Feb 2014 Penguin 2.0: Preparing your SEO armor in a few months
Last week, Google Engineer and head of search spam, Matt Cutts shared some new expectations and warnings to SEO.
He discussed some clearer update guidelines that SEO practitioners should be keen about such as spam, sophisticated link analysis, authority boost, advertorials and many more.
But one of the most talked about topic in SEO today is the new Penguin update. Cutts named it as Penguin 2.0 while others are comfortable calling it Penguin 4.
Going back in 2011, the first version of Penguin was rolled out to improve Google search results. It was a poison that killed black-hat SEO practitioners who violate the Big G’s webmaster guidelines such as duplicate content, keyword stuffing, cloaking and etc.
Today, the new version of Penguin is said to be released in a few weeks. There’s no concrete detail on what the new update is all about but Cutts said that it will have more impact that the first version of the Penguin.
Many SEO experts are confident that their sites will not be infected by the new update as they abide webmaster guidelines especially spam links.
Preparing for Penguin 4 / 2.0
With the nature of the previous Penguins, these are some things that you should prep up with your websites.
- Original Content – Make sure it’s yours and you put proper tags. You can avoid duplicate content through canonical tags and 301 redirects.
- Traffic Metrics – There’s a great chance that Google will look on the demographics of your website visitors as well as the your link profile and neighborhood.
- Anchor text – One of the best signals that determines if a certain site or content is spammy. Use variety of anchor texts such as business name and white noise such as “click here” and “read more”.
- Social Signals – Social is the new face of Digital. Make every share, like and plus count.
It’s important to make your link profile clean and natural as possible. There are many webmaster tools available on analytics that you can use such as the famous Disavow Tool.