Last month, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, released the video where he talked about the future of Google, SEO, web spam and all new Google Penguin 2.o Algorithm update.
The original Google Penguin update was first announced on 24 April 2012. It caused a huge stir among internet marketers. While this update was intended to help reduce webspam and spammers for manipulating search results, many “innocent” webmasters became victims too.
It’s about average blogger or site owner who never engaged in link-buying or black-hat SEO tactics. They are making a living from his or her site, know nothing, but then got their site totally slapped and dropped from the rankings.
What Will Penguin 2.0 Do?
While at this point it’s purely speculation, the short and simple of the matter is that the Penguin 2.0 update is aimed to reduce web spam and get quality sites to appear at the top of search results. However, there is always going to be a way to tilt the odds of ranking highly in your favor. The original Penguin update targeted on-site over-optimization. It means that if you have an unnatural amount of keywords that you were clearly trying to rank for, then you will get penalized. For example if you were trying to rank for “Black shoes for men” and this exact keyphrase “Black shoes for men” appeared in your title tags, meta descriptions, H1, H2, H3 tags, in your footer and in every second sentence of your content, you would very likely have been slapped all the way down the rankings to a position where nobody will ever find you.
The Panda update targeted over-optimization of keywords in the anchor text. So if an unnatural percentage of the links pointing to your site were all one keyword that you were trying to rank for, you would have gotten penalized.
The core of SEO is highly unlikely to change. Google still uses an algorithm (code with rules to follow) to determine which sites to rank. That means there is a checklist of good and bad things that the Google bots and spiders look for, and if your site meets these good things on the checklist, you will be rewarded with high rankings.
While up to this point we have still been able to rank one and two page websites for highly competitive terms, this is something that could possibly change with Penguin 2.0. Things like links from obvious link farms and blog networks could create penalties. Links from dropped domains or bad neighborhoods could be targeted more. The update could look at things like bounce rate, time on site, page views and social engagement… But it’s all still speculation.
What Should You Do?
We have incredible success with our current SEO strategy, and we rank for competitive terms within weeks with brand new sites. We have numerous case study sites built on our strategy and they withstood the Penguin 2.0 update beautifully and even improved in rankings. Please contact us now on 1300 008 964 or visit our website on The Website Marketing Group for a free quote on SEO service.