How To Recover From The Google Penguin Update

Google’s latest effort against the web spam is its Penguin update. This update has seen 3% of online searches effected and punished by over optimisation or spammy links. 3% may not seem like a lot but when you consider the billions of websites that are out there it becomes a significant number. If your website has been hit by this update then you may be losing a lot of business and be in a state of general panic. If you are in this situation then fear not as here are some ways that your website can recover and start to rank highly again.

Poor Quality Links Have To Go

If you find that your site’s rankings have significantly dropped then it is more than likely that you have links coming into to your site from low quality and or irrelevant websites. This is often the result of link building strategies that were popular a few years ago. These strategies focused on building the biggest amount of links possible without caring about the quality of the sites linking to you or their relevance to your website. You will need to manually request that each bad link to your site be removed by the owner of that site.

Be Careful With Your Anchor Text

One of the major things to be punished by this latest Google update is the over optimisation of anchor text. So if you have been linking back to your website using the same anchor text time and time again then there is a good chance that your rankings for that key word or phrase will have fallen. You need to mix up your anchor text a bit and even include some generic links such as “click here” so that your backlinks are as natural as possible.

Act Naturally

As I have already touched on it is important that your website and linking system is as natural as possible. This is Google’s overall aim and the reason that they make updates such as Penguin in the first place. They don’t want to stop SEO but they want to stop people and websites gaining an unfair advantage by over optimising and exploiting the system. If you want to guarantee the safety and high rankings of your site then anatural linking strategy through social media and high quality content is the only way forward.

Forget Google, It’s The User That Counts

Okay don’t completely forget Google as you still need to operate within their rules and guidelines but too many website owners are constantly trying to keep up with Google and they forget the real reason they have a website. The most important people on any website owner’s mind should be the user of their site. They are the people who will actually spend time on your site, use your service and or buy your products so you should be concentrating on making your site as user friendly as possible. If you try to make your site as entertaining, informative and easy to use as it can be then Google will appreciate it and you may just find that by not focusing on pleasing Google so much you will actually please them more.

So if your website is down in the Google dumps then there are a few things you can do to claw your way back up but just remember that spammy tactics will no longer cut it with Google so make sure you are focused on making the best possible website for your users from now on.

Sally Persnap is a business owner who recently lost a lot of business due to her website being punished by the Penguin update. She then hired a SEO Armagh company to help her recover and she is now ranking highly again but this time in a natural way.