Google Penguin is the latest update of Google’s to make a splash on the internet. It comes after the much feared Panda release in 2011, and has been called the ‘over-optimization’ update. The question is, how will this algorithm update affect your future social media goals? Today, I’m going to discuss Google Penguin, and how it fits in with your social profile.
Courtesy of seo-hacker.com
What is Google Penguin?
Put frankly, Google Penguin is another webspam update, that targets websites who are actively using black hat SEO, or sneaky, unethical SEO tactics to get their sites ranked. Anything from cloaking, spamdexing, spam commenting, link schemes, duplicate content and keyword stuffing can be flagged by Penguin.
The tricky bit comes in when you hit those grey areas. If you do article marketing, blog marketing and linkbuilding – then you could be offending the Penguin!
Changes To Your Social Media Campaign
You already know that SEO and social media are inevitably linked together. You can’t have one without the other. After all, what’s the point of blogging if no-one will ever get to read your post. This is where the danger comes in. I’ve learned that to make sure you’re on the right side of these happy feet – make these changes now!
• Check that your content has a keyword density of 2% or less. Any more, and Google Penguin will think you’re keyword stuffing.
• Check your blog’s footer, header and sidebars for unnatural or artificial links. Remove them as soon as you can.
• If you’ve been linkbuilding to drive traffic to your blog – check your link networks in Google Webmaster Tools. Remove links on poor or weak sites.
• Also check out your blog and forum comments and links. If these are spam, or are on a bad site, its best to remove them.
• Check your anchor text. It’s tempting to use ‘exact match’ keywords when you add links to content, but don’t! Link diversity is just as important!
• Make sure that your content always has social media buttons. Google likes social sharing and interaction, and they’re assigning more weight to it daily.
• To offset a site that has been flagged by Google Penguin, add fresh, high quality links to your blogs, directories and article campaigns.
• Make sure that your content is always top notch, and that it contains multimedia. Google loves posts with video, slideshows and images.
Google is taking social interaction seriously these days, and we’re seeing it more and more in their algorithm changes. Posts that have hundreds of comments, shares, likes and tweets tend to rank higher already. This is why it’s clear that all content
online must be accompanied by a strong social infrastructure.
Google Penguin is just the first taste of things to come. Google wants their results to be user focused, which means that your website needs to embody that philosophy. In fact, if there’s an element on your website or blog that isn’t user focused, it shouldn’t be there!
How else can the SMM community avoid being penalized by Google Penguin? All opinions are welcome!