If you experienced a drop in traffic this spring then there’s a good chance that Google’s latest update caught you by surprise.
By Andy Atalla, founder and director of atom42
Google tweaks its algorithm every once in a while to fine tune its results, hit bad practices and make search a better experience for its users. Or at least that’s how the company would like it to be seen. For many eCommerce businesses, a Google update can mean a catastrophic fall in traffic and revenues, with some entrepreneurs left wondering what exactly hit them. The fact that Google will reveal little about its algorithms and often gives no notice to companies makes these changes all the more unsettling. On April 24th, it announced its Penguin update and many online businesses have been feeling the effects.
What was the Penguin update?
The Penguin update was really about cutting out link spam. Many of these links were from sites with p
oor reputations, or places often referred to as ‘content farms’, where articles are not written to be read but solely to help boost another site’s SEO. Such ‘spam links’ are now the target of Google’s search quality teams.
It would appear that Google is also wary when a site appears to have too many links from forum posts, blogs and other places where it seems likely that the beneficiary is behind the links.
In many ways, this shouldn’t be a surprise to businesses. Google has always placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of links, viewing them as recommendations. Therefore, it still wants to reward genuine recommendations, but will penalise those who are just patting themselves on the back. The unsettling aspect for webmasters is often the realisation that some of the links which had been improving their rankings were now working against them.
Has Google been in touch?
Some companies have actually received communication from Google about these changes, however most will not have done.
Assess your link profile
Webmastertools, is a free service provided by Google which offers site owners large amounts of information about their own website. Here you can find out who is linking to your site, and how many times they link to it. The next stage is to manually assess the quality of these sites, in particular the ones you have multiple links from. Low quality sites often have multiple ads above the fold, lists of irrelevant-seeming links and notably weak content. Next, make an effort to get the low-quality sites to remove those links where possible, this is usually best done by contacting the site owner and politely requesting that links to your site are removed.
Branded vs non-branded links
Many links will contain ‘anchor text’, and in the past site owners have strived to make this text keyword-rich to improve their SEO. But Penguin sees overly-optimised anchor text, particularly if the links contain identical or similar keywords across multiple sites, as unnatural, so it’s wise to aim for a higher proportion of branded links (which just contain your site’s URL or brand name) compared to keyword-heavy links.
Update your content
While Penguin was mainly concerned with down-grading spam links, suspect site content was also targeted. If you’ve over-optimised your site with keywords, you’ll need to cut those down to a more natural level. Even mild keyword-stuffing has been hit by Penguin and usage now needs to come across as 100% natural. Post-Penguin, Google is also better at identifying weak or non-user-friendly content, so aim to make yours as relevant and helpful as possible.
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