Original Thought Should Celebrate Google's Penguin 2.0

    Google’s Penguin and Panda are attacking the search engine rankings of websites that use black-hat SEO procedures in a way to artificially raise their own Page Rank. This angry little incarnation, now version 2.0., has been a cause of concern for many developers who love to push the envelope.

    If you’re happily playing by the rules you should be fine but unfortunately some content rich websites, using what they thought was white hat, fell prey to Penguins attacks as well. From what I have heard, cleaning this up requires the purging of some questionable backlinks and the deliberate turning down of the keyword overstuffing.

    If you’re not playing by the rules, the path you paved, unfortunately, has taken you down a dark damp alley that features bad odours and poor lighting. With this new algorithm running, never mind the shadow of Penguin's spam reporting feature, lurks many nasty surprises that will spring out every now and then.

    Keep your head hung low and watch your back because eyebrows singe easily in this environment.

    One main reason for the loss in site juice is due to the fact that anchor text was being directed to a few specific keyword rich pages instead of actually linking to good original content.

    The Penguin update trained its eyes on the quality of backlinks, not the quantity.

    If your site had anchored content linked to the same old SEO specific keywords you were gambling with your PageRank. Luckly, some web-sites had no problems whatsoever but others were ripped apart, so to say.

    Google also made a specific point to target doorway pages that try and fool search engines.

    In case you didn’t know, doorway pages are web pages that are created specificaly to re-direct traffic to a new page using a lightning fast re-direct.This is for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results of popular phrases to attract traffic.

    When the user enters the site they are sent immediatly to a different page. This new page might have a topic that has nothing to do with what the visitor was looking for in the first place..

    Black hat SEO , plain and simple

    The nasty little Penguin also took a harder look at keyword and Meta Tag stuffing.

    Again for those who do not know, keyword stuffing is when you place popular targeted words into the body of a page that has little real relevance to the actual content presented.

    Meta tag stuffing is the dark art of using popular keywords in the head tag that is not relevanct with the topic being displayed to the user.

    As for duplicate content...well that is a whole new kettle of fish. Content on the net has been constantly repeated Ad nauseam to generate traffic thru mass volume injection. Some Webmasters do not even use a thesaurus to at least try and alter what they are copying. Hopefully Google continues to make Penguin even stronger so that we can finally get rid of news farms that mirror what’s popular to obtain a better page rank.

    Keep practicing black hat SEO and you might just get a special visit from that Nasty little Penguin,,,,

Fitting quotes:

'He looks about as happy as a penguin in a microwave.'
Sid Waddell

Chicken and fish?. You know what you should do?

      'Combine them, eat a penguin.'
Dave Attell