Monday 14 May 2012

Google Penguin: a nightmare of many website owners


Once was top position in Google search, now lagging behind? Until April 24, 2012, everything was all right, but recently many websites lost their ranking dramatically. You know why? Google Penguin has badly punished those sites that do over-SEO. Before go in detail, let’s know what is the difference between Google Panda and Penguin. Google Panda is all about content, wherein Google Penguin is over-optimization. Too much of everything is bad. Same applies here. Let’s understand what are those over-optimizing elements?

Spun article/rewriting articles: If you plan to practice spun article or if you are already into rewriting article, please stop doing it immediately. Penguin knows that you are doing something spam. In fact, it was not considered as spam until March 2012, but it eventually it happened. Let me explain! Suppose you come up with five keywords and plan to do article submission. You told your SEO service provider to do article writing. This is real example I am giving you, not fake. One Bangalore based SEO company said this. Five keywords become 125 articles. It means one keyword gives you 25 articles. How they do. They just tweak the body copy and little changes in title. Some companies use rewrite software and then get the quality checked by their content writers. Added to this one content writer will have five different gmail account so that Google would not doubt on them.

Manipulated question and answer: Yahoo Answer is very popular, when it comes to question. But people started abusing it. Some people get paid for this. Let’s say you have a vegetarian hotel in Bangalore. What you will do is you will tell your friend to write a question in Yahoo answer “I am looking for good vegetarian hotel in Bangalore” and on the other hand you reply the question, saying, “we are one of the good vegetarian hotels in Bangalore. Talk to us for more info”. This kind of practice will not help anymore.

Blog comment: Paid blogging no more works.

Link building: Indian style of dialog. Sir we will give you 100 backlinks in just Rs 5000. Result is pucca (guaranteed) sir. Already we have done it. They are getting good result sir. Anchor text will be yours. We have special offer for you sir, which will end in two days sir. Please say no to paid link.

Paid directory submission: Same fashion as paid link building

So in a nut shell, we learned that overdoing/web spam is not tolerable. Do honestly and organically. Be customer-centric not SEO centric.

Who will be most affected: SEO service providers will be the most affected, but can recuperate if plan properly? If any of you outsource your SEO, be very careful about this. It is better to build your own in-house SEO team.