Penguin 2.0 has rolled out. You can take it as threatening news but you can also think of it as a corrective wave. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, has been quite instructive in his latest video about how SEO in coming months will shape up.
Beware the Penguin 2.0 – Changes to Google SEO in the coming months
Matt Cutts, a member of the Search Quality team for Google, recently talked about how SEO (search engine optimisation) for Google should unfold in the coming months. What he suggested is captured below in a nutshell.
- Addressing webspam much more comprehensively via Penguin 2.0 (rolled out on May 22).
- Punishing advertorials violating Google’s ethical guidelines. Web owners must provide user disclosures to suggest that their links are paid and not organic.
- Dealing sternly with traditionally spammy areas (example- pornographic queries).
- Denying spam links more forcefully, automatically making them less effective.
- Implementing complex techniques of link analysis.
- Rolling out hack site detection tools to help against hack sites and those that serve malware. Hacked sites are to be expected to communicate better with webmaster tools thus discovering what method of troubleshooting to employ.
- Punishing users working over black hat forums and spamming packages.
- Rewarding those websites which use powerful organic content.
- Rewarding authority sites over a particular niche (hospitality, travel, medicine). Google’s algorithms will rate sites with regularly updated, quality content higher thus helping users gather quality information more easily.
- Helping sites that fall in the ‘grey zone’ but have been nonetheless affected by Panda (this is subject to finding a few positive signals from them).
- Providing example URLs to webmasters in order to help them diagnose their problem better.
- Preparing better grounds for small and medium firms to compete (who were at the receiving end of Penguin 1.0)
- Working on result clusters for the same domain. If you see the same domain appearing in a cluster on the search results, you can expect to see that domain a lot less in the following pages. Moreover, Google will also look to relegate clusters as far from the top pages as possible.
You can watch the whole video here:
What do you think will be the single most effective change for SEO in coming months?
What you ought to figure out for a successful link building campaign
Short term link building campaigns don’t work. Period. Erin Everhart for the Search Engine Land talks about this guy (we will keep his name John for the purpose of familiarity) who did everything great for a long while; organic content, regular posts, tweets and retweets, and natural links.
Suddenly something crazy hit John and he stopped updating his blog, stopped offering website link to Facebook posts, stopped email marketing and video management. It’s anybody’s guess- John’s website traffic momentum went for a toss. Both the unique visitor count and organic traffic suffered.
The lesson here is clear – even when you reach your traffic targets, you cannot stop your SEO campaign. To stay on page 1, to retain your traffic volume, you have to keep doing what you’re doing.
Successful link building is a tough act to perform- a very satisfying act too when done right. You must know your target audience and the kind of resources you can pull (in terms of time, money and worker count).
Everhart says that you also need to prefigure where you want the campaign to reach finally. Also, if the conversions are happening at an ideal time- You can’t fool buyers by taking them to the ‘buy’ page when they don’t even know if you are selling goose or gander. You can read the full article here.
Are you concentrating on natural link structure, especially since the latest Penguin update?
How To Locate Unnatural Links Pointing To Your Web Site
What do you do if you have been told by Google that you have “unnatural links” pointing to your site?
Matt Cutts from Google answer this question in his recent video.