Has the recent “Penguin” Google update affected your search rankings? Some major and legitimate sites have been hit hard by this recent algorithm update and SEO pros and webmasters are generally NOT happy about it.
The good news is that Google is trying to improve relevancy for seekers and remove questionable link farms and other sites that just serve to “Spam” the search results. The bad news is that honest and high quality sites with all original content have also been penalized with sudden drops in rankings and traffic which can make or break some businesses.
The common practice of anchor text linking has been hit and sites with 65% or more of their incoming links with keywords in the anchor text have lost rankings. This site is currently #2 for internet marketing santa barbara, but if I had posted on a bunch of sites a link TO my site with the anchor text as internet marketing santa barbara, I might have been penalized by this latest update. (Fortunately for me and my clients, almost all of my rankings have not suffered. Not so for many others.)
The New SEO
This is what Google loves to see now:
Content, Content – Google loves content and best NOT on some article directory linking TO your site, but on your site directly. Post those articles on your own blog directly.
Regular Updates – yes freshness counts like at the grocery store and frequent updates help
Social Signals – Stumble, Tweet, Facebook Like and Comment and Share (shares best)
Video – Google loves natural and real content video (not auto generated garbage)
Authority Links – real folks on real sites linking to you. NOT the link farms of bogus links or other PAID links
Bottom line: Post only high quality, original content on your sites and be as natural as possible with all efforts known as “SEO” – avoid keyword “stuffing” on your pages and also in the incoming link campaigns. If getting incoming links, have a natural variety of types of links coming in from real websites: website name, website URL, keyword phrase 1, phase 2 etc. Avoid aggressive link building that sends a bunch of links using a single keyword string, a red flag now to Google. If you find what Google considers to be “bad neighborhood” links, ask the linking site to remove them.
For more, see this excellent article by SEO pro Danny Goodwin: searchenginewatch.com
AND, contact me for a free SEO evaluation of your site.
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