Have you heard about Penguin? Everywhere you turn in marketing, people are talking about it, and stating that it’s time for small to moderate to large business owners to take quick action and update their sites to be “Penguin ready” – if they haven’t done so already.
Google Penguin “one ups” Google Panda by actually penalizing websites that “over optimize.” What does this mean? Is there such a thing as over-optimizing? In general, terms, no. Optimization is a rather broad term that simply means readying your website to be easily crawled and indexed by search engines. Therefore, the more you optimization work you do; the better. As we’ve learned before, the more content you produce; the better.
However, what Penguin is specifically penalizing is websites that over-optimize in terms of excessive keyword repetition. This is indeed an Internet phenomenon, and one that you can’t really imagine seeing in the entertainment world, the news world or in print media. After all, how many times does a newscaster begin his/her story with “Are you looking for information on tube socks? Well, we have information on tube socks. For more on tube socks, let’s turn it over to Jane…”
You would think the newscaster was insane! Likewise, publishing keyword-excessive content seems to go hand-in-hand with a lower quality of writing. Not surprisingly, article directories are suffering from the Penguin strike in a big way, as many of these sites are guilty of over-keywording articles and over-generalizing information, to the point that it’s not really helpful to a real human Internet viewer.
Penguin is actually doing a lot of good, as webmasters and site owners are now being forced to re-edit their content and make sure it is of interest to human beings, and not merely to robot crawlers mindlessly looking for keywords. If you haven’t updated your site to be Penguin friendly yet, then by all means do so…one of the algorithms most controversial changes is the fact that entire sites can be penalized for a large number of individual pages with over-optimized content. It’s time to start taking Internet writing seriously!
