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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How to target and rank high for low competion keywords
Increasing your site’s Google Page Rank
How to Increase Your Google Page Ranking
The most common question webmasters have in relation to Google is: “How do I improve [or increase] my PageRank? Before we go in to answering this question, it is important to take into consideration what PageRank is, how it is calculated, and what it means for your site.
Google PageRank, based on a scale of 0 to 10, is the means by which Google ranks the worth of particular site. Theoretically, a site with a PageRank of 8 is generally of more use to the average visitor than a site with a PageRank of 3. Accordingly, sites with a higher pagerank rank higher in the Google search results for a given keyword than those with a lower pagerank. The goal of google’s search results is to provide the user with the most trustworthy sites that include the particular keyword phrase they have entered into the search field.
PageRank is calculated based almost entirely upon two factors: how many other sites link to your site, and the PageRank of those sites that link to you. Ideally, you want a lot of sites with a high PageRank to link to your site. Getting many low or zero PageRank sites to link to your site won’t do you much good. In fact, there is some evidence that Google penalizes sites that have an abnormally high number of low PageRank sites linking to them. This situation is usually indicative of someone trying to cheat the system by simply adding links to useless pages in so-called “link farms.” So, in a sense, Google is capable of recognizing whether your site hangs out with a good crowd or a bad crowd by what kind of sites link to yours. It is much better to get a few sites (preferably a .ORG or .EDU) with a high PageRank to link to yours (especially those with PageRanks higher than your own) than a bunch of sites with low or zero PageRank.
PageRank is believed to be calculated on a logarithmic scale. What this roughly means is that the difference between PR4 and PR5 is likely 5-10 times than the difference between PR3 and PR4. So, there are likely over a 100 times as many web pages with a PageRank of 2 than there are with a PageRank of 4. This means that if you get to a PageRank of 6 or so, you’re likely well into the top 0.1% of all websites out there. If most of your peer group is straggling around with a PR2 or PR3, you’re way ahead of the game. Currently our website is a PageRank 4. The higher up you get in the numbers the harder it is to move up. Meaning it is easier to go from a PR1 to PR2 than it is to from a PR5 to a PR6.
PageRank is crucially important because it determines, in part, in what order your website will show up in Google’s results. Besides PageRank, the other factor is largely website content – i.e. what your site actually contains, what keyword and keyword phrases are present in your text and how often they appear. If two sites have basically the same content, cover the same topic, and have the same keyword saturation (the percentage of keywords in the entire text), then the one with the higher PageRank will almost always come out on top.
Okay, now for ways to improve your PageRank, legally and fairly:
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