How to Please the Penguin: Making Friends with Google’s New Ranking Algorithm
What is Penguin and why do we care?
Penguin is Google’s cutesy name for a powerful secret formula, a special blend of factors that currently determines Google search rankings. Penguin, just like Panda and previous Google formulas or algorithms, is part of the company’s ongoing mission to highlight Good and penalize Evil. In the Google Universe – the Googleverse, if you will – good web content is original. Good content is relevant to search terms. And good content is naturally popularized; it doesn’t rely on shady tactics to get a #1 ranking. Read on for specific tips about how to please the Penguin.
Mind Your Keyword Use
Was your website unfairly penalized in the Penguin switch? Google knows that the best content isn’t always detected by a formula. If you think that your website was unfairly targeted, use the Google web form to request a human review of your website’s ranking.
The Penguin likes keywords but only in moderation. Articles written by keyword stuffers (i.e., writers who go keyword-crazy) suffered major hits when the Penguin started patrol. How can the offending sites recover? You don’t need to order all new articles with lower keyword densities. One strategy is to use synonyms or near-synonyms as substitutes for overused keywords. For example, if you’ve used the keyword 2013 Lexus GS too many times in a review, replace some occurrences of the phrase with words like luxury hybrid or powerful vehicle. Besides that, the Penguin likes anchor text diversity. Varying the words used in your links may help improve your website’s ranking. In particular, it’s a good idea to monitor your use of “money keywords” versus the alternatives.
- Money keywords are the words and phrases you’re trying to rank well for.
- Non-money keywords are words and phrases such as “this blog post” or “our website.”
Microsite Masters has found that the new Google formula discourages sites that use money keywords as anchor text in 65% or more of inbound links. Thus it could be advantageous to actually use your domain name or a straightforward “click here” invitation as your link text.
Have Authorities Vouch for You
The Penguin is wary of strangers. Inbound links from authorities in your niche resonate with the Penguin. When an authoritative domain in your industry posts a link to your site, the Google ranking program becomes more confident about your relevance and high quality. After all, an authority link can’t be manipulated through gray-hat or black-hat tactics.
Penguin Survival Tip: Banish Duplicate Content
Duplicate content hurts your ranking now more than ever. If you’ve taken great content from someone else, have it rewritten for unique value. Has someone stolen web content from you? Use Copyscape to find out. If you’ve been ripped off, you can report the offender to Google.
Conversely, spam recommendations will raise red flags. Excessive forum posts and low-quality blog comments are examples of inbound links that can hurt your ranking. If you’ve been a link farmer in the past, it’s time to prune your crop! You might find that removing harmful links is time-consuming, expensive or impossible. If that’s the case, focus on developing high-quality links through legitimate means such as guest blogging, content marketing and gaining authoritative recommendations. Also, submit a list of stubborn bad links to Google and explain how you’ve worked to remedy the matter.
Remember: The More Things Change…
Penguin has the same overall vision as its predecessors: to showcase original content that’s useful or entertaining. Now more than ever, Google can avoid highlighting the low quality or copied pages that have only risen through aggressive backlinking and other shady means. When you provide great articles, videos, infographics and so forth for web surfers, you’ll give the Penguin what it wants and you’ll become viewed as an authority by a wide web audience. Everybody wins.
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Search Plus your World with Google
Last week Google made some changes to your search results. If you have a gmail and Google + account, and are logged in at the time of performing a search, you will see personalized results. They are calling it Search Plus your World. We noticed this change last week, and this is really promoting your friends and professional Google + connections.
What is Search Plus Your World showing you?
Personal Results
The new “Personal Results” view that appears in your search results now personalizes the search result listings you get based on both your social connections and your own search behavior. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through your Google+ social network connections now also appears in results. According to Google “The social search algorithm and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful.” They are featuring Google + content as well as photos that have been shared on it. If you look at the image below of a search result for Vab Media, it shows the first result is our Google+ business page and then it shows links and images we have shared on the G+ plus network. This is a nice personal search feature.
Google profiles are featured more now
Another important algorithm change is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be featured more in Google search results. The search results themselves are devoting much larger emphasis to displaying material from a Google+ person or Google+ Business Page. The results individuals see are now catered toward people in their own social networks, quite similar to how Facebook’s algorithm works when you search for people on FB.
People & Pages Suggestions
The final algorithm roll out is Google’s suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow. These will appear on the right-hand side of your search results, when Google decides they are relevant. Perform a search for movies or music and you will see many suggestions. You might see well known or famous people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. Google is allowing you to be able follow them and connect with them on their Google+ social network.
Our conclusions
Overall, we find the integration that allows for searching through private and public material interesting. We think many people will find some value in it. If you don’t want these personal and private search results you can search in google chrome incognito mode or log out of your google account to get just public search results.
This opens up a whole world of possibilities for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and business owners. Now, you can promote your services to your colleagues and friends. You’re in their circles, so now you just need to put your most popular links on Google + Social Network. Contact us for more marketing ideas and questions. Read the actual article from Google below.
“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
- Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
- Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
- People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.” -Amit Singhal, Google
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*A disclaimer from Vab Media: There’s been a lot of controversy in the web world and SEO community that the Giant, “Google” is promoting its own products in search results. Whether this is true or not is not for us to decide. We just want to let small business owners know about certain changes and how they can take advantage of Google’s Search Algorithms, even in the case that they may change in the future.
Read MoreAre long-Tail Keyword Phrases good for my Business?
What is a Long-tail keyword phrase?
Search engine algorithms’ are getting more complex and are always changing.
This description explains indexing, “ When a website gets crawled by search engines, the search engines use automated software programs known as bots or spiders to survey the web and build their data bases. Web documents are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each web page are added to the search engine index. When you enter a search query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best urls are are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top. The most common form is text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.” -Monash.com
All indexable words within a page, are used by google bots to display the most relevant search results. Of course, the repetition and placement of consecutive words are some of the biggest factors that search engines use.
Another difference worth noting between short and long tail keyword phrases are the search results. If you were to search the keyword “renovation” in Google, you will receive 109,000,000 results. Then, if you look up the short tail keyword phrase “home renovation” in Google, it returns 18,900,000 results. Finally, if you enter the long tail keyword phrase “home renovation contractors in Greenwich, CT” , it provides 270,000 results. Although the long tail keyword phrase is searched less than the shorter keyword phrases, there is much less SERP competition.
Another reason to include multi-key word phrases into your content, is that they tend to be easier to rank for, compared to generic single and double keyword phrases.
As another example, if you tried to rank for the keyword phrase “home renovation” you will be facing huge competiton from big renovation brands like HGTV and the show This Old House. These kinds of brands tend to have more authority, money and a higher PageRank than regular construction companies or businesses. That’s why we are suggesting to our clients, the use of targeting more location specific, longer tail keyword phrases.
Using long tail keywords to corner a smaller market has just as much potential, if not more, than using short tail keywords in a larger, more exposed market. Some sites may find that the long tail isn’t quite as useful in their market, while other sites will do far better by targeting the long tail. Either way, using long tail keywords where you can, will definitely give you the advantage over your competitors.
Research on recent search trends in the last few months has shown that long-tail searches of five-plus words used increased by an average of 7%. Also, 75% of the websites that were studied saw a decrease in the number of one- and two-word searches. Since last December’s launch of Google Instant, a new search enhancement that shows results as you type, most searchers prefer a more refined search. Given this info, it’s good idea to analyze your website and to ask yourself these questions:
- Is my site optimized enough for Long-tail searches? Will it rank organically as search queries become more and more refined?
- Does my website incorporate a strong link building strategy for mid- to long-tail keywords as anchor text?
- Is my website optimized to allow bots to crawl and index the deep and potentially long-tail keyword pages?
Google PageRank Updated 2011
Google PageRank Update June 27, 2011
Google describes PageRank:
| “ | PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. |
Here is a link to Google PageRank checker.
Here are some tips on how to increase PageRank.
Please remember it is Pagerank, meaning each and every page can have a different rank. Generally your homepage or main index page will have higher rank than your inner pages and posts. But, occasionally an inner page, such as a popular blog post will out rank your homepage. The more you update your site’s content the better. Keep your readers in mind when deciding what to post next. It also helps if people are commenting and linking to your blog posts. The new Google Panda is awesome!
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How to target and rank high for low competion keywords
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