This year’s Penguin updates by Google definitely involved major changes in the way their search algorithms locate and rank your site. Penguin has affected the SEO industry greatly and forced a lot of organizations to rethink their strategy. One of Penguin’s major implications deals with offsite SEO and link-building. Let’s go over these changes in the SEO landscape and talk about some concrete methods for overcoming them.
In the SEO industry you either live or die by Google’s rules. In the past, aggressive SEO involved placing as many offsite backlinks as possible on other sites, regardless of the quality of those links. As more and more companies caught on, their SEO teams began building massive banks of low-quality offsite links and moving up the search rankings. Recognizing that this type of SEO was actually detrimental to the Web and to Google’s user experience, Matt Cutts and his Web Spam team came up with the Penguin changes to remedy these and other challenges.
In April of 2012, Cutts and his Web Spam team let over 700,000 SEO pros know that the Penguin update’s changes were in effect immediately, and would require website’s offsite links to be of a much higher quality. Overnight, many domains plummeted in rank as Penguin deleted massive amounts of links from the web, while some actually benefited from the changes and rose up on the SERPs. Today, over 6 months after Penguin, many organizations’ e-marketing and IT teams are still unaware of how these changes are impacting an SEO program they might be paying a premium for.
At Baytech, we know exactly how to improve a website’s SEO in light of Penguin’s changes, and a strategy we implement for our clients involves diversifying the sources of incoming organic traffic. Obviously in the past, the goal was to get as many offsite backlinks to the domain as possible. But, Google’s search algorithms are now intelligent enough to ignore backlinks that simply don’t relate to your domain content-wise, and having low-quality backlinking can actually damage your performance on search engines instead of enhancing it.
Through blogging on another domain, using your social media tools wisely, leveraging quality affiliate marketing partnerships, utilizing forums on your website, and by measuring your traffic sources effectively and using proper analytics systems, you can successfully diversify your traffic and trump Google’s Penguin updates. Monitoring the backlinks to your site and the number of times they are clicked will help you measure where, when, and how your organic referral traffic is coming in. This sounds like a lot of work, and it is—but it’s necessary to maintain this sort of program if you want to stay competitive.
Ultimately, this discussion validates why it is extremely beneficial to consult a best practice web solutions provider like Baytech for your internet marketing, even if you have an in-house team that handles SEO/SEM. Many of our clients have benefitted greatly from sourcing their time-consuming and maintenance-heavy SEO work to us. Companies working with Baytech have saved countless time and effort by working with us, and they continue to rank at the top of their competitive landscapes because of our robust SEO/SEM programs and our highly talented team of Baytechers who execute them.
In sum, the key is to keep in mind that Google’s goal is to enhance the web user’s experience and connect them with the content they want in the most efficient way. By making sure the content you provide online is new, relevant, and placed accordingly amongst strong, quality traffic generators, you can easily dominate the SEO landscape in the age of Panda and Penguin. Consult Baytech for these needs and for solid, up-to-date SEO/SEM strategies, and dominate your competition.
-Tommy Gustaveson
