What’s New in Google Penguin 2.0 Update?

Google rolled out its Penguin 2.0 update on 22 May, 2013. However, it is still in nascent stage and it’s after effects are on their way for search engine rankings for different websites. Recalling the Penguin 1.0 from 2012, it is clear that the Penguin has been much targeted to the control webspam. Many marketers still may not be very clear about the exact nature of Penguin 2.0, it is evident that this update is more finely targeted to the on-page structure.

Here are seven key points you need to focus on to save your website from getting penalized by the new Google Penguin 2.0 update:

1) Link Profile Quality: Creating too many low quality link profiles can be a good reason for the penguin penalty. The poor quality backlinks can be from low PR websites, low quality directories, spam domains etc.

To avoid penalty, prepare a list of all low quality back-links pointing towards your website and send request to webmasters to remove your links from their websites. Additionally, analyze all your website back-links and using a disavow tool, prepare a Google disavow file to remove them from Google webmasters.

2) Content Quality: Content is still the king for generating web traffic. However, having duplicate, copied, less relevant, keyword stuffed and unauthorized contents can lead to a penalty by Google penguin update.
The corrective actions for this include:

• Identify the duplicate content on your website using tools like CopyScape
• Remove the copied and fill the missing content
• Rewrite fresh content with focused keywords
• Use proper references and citations if it is necessary

3) Cluster Results: With coming of Penguin 2.0, Google has started limiting number of occurrences of your website on first page search results for a particular search term. Google will make the search results on the first page even more diverse. For rest of the pages you may still see clustered results. Also, if visit any website from search results and return back to search results, you’d be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages.

4) Exact Match Anchor Text: Google Penguin 2.0 penalizes a website for having many links, which use exact match keywords in anchor texts. As a precaution, it you should edit the keywords so that they are not exact match. Also, you should reduce the number of anchor texts with your brand name and use anchor texts, which are more relevant instead.

5) Non Relevant Links: While reviewing websites, Google Penguin 2.0 pays extra attention to all non-relevant back-links on your website. Using a Google disavow tool, you can easily, remove all back-links from the non-relevant websites.

6) Non Natural Back-Links: Getting large number of backlinks in a short span of time can help you in generating more traffic but may lead to a penalty by Penguin 2.0.
It is recommended that you get backlinks from quality and related niche websites. Avoid using a link building software, as they can create backlinks from low quality websites, hacked websites, spammy domains etc.

7) Advertorials: Advertorials are editorial-like content that is published because an advertiser has paid the publication to publish the story or the content.
This is hidden method of link buying and selling. Although, advertorials are not banned by Google, but selling links that pass link juice violates Google’s quality guidelines. This may lead to consequences like lower rankings in Google search results; dip you your website PageRank, affecting your website credibility.

Remove the paid links or advertorial pages from your website, or ensure that these paid hyperlinks have their rel=”nofollow” attribute.With Penguin updates, Google is targeting to penalize websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It is important for us to follow the webmaster guidelines and understand the basics of these updates save our websites from losing search engine rankings, Page Rank, web traffic and more.

As a website owner, we need to make sure that all webmaster notifications which we receive should be handled at priority. And with the onset of Penguin 2.0, you may expect to receive more detailed examples and notifications.