SEO can be roughly divided into two major parts: on-page optimization and
off-page optimization. The latter is usually referred to link building. Having
many backlinks linking to your website will bring you a lot of link juice, and
is telling Google that your website is authoritative and trustworthy. However, some
dishonest SEO practitioners create the so-called “link farm,” trying to
manipulate the ranking of websites. Google definitely doesn’t allow this
situation. Hence, let me introduce the topic of this post: Google Penguin, the
Webspam Sheriff.
(Photo credit: Amadeus Consulting)
What is Google Penguin?
Google Panda and Google Penguin are two algorithm updates that both fight
with unscrupulous SEOs who want to trick Google’s ranking
system. Panda update punishes sites that are considered low-quality, thin
content, or duplicate content. Penguin, on the other hand, punishes sites that
have too many unnatural backlinks. Websites which buy links in order to
increase their ranking are Penguin’s most-wanted. In short, Panda is the
on-site ranger, while Penguin is the off-site sheriff. Websites hit by either
of them will lose tons of traffic.
History of Google Penguin
Google Penguin 1.0 rolled
out on April 24, 2012. Prior to this date, it is relatively easy for a website
owner to increase the page ranking on the search engine results page. All he needed
to do was build a lot of links pointing to his website. Google definitely discouraged
this activity. Therefore, the goal of Google Penguin is to penalize this
intention.
Once a website is penalized
by Penguin, it has to wait till the next update or refresh to be re-evaluated.
The result could be positive, which will bring back the tremendous loss of
traffic, but it could also be negative, which will maintain the ban. Google
mentioned at SMX East this year that the next Penguin update, Penguin 4.0, will
be released before the end of 2015. The new version of Google Penguin is
rumored to be a real-time update. This means that a website can recover from
the penalty as soon as it fixes the problem detected by Penguin and doesn’t
need to wait for the next refresh or update.
Who Is Punishing Our Site, Panda or Penguin?
Whenever a website has a
substantial drop on traffic, the first question should be asked is: Is it Panda
or Penguin that is punishing me? The only way to get the traffic back is to figure
out the problem and fix the problem. Otherwise you might spend a lot of time
and effort improving your on-site quality while the website is actually being hit
by Penguin. And here are two ways to figure out this question:
1.)
Check when did the traffic
drop
A site owner can turn to
Google Analytics and find out when is the date that the website started losing
traffic. And check if there is any Panda or Penguin update/refresh close to
this date. If there’s a match, it is very obvious who is punishing your site.
2.)
Check the traffic of
keywords
The penalty of Panda
algorithm is site-wide. When www.example.com/blog is considered low quality and
hit by Panda, not only pages under /blog but also the traffic of www.example.com and other subfolders will
be influenced.
However, Penguin penalizes a
single page, instead of the entire site, based on a certain keyword. A site
owner can turn to tool like SEMrush to find out whether the losing traffic is
site-wide and whether the losing traffic is only on certain keywords. If there
is one page losing tremendous organic traffic from a search query, it is most
likely the influence of Penguin.
What do Penguin Penalize For?
Trying to sculpt a website’s
inbound links is undoubtedly something that Penguin the sheriff is not fond of.
As below, I list three possible signals that a website may be deemed as
dishonest.
1.)
Paid Links:
It remains unknown how
Google detects whether or not a website has paid to a “link farm” to generate
backlinks. But one thing for sure is that Google has been fighting with this
activity for a long time. Getting thousands of inbound links in a few days is absolutely
unnatural to Penguin’s eyes. Google might wipe your website entirely away from
its index as a result of the violation.
2.)
Low-Quality Backlinks
More or less, there are
always some low-quality websites linking to yours. However, when a very high
percentage of your backlinks do not have a great page authority, it’s a red
flag. Imagine a local restaurant has thousands of inbound links, but only few
of them is from high authority website, such as local news media, well-known foodie’s
blog, etc. This might be judged as link sculpting by Google.
3.)
Over-Optimized Anchor Texts
This one is interesting. A
basic SEO concept is that the anchor text can be used to help search engines
define the subject of the website that is linked to and the relevancy between
that website and its anchor text. For example:
(1.) inSegment is the best digital marketing agency
in Boston, here’s the link.
In a general situation, the
latter anchor text is more helpful for inSegment’s SEO performance since it is
telling Google that www.insegment.com is relevant to the term
“digital marketing agency.” The former sentence, however, isn’t that helpful
because the anchor text, “the link”, doesn’t tell Google much information.
Nevertheless, if Google
finds that whenever there’s a link linking to inSegment, the anchor text is the
exact “digital marketing agency.” Or there is an article mentions “digital
marketing agency” several times and all with the hyperlink of inSegment’s
website. Then, Penguin will definitely suspect that inSegment is trying to
manipulate its ranking on the keyword: digital marketing agency.
Negative SEO
Perhaps you are a
right-minded person and are thinking that Penguin is not something you need to
worry about. You never tried to fool Google’s algorithm with dishonorable
tricks. And you believe that your inbound marketing strategy can win you tons
of organic traffic and shares. I’m glad you are this kind of person, but
unfortunately, you might be wrong.
The link farming service and
dishonest SEOs have never left this industry. Since they can’t easily increase
clients’ websites ranking as they did before, they now put low-quality links
linking to the websites of clients’ competitors…
Yes, this is what happens on
the current SEO landscape. Your immoral competitors may link to your website
from a lot of link farms, where they used to build links for themselves, and
get you penalized by Google Penguin. Hence, it’s still good to understand what
Google Penguin is, even though you never thought of tricking Google.
Solution:
Just like a webmaster can
use rel= “nofollow” to tell search engines that the outbound links shouldn’t be
considered as a relevance signal between these websites, he/she can also
disavow inbound links (backlinks) through Google Search Console. As a result, Google
won’t take these disavowed links into account when assessing the quality of a
website. The detailed instruction can be found as follows: Search Console Help: DisavowBacklinks.
Reference:
Labels: English, SEO
