Google’s coined the term Penguin to denote the side of their secret search algorithm which was originally developed to combat webmasters who employ artificial link-schemes. These link systems aim to artificially increase the number of links pointing to their site and in doing so raise a website’s position on Google’s results pages.
While proponents of this kind of link-exchange system consider it to be a form of Search Engine Optimisation, Google maintains that the practice manipulates search engine results and so violates Google Webmaster Guidelines. In fact, many don’t realise that Google started on a stage at Pub Con and challenged the audience to ‘spam’ (aka webspam) their new search engine. Quite a number of audience members were successful and Google has been locked in a war with spammers ever since all the while silently using these techniques to their advantage and improving the integrity of the algorithm.
Gone are the days of the evil dictator Penguin updates and now there’s ways to provide feedback via channels which allow users to both report links they consider to be spam, and to dispute a negative ranking assignment by the algorithm.
Fewer people realise that the new Penguin updates operate in real time, thus webmasters need to pay continuous attention to their rankings and the quality of their link systems. As links are methodically flagged for positive or negative quality, the ranking of the site they are connected to will be affected via the search engine results page (SERP) positions. This new rolling process allows sites to be constantly penalized (for poor quality spam links) or rewarded (for good quality, natural links).
In addition to impacting a website’s ranking on search result pages, the new Penguin may be used as a tool to target portions of a website for optimisation. It will allow webmasters to isolate those pages and links that Penguin has flagged as containing low-quality links or spam content and improving the construction until Penguin provides a positive flag.
By managing hundreds of websites and SEO campaigns, James Hammon & Co knows it’s more important than ever for content producers to monitor the quality of their content, maintain a properly optimised code structure and combine this with a solid system of backlinks.
Search Engine Optimisation has been a continually evolving art since its inception. Website owners who embrace these changes and work within the system instead of seeking to circumvent it will be rewarded with content that is more easily discovered by their target market.
If you need answers, contact us today, for an independent SEO assessment on your website.
