How to Survive from Google Panda and Penguin Updates?

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SEO professionals are always on the look out for the recent updates from Google and it’s constant changes in search algorithm. Being a part of SEO industry, it is really important to understand the Google Panda and Penguin update. Both the updates are related to Google Search Engine Ranking Algorithm which rolled out on 24th february 2012 and 24th April 2012 respectively. Google Panda and Penguin updates are aimed to provide better search result to the users by increasing the quality of sites ranking higher in Google.

Google Panda update is designed to filter out the low quality spam websites from their search result which provides no intrinsic value to the user, duplicate content from other websites violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. Google Panda updae targeing the webspam will decrease ranking for lower quality sites and provide better ranking for the high quality sites who focusses on their websites’ content, potential and overall online presence.

Google Penguin update on the contrary targets over-optimization of the websites, a term coined by Google’s distinguished engineer Matt Cutts. It is mainly related to offsite SEO. The black hat techniques like keyword stuffing – the deliberate overuse of keywords to rank higher in search engine ranking, cloaking – presenting 2 different versions of web page content for search engines crawlers and visitors and irrelevant link building to and from external sites.

The SEO landscape has changed dramatically over the past couple of months due to recent change in Google search algorithm. Lots of websites has been penalized by these updates, basically the search engine ranking of the sites has been hugely affected.

Below are some SEO tips to protect your website/blog from Google Panda and Penguin updates:

• Content is the king… go through the content of your websites and check for duplicate content if any. Invest on original and relevant content and offer great value to your readers.
• Vary your Anchor Text with permutation and combination for your targeted keywords.
• Don’t stuff your content with excessive use of keywords, maintain appropriate keywords density to avoid keywords stuffing.
• Perform a regular check on your website for broken link and fix them immediately.
• Avoid participating in low quality one way, 2 way or 3 way link building exchange scheme or paid link building to increase your search engine linking as this might lead to banning of your website.
• Have a variety in your link building profile, only high PR profile links or only article submission will not do. You need to work on all types of link building sources and these links must be relevant to your niche. Eg: Don’t perfom a link exchange program between a financial site and a dog lover site – both are two different domains.
• Increase your brand presence by having various social profiles as inbound links from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus will protect your website from being flagged as a low quality site by Google. But do not try to spam your links over here as this will be filetered out by the social networks as well as Google.
• Don’t use cloaking technique or doorway pages to impress search engines as these pages are created with the purpose of manipulating the search engine spiders and redirecting to a different page by deceiving the users. This is a black hat technique and implementing this technique in your website will only result in downranking in Google searches.
• Avoid using hidden text and links behind an image or using white text over a white background in your website as these will only remove your site from search engine’s index.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google as this violates Google TOS
• Do not create multiple pages or sub-domains with duplicate content. If you are already having multiple pages, domains or sub-domains with identical content, use 301 redirect to handle it.
• Keep the advertisements versus content ratio to a healthy level, it is recommended to keep ads to a minimum level to secure top positions in the search engines.

Google will keep on changing its updated in a regular basis but you have to keep yourself updated and keep on playing with Google’s rules to stay on top of the listing.

By MITHU SARKAR

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