Google Penguin and Google Panda were the talk of the SEO world in 2012 as well as all of marketing in general, considering how important keyword searches are to today’s modern audience. There is still a great deal of confusion as to what these algorithm updates have done and how they have changed what we know as the “Internet” forever.
Here are four new rules of Google Penguin/Panda.
No more black hat SEO.
If you’re still thinking of keyword stuffing, hidden keyword, spam links, spam farms, back doors and all the other sneaky tricks that used to work – then you are still living in the 1990s. Google is spending big bucks to make sure that spamming and all black hat (which means search optimization methods that are unethical) practices are penalized. And they’re not just penalizing the individual pages…
Protect your entire site.
No, they are actually penalizing entire websites for the mistakes of one individual page. So don’t think you can take cheap shortcuts by creating one page that uses black hat or other spamdexing methods and a dozen other high quality pages. The bad web page could affect your overall rankings.
No more over-optimization.
Who knew there was such a thing as over-optimizing a page? Well, technically there is no such thing as over-writing a page – not in terms of high quality prose or article writing. However, there is definitely a way to “cheese up” your website’s SEO – namely by going overboard in keyword density, by creating cheap links or bad anchor text, and by creating low quality pages. Over optimization basically means “bad optimization” – the stuff you do to get noticed that human beings don’t like.
Write for people.
This is what all of it comes down to…writing for people – for human beings, not robots or web crawlers. Google is adjusting their algorithm to think more like human beings and that is why we are noticing so many changes in SERPs.
Following these new SEO rules for Penguin/Panda will make sure you stay on top of the online marketing world.
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