What Is Google Penguin Update and how It Affects Your Site?

By Faruque Ahamed Mollick

I have already discussed about Google Panda Update which is hated by webmasters. But Panda update also help peoples for better search experience. Well, Google has many more algorithm update depending upon several factors of a website and Google Penguin Update is one of them. 3% of search engine results affected by this update and this one is also a domain level algorithm update. Many high traffic website can see a huge traffic drop for this update.

What is Google Penguin Update?

Google Penguin update is an algorithm update that is designed to penalize and prevent link spamming for better search experience for users. The main purpose of Google Penguin Update is to target those sites which fall under the category of webspam. Google Penguin Update take action for those sites with over optimized for SEO, Sites that are using black-hat techniques for SEO, sites that are doing keyword spamming by using excessive and unnatural use of keywords and those sites using link spam by involving in buying and selling link to build backlinks.

There are lots of websites has found a huge amount of their search traffic for the last update of Google Penguin. About 3% of search results were affected by this update. Though bloggers/webmasters are always afraid of this update and hate it, but it is helpful for Google users because it provides great and high quality of content for them.

Google is fully aware of this fact that bloggers/webmasters and online companies can do almost anything to rank better on search results. So over from few years ago Google become so strict and only allow sites that contain useful and high quality of contents. So Google has starting penalized those types of sites which are involving in unethical way which called webspam. To prevent users from poor quality of contents Google has introduced several types of algorithm update and Penguin Update is one of them.

Also read:

• WWW or non WWW for better SEO of your blog?
• How To Get Blog Post On First Page of Google Search Results?
• What should be the Keyword Density of your blog post for SEO?
• Better WordPress SEO By Add Schema Structured Markup Plugin

How Google Penguin Update Can Affect Your Site?

Here are some reasons that your site may be targeted by Penguin Update of Google:

1. Low quality backlinks

Low quality backlinks are so harmful for your site. I strongly want to warn you from buying backlinks from fiverr for $5 and any other types of services that claim to provide you thousands of backlinks in cheap price.

2. Keyword stuffing

Penguin Update more likely to penalized your site if you are using hidden text for stuffing. Few plugins for WordPress available that add the search query result at the end of the post. It results in keyword stuffing and your site may be penalized for this.

3. External link quality are poor

Poor external link will also can harm your site and for this Penguin Update can penalize your site. Here poor external link are links  from those types of sites with low quality. It is better to get rid of this poor quality of external links.

4. Buying backlinks

Buying backlinks is unethical in terms of Google and it can be the reason for penalized your site by Penguin Update.

5. Keyword spamming and Unnatural keyword density

If your site found with successive use of keywords and the keyword density is higher than normal then your site may penalized by google’s Penguin Update. Using keywords unnaturally may harm your site. Article on your blog always should look natural and should be easily understood by your readers.

6. Over optimization of SEO

Over optimize for SEO may negatively affect on your site. It is better to write content on your site without thinking so much about SEO so that your site looks natural. Remember, you should write for your readers, not for search engines.

7. Duplicate content or found plagiarism

If duplicate content found from any other page of your own website or from any other website then your overall site will be affected and you may be penalized by Google’s algorithm update. Google take plagiarism seriously.

8. Websites with malware

Websites with malware is taken by Google so seriously to protect the Google users. If your site found or any of the page from your site found then it will negatively affect your whole website as Google will take the step against your site is domain level.

9.Any other black hat SEO techniques in any way

In the end I want to say that any other black hat SEO techniques or unethical SEO techniques can be the reason for search traffic drop of a website. Google algorithm is so smart that it can find those SEO techniques that are against Google search engine algorithm. In these case your site may be penalized by Penguin Update.