Google Penguin has already affected numerous online companies since its debut in spring 2012. One of the first casualties mentioned was Ezine Articles, which continues to fall in rankings, suffering penalties over “over-optimized content”. In fact, many SEO companies are now shifting their attention away from article directories (now seen as cheap links) and are instead intensifying their efforts on guest blogging. Guest blogging is when you post a guest blog for another website. When an SEO company handles this, this indicates not only creating the material, but also finding a quality blog at which to post such information.
Surprisingly, even Google’s own Blogger.com was caught in the crossfire, and actually suffered a slight traffic decrease after the Penguin algorithm update went into effect. This is a strong indication of at least two things: (a) that Google is not necessarily giving preferential treatment to its own sister sites; and (b) that low quality individual pages are definitely negative factors affecting the overall site. This explains why Blogger and Ezine Articles both took a hit – just think of the many individual pages on each website that are of very low quality. While there may be some solid gold content on both sites respectively, not every page is a winner.
Companies are already reacting to Penguin, and perhaps even more so than Google Panda, since the world has had the chance to learn about Panda over the past year and a half. Now, website owners are rewriting their pages and making sure that all content is fresh, and ready for new and improved Penguin crawling and indexing. Lastly, some companies that are now thoroughly frustrated by the ever-changing algorithms – are now focusing attention on local advertising (through Google Places, Facebook Places and mobile marketing) as well as other search engines like Yahoo and Bing.
Don’t give up hope. Diversify your web marketing plan and you will be rewarded!
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