7 mistakes you should avoid after the Penguin update

Posted on June 5th, 2012. Written by Andrei.

Any company that offers SEO or Internet Marketing services is directly interested in the Google Penguin subject. There are many sites which have been affected by this algorithm and they will still be. This new algorithm is working all the time. There are sites that are dumped on page 7 in the morning, in the evening are back on the first and next morning, they’re gone again. In my opinion, it will always be like that, even if this algorithm will switch to a new version.

Problems encountered on the internet, due to the Penguin update, started on April 24. Google says that this new algorithm was especially introduced to combat spam and penalizing sites which don’t respect Google’s rules. Until here, everything seems correct, as there are a lot of sites that violate Google’s rules. The injustice I see is that many sites were affected by this algorithm only because of the external links coming on a certain phrase. This helped until Penguin, but now it’s considered spam.

Many companies have turned to various people to submit their websites to directories. The problem is that people who do this don’t know how to make submissions or they submit the site to 4000-5000 directories, using the same name and description, or at least two.

 Don’t make these mistakes!

-Don’t submit your site to web directories, using the same title and description.

-Do not make comments on other niche blogs.

-Do not use links to the site home page with different anchors.

-Make sure that the description of the images (“Alt”) is related to the presented subject.

-Do not abuse the tags – platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. , offers the possibility to add tags to each article. The tags should contain just expressions (words) from the respective article, and not many, 4-7 tags are enough.

-Avoid adding links in the footer, on other sites, it can cause problems.

-Avoid adding links in the footer, from web directories or from other sites – here we have two disadvantages, if we receive a note from Google (PR), part of this note goes to the website in the footer (ok, a bit of the note, but still…). Another disadvantage is the fact that most links to Web directories upload in your site an image, perhaps some JavaScript or other weird codes, meaning more HTML applications and a lower optimizing percentage.

If your site has been affected by Google Penguin, recovery is very hard or impossible, you can even end up with changing your domain name. In February 2011, Google launched Google Panda, which has particularly affected sites without relevant content, sites presenting a service in many pages, with similar content. Meanwhile, Google has made several updates to Panda, until it reached a stable version, as they say. The link building part was not that affected and eventually, Google Penguin was launched, which caused a disaster on the Internet and left a few people jobless.

The most important thing is to respect the requirements of Google, even if we don’t have a choice. A website with relevant content, with a good link structure, well-optimized and with a nice design won’t have any problems.

Andrei