How Penguin will Affect your Blog?
The bottom line is that it depends greatly on how you had been promoting your blog, how popular it was beforehand and who had been linking back to you.
Possible Negative Effects and their Causes
If your blog was using black hat SEO tactics such as frequently posting low quality content whose main purpose was to present niche keywords for Google’s search bots without focusing on your human readers, then you will be quite likely be negatively affected by Penguin. The same goes for infrequent posts of copied content that was taken from other sites and barely rehashed or not changed at all. Through this, a lot of content aggregator blogs were affected negatively; Google wanted them to say something of their own, not just repeat what someone else had taken the time to write.
If your blog was attempting to build links by spamming other websites with comment based links; or buying links from link farms, other low quality content sites or if you were simply creating backlinks to your posts on sites with low content quality and little relevance to your niche, then your blog will probably be affected negatively.
Another thing which may affect your blog negatively is a combination of having numerous backlinks from dubious and threadbare (content-wise) websites leading to your pages and at the same time repeatedly using the keyword or phrase for the anchor text in each of these links. This double combination was apparently considered quite spammy by Google since some of the most heavily affected websites were doing this.
One further possible cause for negative Penguin impact could also be a lack of content. If you were only posting to your blog intermittently and without a high degree of freshness within your niche, this may have also negatively affected your search rank. However, take this last idea with a grain of salt, since it is quite common for Google to give rank based on post or page relevance to a search without considering how prolific and up-to-date the site behind that page is.
Positive Impacts of Penguin
Penguin wasn’t all bad news, not by a long shot. If anything it benefitted more websites by far than the number it hurt. This is because as a whole search rank is mostly a zero sum game in which one page ranks at the expense of others. Thus, if a number of websites or blogs were using black hat to manipulate the search rankings in their favor, honest blogs in the same niches were losing positions against the black hat competitors. This is how Penguins elimination of black had operators directly helped all the rest:
According to Matt Cutts of Google, Penguins initial release negatively affected an estimated 3% of all indexed websites. This means that that the rankings taken away from those dissipated 3% were then spread amongst a larger number of more honest websites. The effect would have varied based on a number of factors such as niche and popularity but many white hat websites rose in the Google search rank for their niches because their spammy competitors had been bumped down.
If you were the owner of a blog that never used any obvious black hat SEO, you probably saw yourself at least marginally moving up the search rank.
Now, let’s see what you as a blog owner can do to see that you continue staying clean with Penguin and its future modifications and enhancements.
SEO without Worrying about Google Penguin (Or other updates)
Instead of focusing on an ever-shifting multitude of spam tactics to raise your Google search rank by manipulating search bots and algorithms; you should instead simply align your blog with Google’s ultimate interests and those of your readers to gain lasting popularity.
1. Focus on Human Readers
Create all of your content, be it text, photos or videos, for the sake of pleasing your human readers. Not only are they ultimately your real and only customers, they are also the same people Google wants to see you pleasing. And if the Google engine notices through their algorithm that your site is doing this, they will most likely give you an upward boost.
Forget writing badly structured, keyword stuffed content or creating duplicate content. Instead, craft informative quality work that really entertains your target audience; causing them to share what you’re offering through their own internet channels, spreading the word and your page rank.
Your overall point should be to create a place where your fans are pleased, not just a tricky toy for collecting search engine ranking.
2. Look for Valuable Backlinks
It’s been said that a single backlink to your blog that came from a website like techcrunch.com or wired.com is worth more than several thousand content farm “SEO boosting” backlinks. Thus, the obvious thing is to forget about link spam or buying reams of backlinks and focus on getting noticed and trusted by just two or three high quality sites in order to boost your SEO profile.
You can pull this off by following step 1 above; create blog content that interests or informs people enough to want to share it inside your niche.
3. Keep your Content Fresh
As a blogger, you have the single best site format for displaying constant fresh and new content in your niche. Additionally, so do thousands of other bloggers just like you. Because of this, settle nicely into the details of your online niche and find ways to create the largest possible amount of content you can on a regular basis. Whatever else you do with your blog, keeping it freshly stocked with new information and video, audio or text content is a primary goal and very useful tool for competing with rival websites on the Google rank index.
About the author
Carl Petoskey is a well-known freelance writer that has covered the tech realm for over a decade. When Carl’s not busy writing poignant articles, you can find him reviewing business Internet service providers or working on his small business consulting.