Google yesterday released its much anticipated Penguin 2.0 algorithm and this has the potential to seriously damage a business’s ranking in Google search results. As any small business with a premium ranking website in Google will tell you, being removed from the home page of Google in search results can have a devastating impact on your business.
At GOOP, we have always focused on building search engine rankings by writing quality content on behalf of our clients in a well-structured flowing website that Google and other search engines reward with premium natural organic rankings.
We always recommend to clients that they write regular monthly blogs on their website to provide high quality content that will help boost your Google rankings.
Why Penguin penalises sites?
The volume of links was once enough to help boost your rankings in Google. However, Google has become increasingly aware of this being exploited by so called SEO experts to boost the Google rankings of not-so-well-built websites. Penguin 2.0 chases down these back links and measures the quality of these links. Where these links come from is now of critical importance to your website. Are they good reliable quality websites or are they ‘spammy’ and generic and possibly built for the purpose simply boosting search engine rankings by providing simple access to linking services.
Once you have ascertained where your links are coming from it is fairly easy to establish (for a web developer) if the websites back linking are good or bad. Does this back linking website have:
- low Google domain PageRank less than 1
- young websites typically less than six months old
- very high Alexa Rank greater than 7,000,000
- many external links from the page. We would suggest that more than 20 are too many. This is a key indicator that the site was set up to boost SEO
- links from websites with identical C class (the first three digits in the IP address) shows multiple sites set up on one server and is a clear indicator that this is set up for SEO deceptive purposes.
What to do if your website ranking has been impacted by Penguin 2.0!
The good news is this can be fixed – the bad news is that it will take some time. Call a reputable web developer that can find these back links quickly and identify these poor quality websites that link back to your website. Once this has been done, your website needs to be disassociated with these poor quality websites by lodging disavow applications via your Google Webmaster control. Again, the best thing you can do is call a reputable web developer for this purpose. Disavowing with Google though can take a notoriously long time and it may also help to touch base with the offending website to see if the offending back link can be physically removed from this website.