Mr. Popper’s penguins were cute and cuddly creatures – great for a few good laughs and a lot of fun to watch on the big screen. Google’s penguins? Not so much. The first penguin, let’s call that one Papa Penguin, literally put many well-intentioned and eager internet marketers out of business. Those that weren’t put out of business were forced to reassess the way they did business online and make significant changes in order to recover lost ranking.
Now that version 2.0 has arrived, you may need to review the way you conduct your business.
Focus Your Energy on Providing Quality Information
If you focus on quality and become a vocal champion for the quality of your web properties, the links (the good kinds of links that Google rewards) will follow. It’s only a matter of time. This means you need to provide your audience with a steady stream of new information about your field or niche. You need to provide information that’s relevant to them in a manner that penetrates.
Efforts to create backlinks through “black hat” processes will only do more harm than good. When you turn the energy you were using to create the backlinks in the first place towards improving the quality and quantity of information on your own websites and blogs, the rewards may take a little more time to generate, but they will be far more stable and Google-proof in the future.
Stop Falling for Link-Building Schemes and Scams
If it sounds too good to be true, it is – especially in the world of internet marketing. Once you have your business up and running, most days it can run itself. However, building up to that point takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. Anyone who tells you otherwise, or promises you an easy or foolproof method for making your mark on the internet marketing world, may as well be selling you a bucket of Google sink. Eventually, Google will find out. They do seem to be all knowing when it comes to these things.
Remove the links you can and consider disavowing bad backlinks you don’t have the ability to remove. It’s not enough to avoid making future mistakes. You need to go in and erase existing mistakes that may be holding your web interests back from the success they’d otherwise have through Google. Remove old backlinks that may have been newbie mistakes, the results of acting on bad information, or simply the results of bad hiring decisions when outsourcing.
Avoid Black Hat SEO Strategies in the Future
Even if Google isn’t doing something about them now, there are a lot of animals beginning with the letter “P” (Google really seems to favor this particular letter for some reason) Google can adopt at future dates to take care of other black hat techniques widely used by webmasters.
The good news is that this version of Penguin seems to reward webmasters that focus on quality information and build organic backlinks by providing quality information that appeals to wide audiences. Do this, and your sites should recover nicely from Google’s latest animal invasion.