Google Penguin Update – What Can You Do?

Penguin update2 150x150 Google Penguin UpdateAccording to Google’s own  Matt Cutts : “ We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and a great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

 

Now I’ve had a lot of people asking for advice on SEO following this penguin updates.

Well let’s go through what the updates actually were…

  1. There was some algorithmic change to give over optimized sites less relevance in the Google search. This means that all of the <h1> keywords on site, super optimized headlines, titles and meta keywords etc need to be reduced. Basically dumb down your on page SEO.
    Change your site title to be more generalized. So instead of having ‘Nintendo Games Wii Blog’ that optimizes for that phrase, change this as an example to ‘Top Nintendo Wii Games Reviews’ etc
    So change to be a little more generalized but still containing your keywords (if possible).
  2. You need to now vary your anchor text and also interlink on your inner pages on your site.
    To do this we need to increase the number of anchor links we create for out target pages. We need to add some long tail versions so we have a minimum of 3/4 versions of keywords going to a targeted page instead of a single keyword.
    If we add 2 links in our article to our target page, make the second link point to your main domain or a different inner page on your site that is still keyword relevant.
  3. Article quality (a Big one here)
    We need to triple check the quality of our articles, especially if we are using spun articles. If you are using a spun article then we need to now RECHECK the article 5-6 times after spinning and double check that the structure is of excellent quality.

We can use the following site to get a structure report for our articles

http://ed.grammarly.com/editor/view 

Last but not least

Post to your main site more often.

Post to your main site on average around every 4 days (this can be less in niches with low competition) with a totally unique article and make sure that the article is indexed before spinning the article to be posted elsewhere. In the main site article add a link to the main page of the blog and another internal page.

I’ll have more on the Google Penguin Update in the near future.