SEO for 2016: The Complete Do-It-Yourself SEO Guide (2015)
Appendix C. Panda vs. Penguin
Panda vs. Penguin
The Titanic’s Of Algorithm Updates from Google
During 2011 and through 2016 the biggest Google updates to their algorithm that decides organic placement of websites continue to change and scare website owners and SEO’s alike. To some it seems hard to overcome the challenges these two algorithm changes create and some have found it stressful and hard to overcome. I speak all over the country at many industry shows and I open my forums up for questions. The number one questions from business owners and their marketing persons are what do I need to do to fix my website to get it back to where it used to be in the search engine indexes?
Google has made it no secret what you need to do to stay up at the top and if you follow Google’s own Webmaster Guidelines you won’t be hurt by any of these updates. If you are affected, understanding the reasons behind each update, helps to know how to fix your website if it is affected by Panda or Penguin or their updates.
The Panda Update
The Panda Algorithm and its many updates main goal is to get great content and get website owners to renew their content so it is fresh and rich. A second goal in the Panda update is to make sure that duplicate or similar content doesn’t exist anywhere else on the Internet. Part of what Google has had to deal with is people who visit their search engine not trusting the results they get.
Imagine you are driving in a car and you are going to a store to buy something. When you get there, you push on the door and notice the door is locked. You look through the window and you see nothing but trash on the ground because the company has gone out of business.
The third and most important goal of the Panda algorithm is to make sure your website stays fresh. It wants to see that the text on all your ranking pages is updated a minimum of every six months or you will drop in the results.
On the Internet, how do you know if a business has gone out of business? You may be buying something from a website that can still collect money but there is no one there to ship you what you ordered. It is a trust issue. Google wants to know you are still in business. It does this in a multitude of ways. First by knowing you recently refreshed or updated content on your website and an updated copyright tag with the year your company was established and the current year is just a start.
Copyright 2001-2016 (Make sure this is on your homepage.)
Next Google has proven it got smarter and wants to make sure your content is unique and not found somewhere else on the Internet. Google wants to make sure you know that you are not doing yourself any favors stealing someone else’s content and putting it on your own website. Google will degrade the ranking or placement of both websites. A good way to check if you have copied or similar content from the Internet is to check your URL’s at www.copyscape.com.
The Penguin Update
The Penguin update has a totally different focus. It targets those who try to pull the wool over on Google. If you have ever heard of “Black Hat” techniques for getting up on Google you know that those are techniques that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines including those that try to SPAM Google. This can be many things including keyword stuffing, hidden text, cloaking, links SPAM, and much more.
Google has stopped checking for many items from their algorithms that Google virtually outlawed over the years. These items when they were checked for heavily were consider “Black Hat SEO tactics”. Previously using those techniques could easily get you banned from Google and people stopped using them. Over time Google removed checking for some of those techniques in their algorithms most likely to concern processing power.
Overtime, some people realized by accident or by research that using these technique again actually helped their position on Google and there was virtually never a penalty. Word got around and people started using these techniques in huge number and probably praying this day would never come. The day when Google put the penalties back in their algorithm.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing was one of the original optimization tactics and one of the first for Google to penalize. You want to put words on your websites pages that you want to be found for, however, when you put it 25 times in a row you get in trouble. In fact now when it is more than a few times in a row you can garner a penalty. As a rule you should never place the same text on a page more than once.
Hiding Text
There are several ways to hide text such as making hidden text by making the text the same color as the background, making text to small, covering text with a picture using DIV tags, hiding text with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and many more. Those are just examples of the most common ways.
Google and other search engines don’t like anything hidden on a webpage. Their crawlers want to see everything that a visitor sees. When a website owner places content just for the search engines, they’re often going to extremes.
The general rule to avoid a penalty with the Penguin Update is to never hide text, whether by using styles, fonts, display:none tagging or any other means that means a typical user can’t see it.
Cloaking
Cloaking is just sophisticated hiding. There are many ways to make the website How about rigging your site so that search engines are shown a completely different version than what the human visitors see?
That’s called cloaking. Search engines really don’t like it. It’s one of the worst things you could do. While most people are unlikely to accidentally spam a search engine, the opposite is true when it comes to cloaking and Google gives a nice hefty penalty when you’re caught doing it.
Unnatural Link Building
Tempted to run around and drop your links on forums and blogs all over the web, perhaps with the help of automated software? Don’t do it and next, don’t make your link building consistent. What do I mean by this? Say for example, you have a budget of $1,000 per month and you pay someone to build 50 articles with links per month creating a set amount of links each week or each month. When Google looks at your link growth, what they’ll notice is that your link count is growing by the same number each month.
This type of is link growth is absolutely unnatural, particularly if you’re buying all the links from the same source. It’s easy for Google to notice this type of paid link building because Google is smart. Don’t make it easy for Google to find a pattern in your link building.
Paid Links
These are links you pay for on a website or you pay someone to make for you. If you haven’t heard the national news stories of JCPenney’s or Overstock.com getting blacklisted for buying links you need to visit the NewYorkTimes.com and WallStreetJournal.com and read.
If you choose to ignore Google’s Webmaster Policies and by links from overseas or pay to be on highly ranked sites which you are not contributing to or our in your own industry, be prepared for a quick death of your website in the search rankings. Buying these links will help you temporarily but when you are caught you will suffer. Don’t believe these paid link websites when they say they’re undetectable. They’re not.
NOTE: Bing, officially doesn’t ban for paid links, but it frowns upon such purchases.
Exact Match Anchor Text on Links
Stop building exact match anchor links. It is now one of the biggest red flags to unprofessional SEO. If you are a plumber in Tampa and all your links say “Tampa Plumber” and link to your homepage, Google will eventually punish you. It’s just not natural to have links that are an exact match anchor text to your website. You should be diversifying the anchor texts, focusing more on links that mention your brand name and less on links that mention have just your keywords in them.
Debunking the Panda and Penguin Update Myths
Since the Panda and Penguin updates came out I keep a log of virtually every persons opinion on what causes and effects these updates have had. In my own line of work as an SEO Expert I have to test and prove or disprove each of them. Let’s take a look at each one of these and whether or not my research confirmed the title in bold or not.
Review Your Website Basics — Make sure robots.txt, XML sitemaps, search engine webmaster registrations with Google and Bing are up-to-date. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Duplicate Content — Get rid of duplicate content and check http://www.copyscape.com each URL you have on your website to make sure you no one has copied you. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Make sure your website is compatible with all browsers including IE, Firefox, Chrome, IPAD, IPOD, IPHONE and Android — If Google is going to rank your website highly it better be compatible with all the browsers out there. The only way I know of testing this is through either www.SEOAudits.com or www.AccuQuality.com. Not only do they show you if you are compatible or not, their reports also tells you how to fix each issue to be compatible with each browser. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Get Rid of Meta or other Redirects — You had Google fooled up until now but maybe Penguin is telling you that Google now knows about your hidden page redirects. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Stop Delivering Content Based on the Visitors IP Address, User-agent, etc. — Maybe your attempts to serve the best content to people by country are being misinterpreted by Google who thinks you are a spammer and trying to deceive people! Stop! RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!” YOU WILL BE PENALIZED. IF YOU WANT TO SERVE OTHER LANGUAGES AND COUNTRIES GET A DOMAIN FORM THEIR COUNTRY AND HOST IT PROPERLY.
De-optimize the Website — If you have been “optimizing” your website with a high keyword density and over did it. Make sure your keyword density is around 6% and no higher. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Increase Good Links Pointing to Your Site — Make sure that they are from authority websites in your industry only. Don’t use profile links or any link you have to pay for. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Add More Social Buttons — In normal times (The past two years) up until now a Facebook, Twitter, and blog link or widget would do just fine. This isn’t the normal times I was talking about. Add GooglePlus, Google +1, and Pintrest. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Move Content to a New Domain — If you have been penalized by Google you can try and get Google to remove the penalties but research shows it is easier to start with a new domain and ignore the old domain. This time doing things right and in accordance with Google’s Webmaster Policies. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Reduce Your Website Footprint — You think that by removing 800 of the 1,000 pages on your website will help you overcome the Penguin penalty….Myth. Add and keep adding good original content. RESEARCH SAYS...”NO!”
Write Better Content — Write human readable sentences that make sense. Start writing for humans and bots alike. Make the text make sense to both. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Stop Exchanging Links on Your Website — Absolutely not. Exchanging links is a great way to build rankings. But make sure each link has relevance. If you are in Chicago and you are a dentist, you can exchange links with other businesses in Chicago, other dentists, insurers, Chamber of Commerce, other medical doctors, etc. You are stretching it if you try and exchange a link with a car shipping company. RESEARCH SAYS...”NO!”
Do Not Use Low Quality Link Directories — If you have been buying easy-to-get-into directories, or making links using WP profiles you need to stop. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Remove Irrelevant Links to and from Your Website — If your site is about car shipping, you should not be linking out to Websites that are dealing with dental implants. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Decrease the Number of Ads on Each Page — If you have been placing a lot of advertising on each page and think this may be the cause of the Penguin update penalizing you, It’s not. Don’t remove the advertising. RESEARCH SAYS...”NO!”
Remove Your Sponsored Links — If you have been selling or trading a high volume of links to other websites and you were affected by Penguin update, get rid of your “non-contextual” links. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Get Rid of Spammy Backlinks — If you hired someone in India to give you 10,000 backlinks, Google wants to see them gone. Google will also call you out with messages in your Webmaster Tools account. Google is getting better and better at determining where links came from and the cheap links you can get from them have more negative value than positive in the long run. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Use Software Generated Content — Absolutely not! Google has figure out the article spinning software and will penalize you for using it. Get rid of it now! RESEARCH SAYS...”NO!” USE REAL ARTICLES MADE BY HUMANS.
Get Rid of Dead or Broken Links — Google is really looking at coding and broken links. More than a couple of broken links can be detrimental to good rankings on Google. You may want to get an SEOAudits.com or AccuQuality.com Report to find out how healthy your website really is. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Update Your Best Content Frequently — Refresh all your content pages at least every 60 to 90 days for best results on Google especially if it has not been done since last September when Google came out with a Panda update just to make sure content was refreshed. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Write Longer Blog Articles — Your articles are too short and have less than 300-500 words in them. Write longer blog articles! RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”
Send a Reconsideration Request — A Reconsideration Request tells Google that you’re really sorry you made or used bad links and that you will never do it again. It’s a long shot but you have to do it or you’ll remain in the penalty. RESEARCH SAYS...”YES!”