CT Web Marketing Blog

When people talk about the old days of SEO, they might just be talking about a few months ago. That is how fast things change with the search engines. Google changes its search engine algorithm five or six times every year. The goal of the search engines is to make searches more efficient for users. The goal of business websites, especially the small businesses, is to get some of the web traffic generated by user searchers. Efficiency for users and generating website traffic is not always compatible.
One of the recent changes is called “semantic search”. The goal of Google, the makers of this recent update, is to add something of a human element. The new algorithm is designed to “guess” what you are actually searching for. With semantic search, Google is aiming to give users information related to their queries right on the search page. Other websites will still be listed, at least for the time being, but Google will actually be competing with other websites for website traffic.

The goal of this program is not completely clear. Why does Google want non-income generating traffic? Whatever the reason, it is something for e-businesses and other website owners to be aware of.
In the really old days of SEO, keywords were “it”. If you had the right keywords on your webpages and you used them often enough, you could be sure that your website would get high rankings.
Now, Google and other search engines penalize websites for “keyword stuffing”. Just last year, they also announced that they would penalize websites for knowingly posting duplicate content.
Link schemes were also mentioned as something the new “Penguin” algorithm would be looking for and not for good reasons. If link schemes are identified or even suspected, the website could be pushed to the last page of the search engine results.

If you want to attract traffic to your website and you also want to get decent rankings on search engine results for specific keywords, there are some things to keep in mind. The first thing is to be completely honest.

Don’t do any of the things I’ve mentioned that Google doesn’t like. Avoid excessive keyword usage. Keep your content real and unique. Never publish content you have copied from another website.
Take advantage of other Internet marketing tools. Don’t rely too heavily on the search engines to get traffic to your site. Use social networks, email, advertising and other “honest” tools to get your traffic.
There is only one thing that we can say for sure about the future of SEO. It will change. If you avoid using tricks to get your website traffic, the changes should have little effect on your business.

For those of us who have suffered from April’s Penguin update we have below from Blog Guru some steps you can take to correct the situation. There are also rumors that Google will be coming out with another update in the spring. Penguin was implemented on April 24, 2012 and affected approximately 3.1% of all search queries in English. Panda by comparison affected about 12% of search queries. The Panda mainly focus on content but Penguin focus on backlinks.

Every updates from big giant Google is targeting over optimized websites. Penguin does the same and the update mainly targets the websites who does un-natural link building or spam link building. Many black hat cats have been caught by Google Penguin. The websites which uses black hat SEO tools are mainly suffered from the Google Penguin update.
Beware of Google Penguin Update
You can analyze your live links from Google Webmaster tools or any other tools. If you saw a sudden drop in live links then your website may be at risk. The sudden drop occurs because Google have started de-indexing the website which contains your backlinks.

If you have many backlinks from such websites then your blog or website is in risk of Google Penguin update. Also if your website experienced a sudden increase of backlinks then Google will think that your website is making unnatural backlinks and will be affected by the Google Penguin update.

What to do if you were affected by the update
To recover from Google Penguin update you need to analyze the websites which suffered from Penguins. Then we have to build new link building strategy which will not come under the black list of Penguins. I will give step by step procedure to recover from Google Penguin update or will give steps to protect your websites from Google Penguins. Penguin targets the unnatural backlinks which is a backlink produced by black hat techniques with the help of black hat software. So you have to make your link natural as possible. Don’t bump a large amount of backlinks in one day. This can make Google alert that your website is crating unnatural links and will be caught by Penguin. Also take quality websites while creating backlinks and don’t make backlinks from websites having page rank less than one.
Use backlinks from relative websites
The more relative your website backlinks are then the more weight Google gives them and Penguin will actually add value to your website. This is because the backlinks from niche websites will look more natural compared to backlinks from unrelated websites. For example if your blog is about French cooking and you are getting backlinks from a blog which concentrates on refinancing it’s considered an unnatural link and it would be penalized by Google. Google will treat this as unnatural backlink and your website will be affected by Penguin.