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The Aftermath of Google Penguin: Picking Up the Pieces

May. 15, 2012

It has now been 3 weeks since Google unrolled its algorithm changes, better known as Google Penguin. Many businesses and customers of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are still feeling the brunt and the consequences of these changes. This article seeks the answers with the intent to inform you of your next step.

Overview:

Google does not share the pain over its algorithm changes. Matt Cutts, the head of the web spam team believes the move was a success. Things from his standpoint are improving and the company is continuing to fight spam and to improve consumer and website user experience.

But the question whether things are improving still stands. SEO Analyst Danny Sullivan set out to answer this question for the curious businessmen and businesswomen. He noted how some well-established sites lost their rankings after the algorithm changes came into effect. Taking the top spots were low-quality sites which have little or no credibility.

Cutts is optimistic about the whole situation. He does not believe that these issues were caused by Google Penguin and were there before the changes took place. With time, he believes that low-quality sites will also find their proper place inside search engines.

Google Guidelines To Follow:

Following these guidelines will help your website be easily found, ranked and indexed. This is important, especially if your site was hit by the Google Penguin algorithim changes.

Design & Content Guidelines

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links.

Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and correct HTML.

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages.

Technical Guidelines

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. Search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site when the site contains fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, and Flash.
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site.

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it`s current for your site so that you don`t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler.

Visit http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you`re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings.
If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don`t add much value for users coming from search engines.
Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Monitor your site`s performance and optimize load times.

Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, or WebPageTest.

To read more about the guidelines click here.

What Now?

Google Penguin is an ongoing project. It tags things that it thinks is spam. Matt Cutts assures Google users and customers that things will recover. However, it still remains to be seen whether this will be the case.

For now, he offers one tip to website owners. He directs them to clean up the spam or start all over again. Once done, he encourages website owners to reapply for reconsideration.

About Wisdek Corp:

Since 1998, Wisdek Corp. has grown from a pioneer in a non-existent industry to a multinational corporation that is ranked amongst the top 30 SEO companies in Canada by top.seo.com. We provide PPC Management, link building, content development, video marketing (VSEO), ReMarketing and SEO Toronto based services to companies of all sizes. Although our head office is located in Toronto, we retain offices in more than 10 countries.