Google has always since the birth of their search engine been updating their algorithm to provide their users with the most relevant and best search results. Your internet marketing campaign should never be set in stone so that you have the flexibility to adjust your strategy when Google decides to roll out new updates. Recently, the new updates has been coming with a storm and many websites has been affected with their two latest updates – Panda and Penguin.

In February 2012 Google updated their algorithm with the latest Panda update. This update was designed to lower the rank of poor quality sites. These are the websites that focused on duplicate content. Websites that uses spun articles, scraper content, and duplicate content were hit very hard and lost almost all of their rankings on the search engine giant.

The Google Panda update affected the entire domain than just a specific web page. During April Google rolled out two new versions of this update. What can you do if the Panda update affected your website?

Google Panda update fixes

  • Use only original and relevant content.
  • Do not over use keywords on your website.
  • Focus on increasing the user trust on your website.
  • Include contact information.

Round about the same time the Google Panda updates were applied, Google rolled out a completely new update on 14 April 2012 called Penguin. This update was focused on fighting spam and to eliminate spamming techniques that are against the Google quality guidelines. Most of the sites that were affected practiced black hat SEO methods such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text, paid links, and link schemes.

This new update by Google was designed to act against website pages rather than the entire website and domain. If you have been affected by the Penguin update, then you were most likely labelled as a spammer by Google. If you can resolve all the spam, your website’s ranking should return within a couple of months. If you were affected by this update and you are not using any spam methods, file a Google reconsideration request. The same as with the Panda update, expect a couple of Penguin updates to follow soon. What can you do if you were affected by the Penguin update?

Google Penguin update fixes

  • Follow all of the Google quality guidelines and stay updated of these.
  • Avoid black hat SEO at all costs.