It’s trickier to be a search engine optimization specialist than ever at this time. Google – in their infinite wisdom – has decided to put out some incredibly painful updates that can seriously damage the traffic that certain website owners get. While Google certainly intends to help its visitors with these updates, they do not always get them right. And when that happens good websites suffer needlessly.
In the case of the Google Penguin update in its various forms, there are techniques that people can use to experience Penguin recovery and improve the status of their website in the search engines. We will provide valuable tips for those in need of recovering from the Penguin updates. If you implement these tips you will have a much better chance at having your website experience Penguin recovery.
Over-Optimization and Minimizing the Damage Done
The beauty of on-page search engine optimization is that it allows you to manipulate certain factors of your webpage in order to attain high rankings. But the downside is that some webmasters and business owners have a tendency to over-optimize certain elements that ultimately end up hurting them in the search engine rankings, especially with the Penguin update.
Many webmasters and business owners look at on-page optimization as their first priority. Plus, it’s a lot easier to tweak certain variables on a webpage than it is to create detailed back linking campaigns.
With that said, there is a downside to on-page optimization. The downside is that the search engine spiders – in particular Google – will have a much easier time picking up on web pages and websites that are over-optimized.
The problem with webpage optimization is that there is no specific cutoff point. Since we do not know precisely what Google is looking for in their algorithms, it’s a matter of testing and tweaking things in order to achieve full Penguin recovery. But we have successfully recovered websites that have found themselves in the Penguin doghouse – or Penguin house! – and we would like to point out a few areas that should help.
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Over-optimizing title tags – this is one of the easiest areas that webmasters potentially screw up with over-optimization. And even more importantly to understand, it’s so much easier for the search engine spiders to catch this over-optimization mistake. It’s important that you begin to cut back or avoid the keywords in the title tags and use this as a branding opportunity instead.
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Over-optimizing header tags – this is very similar to the title tags in that it’s incredibly easy to over-optimize this with excessive keywords. But it is easy for the search engines to scrutinize header tags, and the spiders are going to pick up on over-optimization very quickly. Provide useful and informative header tags that will engage your audience instead of packing them filled with repetitive keywords.
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Over-optimizing internal linking – internal linking is a great way to ensure that your website content is properly indexed, but it also poses an over-optimization problem that will need to be addressed during the Penguin recovery process. Adding too much anchor text optimization during internal linking is a major red flag to Google, and it could end up causing a Penguin related penalty that will make your website suffer.
Bad Link Cleanup and New Back linking Practices
The next step in the Penguin recovery process is to clean up bad links and put a new back linking strategy into practice.
Have you recently received a Google webmaster tools notification? This notification has alerted website owners to unnatural linking. This may have been a practice that you used earlier on when you first created the website, or it might be something that you were currently doing. Whatever the situation, it’s time to remove those unnatural links so that Google does not penalize your website any longer.
Here are a few tips:
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Look at linking domain diversity – if you have too many links coming from just a handful of domains, this is a serious off-page optimization mistake that Google is going to penalize you for. If your back linking profile is mostly comprised of site wide links, you are really going to feel the wrath of the Penguin update. Contact website owners if you do not have control of these links and find out if you can get them removed. This will help the Penguin recovery process big time.
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Look at page rank distribution – when reviewing the back links that are linking to you, pay close attention to page rank distribution. For the most part, a natural back link profile will have the majority of the links coming from low page rank pages. If all of your links have high page rank scores, you need to dilute this by getting a lot of low page rank links to make your profile look more natural.
Source: Searchexplosion
