Should You Be Worried about Google?s Latest "Penguin" Update?

[djbaxter]

Should You Be Worried about Google’s Latest "Penguin" Update?
by Sonia Simone, CopyBlogger
May 23, 2012

Penguin isn’t as new as you might think
For the most part, Penguin is simply automating work that the Google search quality team was already doing manually. Were you doing something tricky to cloak your keywords, or participating in dodgy link exchanges? Before, Google had a quiet army of employees out scouring the web to look for spammy practices like this. Many SEO researchers actually thought this work was automated already, because the Google team was so diligent. (They only looked like a robot army …)

Now Google’s algorithms have at least partly caught up with their manual work. Which means they’re just getting a little better at catching what was already “against the rules.”

What is "overoptimization"?
One of the specific targets of Penguin is what’s called "overoptimization." That means search optimization that’s a little too perfect. When 99% of the links to you are using your preferred keyword term as anchor text, for example. The penalty also applies to what’s called keyword stuffing... "stuffing" your keyword too many times into your content is actually probably more harmful than slightly underusing your term...

There’s a very simple test to see if you’ve overdone this: Read your content out loud and see if it will make sense to a human reader. If it’s useful and "sounds right" to a person, it’s unlikely to trigger any red flags with the search engines, today or tomorrow. That’s the key to good SEO copywriting, and it always will be. Write for humans first.

Read more...

 

[AllanJames]

Well, I've given up about worrying - because after chasing my tail through all the ongoing changes and updates I decided to do three things:

1) Just write to produce the highest quality and most useful content for the readers of my affiliate training blog. No more gaming the system, not artificial link building, not even much notice on keyword density and off page SEO of any sort. The visibility of my training site has continued to rise and back-linking is occurring naturally.

2) I moved a lot of my 'free' traffic generation activities to Video Marketing on Youtube.

3) I used the time I freed up to improving and growing my email marketing.

Seems do be doing well.

 

[CarolWales]

When it comes to Google updates, you cant always keep doing the same thing. In order to maintain a good ranking in the Google search results, it is essential to change the marketing strategies in accordance with the updates given by Google. For Google it is essential to present the right information to the people and that?s the reason why the updates are given. Designing the search engine optimization strategies in accordance with Google is the best thing you can do for securing and maintaining good search engine rankings for your keywords.

 

[Laura61]

The mass panic that seems to occur after each algorithm change is kind of silly in my opinion. If we're building quality sites and using solid, reasonable off-site SEO techniques, we don't need to worry. Just keep plugging away!

 

[artistictouchbhm]

People are panicing cause they've all done Black hat SEO tactics to get on first page the quickiest way.

Content is king and as long as that principal stays in place then you'll see what I mean.

 

[JamesQ]

I completely agree. Content is still king and adding value in your content should paramount. The stipulations of the new update are not that complicated. If your inbund links come across as genuine you should be ok.