Animal House or Pet Cemetery

Well...maybe a little of both but a little over a week ago around April 24th Google came out with their newest algorithm for ranking sites in their search engines. This one they call the Google Penguin Update. Their Panda algorithm was named after the engineer that developed it, Navneet Panda, but Penguin....guess maybe they were trying to just be a little cute.

Many site owners aren't laughing so much now as their sites have suffered in the rankings due to the Google Penguin update and are loosing thousands in revenue. Those hardest hit lost their ranking due using the paid blog networks like BuildMyRank and AuthorityLinkNetwork. There are others similar and many have closed their doors.

Other sites have lost their ranking due to over-optimizing their websites. The Google penguin update tanked those sites using too many keywords on their pages and large numbers of anchor text links within their pages also.

The Google penguin and panda algorithms are also looking very close at sites that are under one year old. If that site has hundreds of backlinks and less than a year old, then the site could be penalized for link spamming. Basically your link popularity should increase gradually over time.

A few other things the Google penguin updates are targeting are duplicate content, link cloaking, and redirects, and any linking schemes designed to game the search engines.

What's the point on all these algorithm updates and changes? Here is a word from the Google Webmaster blog from the head of Google's Search Quality group, Matt Cutts.

"Basically the changes will negatively affect ranking that violate Google's guidelines for quality and content. Advice for site owners is to provide high quality information with the reader in mind and engage in white hat SEO and not other webspam tactics merely to game the search engines."

If you have been building your business using basic white hat methods then you have nothing to worry about, but there are a few thing you can do to recover and help increase your page rank the Google Penguin updates seem to favor.

1. Get Friendly. Google Penguin updates seem to be putting more emphasis on social networks. Put and use the Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and others social network buttons on your pages. Don't forget Pinterest. They are #3 behind Facebook and Twitter.

2. Vary anchor texts. Don't use the same words or phrase over and over when linking to your pages. Links should flow naturally within the context of the document.

3. Don't over optimize. No keyword stuffing. Check your pages for percentages of keywords used. 2-3% is about normal or about one keyword or phrase about every 100 words.

4. Inbound or external links. When creating content or otherwise posting links pointing to your pages, vary the pages they point to. Don't have all pointing to your home page but have some point to other pages within your site.

5. Internal links. Improve the links within your website. Make sure any keywords used in anchor text in the inner pages of your site are pointing to pages that are relevant to those keywords and naturally flow within the content of the document.

Don't try to short cut your business trying to get page rank. Google penguin updates expect to see link popularity increase over time, not overnight. Simple put, Google wants to view a site that represent a legitimate website marketing a product or service, and not one that appears to trying to game the system just to get more traffic to their pages.

The main purpose of Goggle and these Panda and Penguin updates are to insure the searcher is receiving the quality content they are looking for. Try to update your website frequently and with quality content. Search engines like quality sites with fresh, on target information so try to optimize your pages with that in mind.

There are many things you can do to help your rankings in the search engines. Best thing to do is think long term. You want to build a business to last and not have to worry about what Google or any of the other search engines are doing. Remember that Google is not the only game in town either. There are plenty of ways to generate traffic to your website without regard to Google. Creating quality content on your website and good affiliate marketing practices is what will make your business successful.