Panda and Penguin unleashed

The Penguin is unleashed

Google introduced its newest major algorithm change, again named after a cute black and white animal, on April 24th. I haven't seen as big an outcry about the Penguin as there was after the Panda algorithm update, which suggests that its impact on the earning online community was not as huge. Google itself estimates that about 3.5% of websites was affected. However, as expected the release of a major change in algorithm, released a huge amount of analysis. Since the big G doesn't share the details of its methods, all the analysis was speculative, some of it is probably right, some completely wrong. I have just read seen an interesting, if lengthy explanation of how the Penguin affects website ranking, which seemed to disagree with a lot of the perceived wisdom, I don't know if it was true, but it sounded quite rational.

Lengthy explanation of Panda and Penguin

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The Penguin vs webspam, what Google says

According to Google (whether people believe them or not is another matter), the role of the Penguin was detect over-optimization. Hence it was targeted at webpages which rank well, not necessarily because they have such excellent content, but because they've had a lot of SEO (search engine optimisation) done on them, both on the page and off page (links). This is different from the Panda change, which tried to detect webpages which gave its visitors a poor user experience, because of excessive advertising, duplicated content, very little text on the page etc.

The general idea seems to be that Penguin is attacking 'web spam'. Many of the SEO techniques of the black hat flavour involve creating pages for no other reason than to increase the ranking of the main website (to which the spammy page links). An obvious example of that, which I am sure we all encounter while hub hopping, is articles spun beyond all comprehension, whose only function is to provide back links. A couple of weeks ago I went to check out the front page of GoArticles. I was rather disgusted by the homepage showcasing a whole bunch of articles, which made no sense whatsoever, obviously there to provide links to a payday loan company site. I think we can all agree that the internet would be a better place without such gibberish.

on page over optimisation

The kind of over optimisation that can be done by over eager SEO practitioners can be divided into two types on page, generally to do with keywords for which the page hopes to rank. If a your hubs inadvertently fell foul of the new algorithm (over optimisation can be unintentional as well as black hat, Google doesn't care), and you saw a drop in ranking or traffic, this is easy to repair. Read your hub and see whether the keyword is repeated too many times, so the text doesn't read well and sound repetitive, and change some of the keywords for synonyms.

Penguin detects pages that are 'keyword stuffed' and might mark them as web spam. it also dislikes hidden keywords which are not seen by a visitor on the page. I have become a little bit concerned about the alt text which I've added to the photos in my blog and webpages. Since I've always read that I must not forget to use image captions and alt text for SEO purposes, I had always made sure they contained keywords, I wonder if this is held against me now.

The idea that was quite new to me, and that makes sense, is that the general advice about basic optimising for keywords is a little bit over the top. For example, I have always been told that I should put my main keyword in the URL, the title, heading, description and anchor text of a link, as well in the text. I must admit, that at times I felt that this wasn't very natural.

Because I am not some kind of SEO superninja, I don't usually target single word keywords, and often not even two word keywords. I often feel that the competition for these is too high, and go after whole phrases. In a way this isn't just a function of how good you are at SEO, but also at the available resources. My HubPages subdomain is a few months old, and it doesn't have a huge number of hubs indexed. All this makes it a weaker platform for competing with the big guys. The problem with targeting a phrase keyword, is that it isn't very natural to have the same phrase in the title, and in the capsule subtitle, hub summary etc. So in a way, when I've put them everywhere, I was doing what Google doesn't won't web masters to do, I was writing for search engines, rather than my readers.

Off page optimisation-backlinks

The on page optimisation is the easy part of SEO, the backlinks are the difficult part. Google regards incoming links to a site from high authority pages as votes of confidence. If many sties link to a site, that is an indication that the site is an authority on a topic, and is likely to rank well in the SERPs. This has of course caused web masters to look at various ways in which they can create backlinks to their sites.

Of course having self-created backlinks are useless from Google's point of view, as far as the search engine is concerned, it would love to be able to tell when the link was made by the webmaster of the pointed-to site, and would disregard all such links. After all a back link to your site, that you make yourself, is not an indication of the usefulness of your site. We all think our stuff is wonderful, and even if we don't, we still want a lot of people to come and see it.

One of the generally cited functions of the penguin update, is to detect bad incoming links, and penalise sites where the webmaster has done a lot of work on creating backlinks, or even paid for them. This has resulted in many SEO gurus urging people to remove bad incoming links to their sites. The interesting thing about the video, is the argument that sites are not being penalised by being linked to from 'bad sites'. What is happening is that the 'bad sites' linking in, for example spam blogs (sblogs) with very little content, whose only function is to provide a back link, are being marked as web spam, and all links coming from them are suddenly useless.

So yes, sites that had a lot of links from weak sites created purely to provide backlinks have lost rank and traffic. However they did not lose traffic because they were penalised by Penguin for having bad incoming links, but merely because they lost the boost these links were providing them. Removing the links will not restore the lost traffic, it will do exactly nothing. The only solution is to try and obtain good strong links from good sites.

This does not mean that having an unnatural looking link profile, a huge number of new links in a short period of time, all links with the same anchor text, all links from dofollow sites etc will not incur a penalty, just that this is taken care of by other parts of the Google algorithm.