Google has recently introduced Penguin 2.0 and that has left plenty of internet marketers shaking in their boots, with flashbacks of other Google animals such as Panda and Penguin version 1.0. Fear is the word of the day. It may feel like the sky is falling for internet marketers everywhere, but it doesn’t have to work that way.
The World Wide Web kept turning after Panda and the previous version of Penguin. It will continue to turn when the next animal comes along. It’s the nature of the Google beast, if you’ll pardon the pun, to try to shake things up every now and then. It prevents marketers, on a large scale, to game the system in order to put inferior sites with little value to offer Google’s customers at the top of the search engine’s rankings.
When the changes come, they are inevitably painful to many, honestly-intentioned marketers who are hurt because they followed bad advice or put their eggs in the wrong SEO baskets. The primary target this time around, as before, was web interests that practiced nefarious link-building tactics and strategies or that purchased links outright. Google still believes that back links are a good indicator of the value of a website – or even a specific web page.
Understanding Google’s Position
The problem is this: Google wants to feel as though you’ve earned those links. Black hat link-building tactics of the past and purchased links are the primary target of the Penguin’s (version 2.0) wrath. It’s frustrating as a marketer. Honest marketers really do want to put the best face forward and provide a quality product to the buying public. After all, that’s how repeat business is earned.
However, no one starts out knowing how to get his or her websites viewed by the buying public. So aspiring webmasters and internet marketers begin their journey by looking for information on how to get their website noticed. There’s a lot of it out there and a lot of that information predates Penguin 1.0. They follow this advice, get results, start earning a little bit of money (sometimes a lot of money) and then Penguin 2.0 comes along and sends them crashing back to the ice age of internet obscurity.
It Certainly Feels Like the Sky Is Falling, Doesn’t It?
But that’s not the case. There really is good news this time around. Unlike other times, Google has now provided a little direction to marketers. They’ve put marketers on notice that trying the same things in the future will result in the same failures.
It’s not that Google are anti-marketer. That’s hardly the case. They want to provide a good quality product to their customers. This means that they are going to continue punishing sites they believe are attempting to game the system while rewarding sites that provide large volumes of fresh, compelling content that’s relevant to the search terms or keywords.
In the end, if you give Google what they want, they will reward your site with higher rankings. Penguin 2.0 happens to be the first time they’ve actually come out and stated what they want. They’ve given you the roadmap this time around. Follow it and you shouldn’t have problems with Google in the future.