October 27, 2014

The mystery surrounding the latest version of Google’s Penguin Algorithm has been resolved. The company rolled out the recent update, Penguin 3.0, on October 18th. It is the fifth release of Penguin till date and is mainly intended to combat black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, irrelevant keywords, invisible text to name a few. Although the update will be more interest to the website owners and SEO specialists, but will also affect the millions of users that turn up to the search engine giant to search for anything.

What does the update target?

  • Exactly matched anchor text
  • Keyword rich anchor texts
  • Backlinks from spammy or low quality blogs and sites
  • Malware affected sites or blogs
  • Sites with high number of advertizements and partner links
  • Sites or blogs having many backlinks from guest blogging networks
  • Sites or blogs having artificial social sharing

How to protect your website?

Keeping in line with the previous versions of Penguin, the update will also target at penalize the websites that use spammy links to achieve a higher ranking in Google. Here are some of the ways in which you can safeguard your website from the drastic effects of the Penguin update:

  • Remove faulty backlinks: You might not have any idea about the number of spam websites that are sending links to your website. Make sure you do an audit of all the links that can negatively affect the ranking of your website. Every link to your website should abide by the quality guidelines of Google.
  • Remove exact match anchor texts: Over optimization can also lead to your website being penalized. Penguin update will target any anchor texts that are either exact match or keyword stuffed. Thus, make sure you remove all such links.
  • Remove links from guest blogging: If you have been getting links from guest blogs in the past, make sure you identify all those links and remove them.
  • Remove low quality and irrelevant links: If your website receives links from link farm directories, you must remove them. Google is completely aware that the only purpose of these indexes is to gain backlinks, particularly if these are not relevant to your business.
  • Remove highly optimized links: Keyword stuffing has been a thing of past. Although these anchors might be getting you lots of website traffic earlier, but with the recent Penguin update, you can not only drop your ranking but also face strict penalties by Google.

Battling any Google algorithm’s penalties is quite difficult. Therefore, it is suggested that you keep a constant check on your backlinks and avoid using black hat SEO techniques for better ranking of your website.