Wednesday, 7 November 2012

Google Penguin Problems?

By William McEwan


Search Marketing has undergone some huge changes this year. First Panda and now Penguin. Google continues to release search algorithm changes that have impacted webmasters and small business search rankings. Google stated these changes were intended to promote better search results and reduce spam. Sounds great but we've seen a ton of activity in the Internet marketing community discussing the changes and their impact to search results across the board.

These changes are forcing business owners and SEO companies to re-think their marketing campaigns. These SEO teams have had to go back to the drawing board in some instances where well-ranking websites have all but dropped off the radar. In the past, webmasters focused on keyword density and the volume of back-links to their pages. With this update keyword stuffing and back-links were both affected. Some data suggests domains which had a similar keyword as anchor from various sources were adversely affected. This would suggest that using varied anchor text from reliable sources in the way to go.

These updates also focused on unique and quality content. More and more quality content is extremely important for small business marketing. Gone are the days of cheap article spinning and automatic link distribution. Webmasters need to focus on writing meaningful content that gains back-links naturally. If you write engaging content that people in the targeted audience want to read, it will be read again and again and linked along the way.

Social media continues its rise in the Internet marketing landscape as well. Around the same time of the release of Penguin, Google announced a new Google Analytics offering directed at social media monitoring. You are now able to track your traffic back to see how the visitor arrived and see a wealth of information about your campaigns. It suggests that using social media is becoming paramount for search marketing campaigns. They can be leveraged to promote quality content that gets natural attention.

This year has already shown to be major year for search engine results. The search marketing community will take a while to normalize again. We can hope that spammers were the worst bunch of people hit and the web is a better place as a result. We can also hope that they don't reverse engineer the update and circumvent these changes. Google has stated that they intend on continuing these types of changes to further reduce spam and improve search accuracy. We can expect that search results will continue to move around a bit in the coming months as a result. We can hope that quality organic SEO with minimal spam is the wave of the future.




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