What is Google Penguin?

Google’s Penguin update is here, and you may have already noticed it starting to affect your search engine rankings. So far, it appears that most search engine rankings changes are in a negative direction – especially for those in the internet marketing community. At the same time, Penguin is going to crack down harshly on those webmasters who stuff pages full of keywords

and engage in other webspam tactics. Put simply, Google is sick of having spammy, low-quality sites appearing at

the top of their search rankings, and it’s in their best interest to penalize these sites as being “over-optimized.”

What does it mean when a site is “over-optimized”?

One of the biggest signals of over-optimization is having multiple pages, posts, and subdomains that have

essentially the same content. While Google’s duplicate content penalty has been around for a while, Penguin takes

a renewed attack against webmasters who optimize individual pages for specific, highly similar terms.

For example, if you’re looking to buy cars in New York, then an over-optimized website may have specific landing

pages for “cars New York”, “New York City auto”, and “buy cars New York City”. Even if these pages provide helpful

information, it’s not intuitive to have users travel to each one of these pages to get the information they need. This

is why Google is rewarding sites that have less-than-optimized headings. For example, a page with “A basic guide

to buying cars in New York City” as its header may start to appear at the top of search engine rankings in front of

all of the other pages listed above.

Another signal of over-optimization is using hidden texts and cloaked links in order to trick Google Penguin Update

into thinking that your website is more legitimate than it actually is. Similarly, if Google notices a lot of links

pointing towards your website from untrustworthy sources, then that can also be a signal of over-optimization. In

all of these cases, your website will be hit with a stiff penalty.

Conclusion

Matt Cutts has clamped down heavily upon duplicate content during time as the head of Google’s webspam team.

We all knew something like the Penguin update was going to come in the near future, but not all of us knew how

to protect our sites from its effects. Stay tuned to our Metaphix blog over the next 24 hours as we unveil

everything you need to know about the Google Penguin update and how to ensure your websites remain on the

front page.

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