Google has released three algorithmic updates in April that have already made May a very busy month. The purpose of these updates is to weed out excessive spamming and to award organic links. As always, a few legitimate sites have been hurt by this update, forcing us all to review our SEO strategy.
The Panda update focuses on duplicate content and content scraping, and the Penguin update focuses on linking strategies.
There has been much talk about how Penguin is actually affecting everyone, but I have narrowed it down to these three major factors:
· Low quality backlinks. It is starting to look like Google is penalizing you if you have any backlinks that are not organic or high quality.
· Backlinks from websites that do not match your content. If you are accepting backlinks from any website or linking together your own sites with different content then it is recommended that you stop.
· An excessive amount of links that point back to a website with exact match keywords in the anchor texts.
What to do?
1. Remove unrelated or spammy links and implement an organic link strategy.
2. Mix up your keywords and include your brand name and URL in the links
a. 20% of your keyword links should be non-keyword or brand-based
3. Remove footer links
We always recommend small changes to our clients, and for them to be patient. Make one change and give it a few weeks to let it take effect, and see how the rankings change. It is best to always be aware of recent updates because the Google algorithm never sleeps.
