In fact, nothing says that you are an authority on a topic more than content that receives high engagement metrics, like shares, comments and +1’s. And regardless of your follower numbers, the only way to obtain high engagement rates is with content that captures attention and makes audiences feel like they need to share the information with their circles. There is absolutely no way around it – in order to receive high engagement numbers, brands must create and post content that resonates with their audience, is relevant and is in high-demand.

3. Leverage Communities and Hangouts

To be an authority within your niche, your presence on Google+ most go beyond posting regular status updates. Luckily, Google’s social network offers a variety of avenues for brands to foster relationships with their audience, including Google+ Communities and Hangouts.

Communities, for instance, allow users to create social groups based on specific topics or interests. And when a brand fosters an active community, it not only helps them build better relationships with their audience and acquire more brand advocates, but also helps them obtain more interactions and therefore gain authority within their niche. In addition, brands can use Google Hangouts as another unique way to build relationships and increase engagement rates, which, ultimately, helps a brand gain authority.

4. Interact with Your Audience

We have already established that shares, comments and +1’s help a brand gain authority, so what better way to encourage this type of behavior than by interacting with your own audience? Just as adding people to your circles can influence them to return the favor, so can interacting with people. That said, you shouldn’t just start interacting with everybody and every status update. Rather, choose your interactions wisely so that you do not come off as unprofessional (and un-authoritative). For example, if someone comments on one of your posts, consider responding back. This will help build brand loyalty by showing the audience member that you pay attention and care about what they say – making them more likely to interact with your brand in the future. Likewise, if someone posts interesting content that is relevant to your industry, an action as simple as a +1 or share could influence them to return the favor in the not-too-distant future.

5. Network with Other Brands

Take your interaction strategy up a notch by networking with other brands and industry professionals. While the aforementioned audience interaction tips can be applied here as well, you can also partner with other brands and professionals to share contributed (guest) content with your audience. By doing this, your business is not only providing its readers with relevant content from respected industry professionals, but it also helps to increase your business’s visibility. This is because the contributor is likely to share the content with their network as well, which puts your brand in front of a whole new audience and gives you the opportunity to increase your followers and engagement rates.

6. Use the Google+ Page Badge

Just as you display social sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter on your site, it is also important to feature the Google +1 button. This button encourages site visitors to publicly recommend your content and share it with their Google+ circles. And the more +1’s you obtain, the more authority you gain, as it shows Google that you are a trusted source of information.

7. Take Advantage of Authorship

If your brand is publishing content, make sure to link that content to the authors' Google+ profiles with Authorship. This not only gives recognition to your hard-working employees, but it also shows Google that there is an identity connected with the content, which gives the content and your brand, better credibility.

Could Google+ Play a Role in the Upcoming Penguin Update?

Michael Garrity — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:05:00 GMT

On Friday morning, Matt Cutts, the person in charge of Google’s webspam team, announced via Twitter that the search engine would be rolling out the next generation, version 2.0, of its Penguin update (originally released in April of last year).

This update will likely have considerable ramifications on the way that Google sorts and ranks pages on its search engine results pages (SERPs), as these types of overhauls entail altering the search algorithm, as opposed to just an index refresh.

Penguin 2.0

The first Penguin update focused on black hat SEO and links/link quality, as part of the company’s apparent desire to keep "spammy" sites stuffed with low-quality links from reaching the upper echelons of the SERPs (or even the first couple of pages, for that matter). It’s been tweaked a few times since then, with the first refresh (Penguin 1.1, if you will) simply cleaning up and implementing the algorithm update in the way it indexes pages, and the second refresh adding the Disavow Links Tool, which puts the onus of identifying and removing bad links on the webmasters.

But this new update promises to be much more significant and should resonate more with all websites and webmasters. In a video released yesterday (see the bottom of this post), Cutts said that the upcoming Penguin update, which is expected in “a few weeks,” will likely go deeper and have more of an impact than Penguin 1.0, but didn’t really elaborate beyond that. He also explains that Google is looking to give special ranking "boosts" to sites that are authorities in a specific industry, community or space, meaning it will return those sites above loess authoritiative sites in related queries. He doesn't define how they will determine that authority, however.

Naturally, this has led many Web pros to wonder just what this new update will entail, and how it may affect their own performance in the SERPs. For now, all we can do is speculate.

What about Google+?

One likely scenario involves Google’s silently growing social network, Google+, which passed Twitter in Dec. 2012 to become the second largest online social network in terms of active monthly users (according to a Global Web Index study). Whereas Google started out by aggressively (over) marketing G+ when it first went live, the company has slowly backed off in favor of quietly integrating the social network with its myriad other products.

It wouldn’t be at all surprising, then, to see Google trying to incorporate G+ more intricately into its search engine, as well. And since the original Penguin was largely about links and link quality, one might expect Penguin 2.0 to put a special emphasis on links appearing on the social network. That is, content that gets linked to on or from Google+ will be weighted more heavily, or at least with more credibility, than if it were just a link on a random website or blog.

In other words, Google could end up viewing links that also appear somewhere on Google+ as being of a generally higher quality than others, so it may end up giving them a boost in the SERPs. And if that’s the case, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google Search also paid attention to the activity around links on Google+ (e.g. shares, +1s, etc.) in order to better determine just how “quality” they may actually be.

Should this end up being the case, it would mean that brands and content publishers, especially, will want to become more active on Google+, sharing links on the social network in order to give them more authority or credibility in the SERPs, especially if they expect these links to appear on other websites or blogs.

Of course, this is all just speculation, and Google is being, and will continue to be, quiet on the subject until the release of the new update, as it always is. I’m just saying, it would be an interesting way for the company to quietly nudge people toward using Google+ more often, although the downside would be the creation of an increasingly insular, exclusive “Google Universe” that may alienate Web professionals and users even more than it already has.

The SEO Zoo: Panda vs. Penguin

Michael Garrity — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:30:00 GMT

The Web is a wild place, and the principles of survival of the fittest are very prominent in the realm of search engine marketing and SEO. So it makes sense that Google would name its algorithm updates after some of the world’s exotic wildlife.

Google’s biggest changes to its search algorithm over the last two years are a pair of updates known as Panda and Penguin. Both of them had the same basic goal of lowering the rank of low-quality or “thin” websites, and thus increasing the rank of higher-quality sites. However, despite their common allegiance toward improving the quality of Google’s search rankings, Panda and Penguin are very different beasts.

Panda

What really sets the Panda update apart from other algorithm changes is that the content of an entire site (or a specific section of a site) has an impact on search rankings, as opposed to just individual pages. In other words, if a significant number of pages on a site are flagged as having terrible content, the whole site can be penalized.

Panda primarily favors unique, original content – especially content that comes backed with a lot of clout and authority, like in-depth research reports or thoughtful analysis – over auto-generated content. For websites looking to improve their rankings, they should separate out and get rid of all of that content, mostly because having content with little-to-no value can get an entire site shut down, even if most of its content is unique and worthwhile.

At the end of the day, Panda is trying to weed out duplicate, overlapping or redundant content that isn’t beneficial to the searcher. Mostly, it aims to take down so-called “content farms," which publish a lot of low-quality articles stuffed with popular keywords to drive traffic and to get links. It also works to stop content scrapers from outranking the original author and content.

Penguin

Penguin, on the other hand, specifically has it out for webspam. With this update, any sites that are found to be violating Google’s webmaster quality guidelines can have their site rankings dropped.

There are a few major offenses that Penguin was designed to combat, including stuffing sites with keywords (particularly low-quality keywords), cloaking, spamming anchor text, purchasing links and more. But even some less obvious techniques could wind up on Penguin’s radar, such as incorporating irrelevant outgoing links into a page of content.

However, Google hasn’t been totally upfront about exactly what Penguin is looking for, saying only that the sites it targets are “doing much more than white hat SEO” and that the company believes them to be “engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.”

If you’re having a Penguin problem, the best way to start recovering your rankings is by getting rid of your low-quality links and removing any keywords you may have stuffed away on your site. Basically, anything on your site that may toe the line and appear to Google as a black hat SEO tactic should be immediately removed. Fortunately, most of the time, Google will notify you on your Webmaster Tools account if it finds questionable links or other issues with your site, so checking that regularly and immediately fixing those problems should help to prevent your site from dropping in the search rankings.

Time to Adapt

Since Panda and Penguin are algorithm updates, and the penalties that they enforce are not manual. Therefore, it will do you little good to make a reconsideration request to Google to get your site back up in the search rankings. Instead, you’re going to have to make changes and fix your site on your own, and then wait for Google to come back and re-crawl your content before you’ll see a recovery. So you know, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you’re not on the bad side of either Panda or Penguin. After all, it’s a zoo out there, and you don’t want to get left behind.

Don't Ignore Manual Penalties from Google

Michael Garrity — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:15:00 GMT

Have you ever been hit with a manual penalty by Google? That is when publishers are notified by the search engine for breaking one or more of its quality guidelines. If so, how did you deal with it?

The tricky thing with these manual penalties is that they can show up at anytime, since they’re not subject to the limited visibility of the algorithm and can be levied by a Google employee at basically any time if they find something questionable on your site. Of course, everyone wants to avoid receiving one of these penalties, because they also come with an immediate drop in search rankings.

Interestingly, however, many publishers often decide to just ignore these warnings and wait for the penalty to expire, perhaps in hopes of making their way back up the SERPs naturally once their red flag has been removed.

Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller recently came out to “strongly suggest” (in other words, listen up!) that publishers don’t just ignore their manual penalties and wait for them to expire. Rather, he suggests the incredibly novel proposition that webmasters figure out a way to resolve the issue and then submit a reconsideration request to Google once the problem is fixed.

This makes sense, primarily for two reasons: 1. Penalties usually take six months or more to expire, and being dropped in the SERPs for that long can be extremely harmful to an online business, and 2. penalties can simply be applied to a publisher again once the original has expired.

Thus, it would be in your best interest to simply address Google’s concern and correct it to the best of your ability, rather than just ignore it and hope that it goes away.

Google Penguin Update 1.1 (Watch Closely)

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:54:00 GMT

An update to Google's search index arrived prior to the long holiday weekend here in the U.S.

Google's Matt Cutts announced the "data refresh" on Twitter late Friday afternoon. Despite claims otherwise, this is the first official update since the "Penguin" update rolled out in late April 2012. Many SEOs noticed shifts in the SERPs throughout the month of May which were likely just live tests of this current update.

Penguin, an algorithm change that took direct aim at sites that were violating Google's quality guidelines, has caused quite a bit of digital commotion in the past month. This most recent update, now being dubbed Penguin 1.1, refreshes the index based on changes Google made since Penguin arrived. Cutts indicated in his tweet that less than one-tenth of a percent of English-language searches would be affected.

If you were negatively affected by the initial rollout of Penguin, the good news is that sites that were previously penalized (perhaps mistakenly) may see their sites return or recover. The bad news is that it's likely not over yet – Google will likely roll out numerous updates to Penguin over the course of the next few months. Those that believe they escaped a Penguin penalty initially may now lose their positions as Google refreshes its index based on improved/modified filters.

So what should you do? Stay calm, geek on, and watch your ranking positions closely over the course of the next week.