Imagine waking up one morning and find all your hard work has disappeared into thin air. That’s essentially what happened to some business website listings when Google introduced the Penguin update to its search engine algorithm on April 24, 2012.
This was the second major update to Google. The first was nicknamed Panda and it primarily targeted websites with poor content. Penguin went after phishers and spammers, who would often overuse keywords and spam blog comments with backlinks in an attempt to increase their PageRank, Google’s internal filtering system.
What Happened with the Penguin Update
In addition to just demoting particular pages, Panda also downgraded entire websites. This was allegedly done to de-list the junk, but some legit sites also got hit. Overall, Google said the Penguin update affected 3.1% of English queries. And to most of it, GOOD RIDDANCE! This allowed the most important person – the Google user – to receive better, more relevant results from their search queries.
Of course, this no solace to the legitimate businesses that got ensnared in Penguin’s net. Because Google doesn’t necessarily tell you why you’ve been penalized, that means you have to do a lot of detective work.
How to Recover Your PageRank
There are hundreds of (top-secret) factors Google uses to determine your PageRank and the listing order of its results. If you have indeed been hit by Penguin, first of all, take a good look at your site. Is it full of repetitive keywords? Are there multiple pages with duplicate content? Have you surreptitiously placed your links randomly on blogs or commented on posts in a spam-like fashion? Hint: Google doesn’t like that!
The best, easiest, and often fastest way to recover from Penguin is to hire an SEO professional. SEO Experts has been in the game since 2002 helping businesses just like you. Don’t dismay, contact us today!