what is google penguin
TRANSCRIPT
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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