Updated: December 22, 2015
The release of Penguin showed that Google means business when it comes to ensuring that webmasters have a fundamental understanding of SEO. Without a basic SEO skill-set, your business runs the risk of being nailed repeatedly with lowered search rankings.
On the flipside, some experts say Penguin’s release shows that Google no longer cares which color SEO hat you wear, as long as your business stays relevant. Whatever its purpose, Google Penguin is slated to play a major role the future of online search and you can bet there are more changes on the horizon.
Yes, penalties by Google are possible, but you don’t have to be afraid to use SEO techniques—you just need to use them correctly. Below you will find helpful tips on how to accomplish this…
Learn How to Use Your Link Profile
The release of Penguin has made link profiles very important. In terms of links, you are most at risk by using low quality links as anchor text. Most experts recommend trying to have at least 2 rankings out of 10 anchors. The reasoning behind this is to answer two basic questions:
- What’s happening now?
- Where is my business going to be in the future?
Three tools for accomplishing quality link profiles are Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO and Excel.
Recognize Good Links
Learning what constitutes a good link will help your company engage in beneficial SEO practices. Here’s what good quality link building consists of:
- Only using respected sites.
- Only using links that give users valuable information.
- Avoid repeating link sources.
Take Note of Your Website’s Crawl Path
For large sites, crawl paths can be difficult to narrow down. If a crawl path is difficult for you to discern, then it will be just as hard for Google to crawl. While having sitemaps can help, they aren’t a magical fix in terms of indexing information. You should also aim for making sure pages with essential information are higher up on the crawl path.
Employ SEO Monitoring
Lastly, don’t let your SEO efforts go to waste by failing to index your website’s content. This can happen easily on large sites with a ton of information. However, there are ways to help catch any non-indexed information fairly easily:
- Use Google Analytics and create custom alerts to monitor drops in traffic.
- Employ Pingdom to monitor website uptime.
- Use meta tags and/or robots.txt to keep track of the pages you use no index for.
These basic SEO tips should get you well on your way to surviving the Google’s Penguin update. However, if you want your website to thrive by attaining one of those coveted top three spots, then you’ll require the professional knowledge and experience of an SEO company.
To learn more about the robust search engine optimization services we offer, browse our site or contact us today.