Part 4 – Diagnosing Penguin 2.0 Problems for Small Biz Owners
Matt Cutts, CEO of Google has always said that user experience is the most important part of any website. This means that every single algorithm change is designed to enhance the enjoyment and ease with which your readers use your site.
To prevent spammy content on the web, and spammy comments and the like being posted on blogs and in forums, Penguin seeks to identify low quality content and lower its ranking.
If you have links to your site coming from low quality websites, you may be affected by them.
Problem #1:
You have lots of links from low quality websites.
Reversal: Long, slow and difficult
Just like the anchor text issue, spammy links from low quality sites, from link wheels or other dodgy SEO sites will need careful, time-consuming removal. Again, ask the webmasters of these websites to remove them manually first and then disavow any that don’t get removed.
You can then begin building up high quality links that will improve your domain’s power overall. You can do this buy guest blogging, doing community outreach, real life networking with credible companies and brands, etc. It’s hard. You’ll need to get some stellar links to recover, but it is possible.
Problem #2:
You have added lots of keywords to your site on purpose.
Reversal: Easy, fast
Adding extra mentions of your keywords is called keyword stuffing and it’s a very old fashioned way of trying to gain traffic. Technically, this isn’t one of the ‘named’ causes of a Penguin problem and yet was found to be a factor after Penguin’s initial roll out.
Algorithm changes have long since devalued it, so you’re not doing yourself many favours. LSI keywords (latent semantic indexing) are synonyms, adjectives and related words that Google’s algorithm is trained to “expect” to see on your site. It indicates that your site is rich in quality information and content. Keyword stuffing is the antithesis of this.
Solution:
Replace excess mentions of your keyword with LSI keywords.
Problem #3:
Competitors are suddenly outperforming you.
Reversal: Difficult/maybe not possible
You have a competitor who has never really ranked for much, never put much thought into online marketing and never done any form of SEO. They might have a Facebook page and some great brand recognition offline, but online, they’re no competitor of yours. Suddenly they’re number 1 for all your keywords! Eek!
What’s happened is that this competitor has received accidental SEO. Happy customers mention them on their blogs, they get Tweeted about regularly, they have links from big industry sites. Their SEO was always good, but Google just couldn’t really understand it well before because there’s no anchor text at all and no on-site optimisation.
This is exactly the kind of site Google wants in the top spot and if they’ve finally changed the algorithm to make it happen, you’ll not have much luck un-changing it. Black hat SEO companies tend to either give up at this point or they go after them with SEO attacks. Don’t do it. Google is smarter than you.
Solution:
Real world networking, marketing and branding… that’s about all you can do! Raise your brand profile so that you can take them on.
If it’s not a great website; if it’s a spammy site with spammy links, it may have slipped through a crack in the algorithm – in that case you may be able to report it here.
With each of these algorithm updates, more and more SEO professionals flee the industry in favour of SEM (buying ads in search results). This is good news for small business as it levels the playing field a little more each time. Be the best at what you do, and eventually Google will reward you for it.
Part 2 looked at Preparing to Fix Penguin 2.0 Problems Yourself.
Part 3 covered the most common Penguin 2.0 problems and what you can do to DIY a solution.
