When the most recent refresh of the Penguin update - now known as Penguin 3.0, was rolled out in October, many businesses noticed themselves sliding down the search rankings while others have been able to realise the benefits of addressing the requirements set out in Penguin 2.0
This article explains why the vital steps digital marketers have taken to recover from Penguin 2.0 are paying dividends now, and what those who have been affected by the latest implementation can do to minimise the damage caused.
Ringing the changes
Over recent years the digital marketing world has been taken by storm by Google’s Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates. Whilst they presented a challenge for many businesses and digital marketers initially, overall they played a crucial role in driving up the quality of online content. Created with the purpose of removing spammy, poor quality and duplicate content, improving the accuracy of search results in relation to more conversational search terms or voice search capabilities, these algorithms and their updates steered the industry towards serving up the most appropriate results for the search being made.
In response digital marketing and SEO professionals had to change their modus operandi, moving away from old school SEO techniques like link farming and undoing the results of such activities, instead focussing on the creation of what Google deemed quality content and thereby quality link earning.
Google defines quality content as being holistic, not shallowly covering the topic at hand and simply being peppered with specific keywords relating to the business in hand, rather comprehensively covering related topics and subject areas with a wide variety of search terms around that business area, for example from proof terms (terms which appear in all articles on the topic in hand) and relevant terms (terms which form part of a sub-topic).
In addition to covering the topic thoroughly, the content must serve a useful purpose to the reader, with clusters of relevant content, and must have good readability. In this context readability refers to word and sentence length, with copy that steers away from unwieldy terminology and unnecessarily long sentences being considered more readable and therefore of high quality. Ensuring content includes quality images and video where appropriate and isn’t overly self-promotional will also help Google look upon it favourably.
Updated update
The latest update to the Penguin algorithm (which was originally rolled out on April 24, 2012), now commonly termed Penguin 3.0, started to roll out on 17th October this year (lasting several weeks) to further impact onsite and offsite links deemed as spammy or unnatural. Penguin 3.0’s impact was felt by those links within low quality content, over-optimised anchor text, sites using automated and low quality links, and those linking from private blogger networks. Those with a multitude of links without social shares to validate them were also affected, as there is evidence that Google is increasingly evaluating engagement signals as a marker of how popular content is, and as social shares are theoretically easier to gain, links should by logic have plenty of ‘likes’ and shares to support them. Sites which have an uneven distribution of links, with lots of inbound links to one page, and hardly any to others, were also penalised.
This update won’t have affected those who had already addressed the issues pinpointed by the original Penguin implementation, in fact they would have benefitted from it as the refresh was intended to reorder ratings based on those that hadn’t addressed their spammy practises.
Looking forward
Digital marketers and businesses have nothing to fear from algorithm updates and refreshes such as Penguin 3.0 if they address the quality issues Google is so clearly prioritising. Google wants the internet to contain more quality, useful content, where those that provide the most value to users via useful, appealing and original content and who can evidence the worth of their content and contributions through high quality off site links and social shares will win the rankings race over those whose contributions are of less value. Furthermore those who have to continue using old school techniques will be penalised for their lack of originality and commitment to quality by plummeting down the rankings into obscurity. There are no longer any ‘quick fixes’ when it comes to SEO – which has now evolved to included many of the tactics used in traditional marketing and anyone who thinks they can cheat this system is quite simply mistaken. The winners when refreshes and updates from Google hit will always be those that have put more effort into their digital content and marketing activities.
So how should those who have been hit by Panda 3.0 immediately address the impact the refresh has had on their business? The simple answer is to have a very good ‘cleanse’ online of their link profile to ensure they aren’t using exact match domain names or concentrating all inbound links to one site page. For those whose social signals are lacking, it is vital they ensure their social strategy is representative of the traction achieved via links.
Sadly, if a site has been hit by Penguin 3.0, even taken reparative action won’t help it to recover overnight.
Key steps to take include;
· Identifying all offending links. Trawl any article directories, link farms, private blogger networks, irrelevant forums and any other aggregator sites for off-site links.
· Check on site webspam. Although these black hat techniques should be a thing of the past by now, - as for that matter should off-site spam – checking the entire site thoroughly for any residual content such as keyword stuffing, link cloaking and hidden text and removing it will help with the recovery
· Remove all offsite offending links. Contacting the webmasters in charge of source sites with link removal requests, and disavowing the links from sites that are really unresponsive is crucial to minimising and the damage caused.
· File a reconsideration request. If you’ve been hit with a manual penalty by Google, once you’ve identified and removed offending links you’ll need to contact Google with a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools.
· Change your ways. Ensuring that in the future only quality, relevant off-site links are published, attracting them with excellent onsite content.
For those that aren’t hit directly with a manual penalty and are able to have it removed via a reconsideration request, there may be a painful wait until the next Penguin update or ‘refresh’ to see any improvement in search rankings. Whilst the latest Penguin update was only projected to have affected around 1 percent of all British sites, its significant impact has been felt by those that are still dragging their feet in the quality content game. As Google is only set to enforce its rules more vehemently as time goes on, they do so at their peril.
By Kath Dawson, creative director at Strategy Digital.
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