keyword stuffing
Opinions
Opinions

Google Penguin: Upcoming Update Announced.

After months of rumors that have raged on blogs, websites and industry forums, the time seems to have come: the dreaded and highly anticipated Penguin Update, an update to the anti-Webspam penalty algorithm, is upon us.
In fact, Google has been working for quite some time now to fight the difficult “virtual war” on bad-quality, bad-value sites, always making new changes to its analytics algorithms with the goal of cleaning up the Serp.

Matt Cutts, before the global audience of the Search marketing Expo 2013, announced the release of major updates not only of Penguin but also of Panda e EMD, highlighting Google’s tendency to reward more and more useful and quality content, at the expense of the sly and rampant Web spam.
There is talk of an event, according to Cutts himself, with apocalyptic outcomes that will have the SEO community debating for a long time.

How to survive the new updates of the dreaded Panda and Penguin? What will change for SEOs?

The release of the latest version of Google Penguin still has no official date to refer to, but there is talk of Penguin 2.0: with these words Matt Cutts points out how the upcoming update will drastically revolutionize the structure of Penguin and generate new algorithms that will analyze backlinks and keyword density. The widespread thought is that after the previous releases in May and October (1.1 and 1.2), life for Black Hat Seo will become truly impossible.
The Google engineer has always strongly reiterated the importance played by those responsible foroptimizing sites for search engines. The virtuous activities that every White Hat Seo, a figure defined as positive and constructive, should carry out are aimed at improving the indexing, usability and speed of a website and carried out mainly through:

    • definition and selection of the keywords most relevant to the content expected to be found by visiting each individual page of our site;
    • correct writing of html code and, in particular, title, H1, H2, H3 and meta data;
    • Compliance with the principles expressed in Google Webmaster from the point of view of: structure, syntax and semantics;

Care, originality and quality of the proposed content;

  • value backlinking.

Basically, those who have always worked to optimize their site in a transparent way (white hat SEO) while patiently waiting to climb the Serp will be able to sleep peaceful nights and toast to the long-awaited Serp cleanup of low-value sites that have managed to reach the top positions through unfair practices. Instead, those who have mistakenly broken one or more of the rules by seeing their site plummet to the bottom of the Serp of Google, Bing or Yahoo (to name the search engines most used by users) will always be able to analyze their mistakes and run for cover before being permanently banned.

But let’s see what are the main reasons for penalization

Google Penguin is an algorithm that aims to search and penalize all those sites guilty of moving up the SERPs with unfair practices. We can classify these Black Hat Seo activities into two macro-categories: the first related to over-optimization of sites, the second related to link building.

1. Over-optimization: if you over-optimize you will get the opposite result as Penguin will read this activity as unwanted interference to the search engine. Examples include keyword stuffing and link spamming.

keyword stuffingspam links

2. Fraudulent Link Building: link building is a very important activity and allows you to give credibility (Trust) to your Web pages recognized by Google as quality pages; this will allow your Web site to gradually increase its Page Rank. However, bad quality backlinks and excessive reciprocal link exchange will be penalized with zero indexing.
It is Cutts himself who declares the escalating war on the market related to link trading. The first concrete and striking action was a few weeks ago when the “Sape Links” link network took a very hard hit-the promise is that this will be only the first in a long series. Therefore, rely only on professional SEO agencies!

Black Hat Seo and White Hat Seo: comparing techniques

black hat white hat

Black Hat

  • hidden or duplicate content
  • meta keyword stuffing
  • Doorway or Gateways Pages
  • Link Farming
  • Cloaking

White Hat

  • Quality Content (Content is King)
  • Proper Use of Semantic Markers
  • Separating Content from Presentation via CSS
  • Title Attributes and Meta Data
  • Selection of the best and most relevant Keywords
  • Quality Link Building

What hat are you wearing?

Claudio Migliorati
SEO Specialist