Have you been penguinised by Google Penguin?

Have you been penguinised by Google Penguin?
When you mention the Penguin Update you’re often confronted with a blank expression and utter confusion of the person whilst they think you might have gone slightly insane. In reality though the Penguin refers to the latest Google update which has left many wondering what on earth has happened to their traffic.
Google are renowned for making their unannounced changes and refining their software which in theory provides a searcher with more accurate results. Now for the most part these changes appear to be pretty minor and go unnoticed by many but for the experts like SEO Next even the smallest of changes doesn’t go unnoticed.
There are small changes but there are some BIG ones which go on at Google too and it’s these when rolled out which cause utter chaos within the world of SEO. You may have heard about Google Panda not so long ago but the latest update which has been rolled out is known as Penguin.
Penguin was rolled out on 24th April 2012 and for the most part it appears to be targeting artificial link acquisition or what is known within the industry as “link spam”. In effect link spam is any attempt to acquire lots and lots of links by either:
• Buying Links
• Trading Links
• Building Link Networks
Now Google has penalised anyone who has gone to a link broker or link service whereby you can acquire say 1000 to 10000 links with just one click or anyone who has set up a number of blogs and filled them with duplicated content and rubbish then linked them in a network funnelling authority to your own site. Obviously this is the easy way to do SEO but link spam has always been a bad long-term SEO strategy and one which should be avoided at all costs.
There have been previous attempts by Google to fight link spam however Penguin has taken this to a whole new level:
• Actively penalises any sites which Google believe have been engaging in link spam
• Following a penalisation by Google sites will disappear from the top ten for their keywords and phrases
• Penalties will be given to links which are part of a link network and so you need to detect any links such as these and ensure they are removed
• Google will now be suspicious of links which use the same or closely related anchor text and so if say 75% of links pointing at your site have say the link text “seo services” then you are in a bit of bother. This is something Google have been warning people about for quite some time now.
• Large volume of links which point to your site and which come from blog comments, forums or site footers are now being noticed by Google and are making them suspicious however this is normal as these are all common places for spammy links – you have been warned.

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