Shimul Aich

Penguin Analysis: Tips to Recover Lost Rankings Due to Penguin Update

The past few days have been fascinating for SEO professionals, both blackhats and whitehats. Loads of sites facing problem due to Google’s latest algorithm update (now officially named Penguin). The update was originally called the Over Optimization Penalty, then the Webspam Algorithm Update, and now Penguin.
What exactly Google wants to do with this algorithm change. Many blog posts out there saying Google is trying to improve search results. But penguin update is NOT focused on improving the quality of search result. Don’t get me wrong, Google always tries to make things better. The focus of penguin is to penalize and remove value from sites and pages whose link profiles appeared to be manipulating either search results and violating Google guidelines’. If your link profile not passed Google’s quality guidelines then your rank will be going out. Here’s a video Matt Cutts recently put out –

I’ve already started working for some companies that have been hit by Penguin. Started analyzing their websites and started working to make them compatible for the Post-Penguin world. While working for these companies I have closely monitored various webmaster forums to collect examples of websites getting hit by penguin update and listed what they were doing wrong. Based on my research and analysis so far, I wanted to write a post explaining what I’m seeing and document the common problem across sites that are being penalized.
Most of the site was hit by Penguin due to Unnatural link practice. What should be counted as an unnatural links –
Paid text links using exact match anchor text: Most of the company wants to increase their links by buying links from other websites with that exact matching anchor text. This is against Google’s quality guidelines, as Google would consider this a paid link to manipulate PageRank and Search engine ranking rather than to provide any value to visitors.
Links from low quality sites using exact match anchor text: Directory submission, Social book marking submission and others submission work become day to day SEO jobs. But links from these types of sites by using exact anchor text to improve ranking is now treated as spam link building process.
Comment spam: When analyzing websites hit by Penguin, I have found lots of people doing comment spam. People using signatures in comments using exact match anchor text. For example, instead of using your name, people commenting were using the exact match anchor text for keywords they wanted to rank for. I don’t think these links can be treated as a natural.
Guest posts on network sites: Google already penalized few guest blog networks, like – BMR and Linkvana. Therefore, if you are using those networks to improve your ranking then you also will get a penalty from Google.
Article marketing sites: Article submission with thin content by using exact match anchor text were another common factor among affected sites. People used to do bulk article submission with same article or some time they just spin the content little bit. This practice will no longer help you; try something different which will generate some value for the users.
Links from dangerous sites: Do you have inbound links from sites that have been flagged for malware, numerous pop-ups, or other spammy issues? This was another factor that caused websites to lose their Google rankings.
Presence of footer links: Most of the web design and Development Company used to put their link at the footer of the site which they developed. This type of links is not at all relevant with their website and does not generate any value for the users. So try to remove these links from the footer.

How to determine whether your site was hit by the Penguin or not?

Google has rolled out so many updates within short span of time, like – Panda 3.5, 3.6, parked domain and penguin. So you should know why your website’s rank gone down.

Check your analytics traffic report to look at the date your traffic changed. If your traffic dropped after April 24, then you have been hit by Penguin. If your traffic changed before 24th April you may be impacted by Google’s Panda 3.5 update, which was launched just a week earlier on April 19.

My website was impacted by the Penguin update – What should I do to recover from it?

Below, I’ll list some of the tips which will help you to recover from Penguin -

• Diversification is Key – Adopt a diversified approach to search engine marketing. You can’t track the movement of a drunken man so you need to build drunken man link policy, which will be difficult for the Google to track your
  pattern.
• Remove unnatural links – Check your link profile with back link checker or check your link from the webmaster tool link section. Get details, which website link you and if you found anything wrong or unnatural, then try to remove those links.
• Avoid Unnatural Link Building - Don’t go to the links from private blog network – like BMR and Linkvana. Avoid submitting thin or Spin content on various article submission sites. Because these are the sites have been hit hard as a result of both Penguin and Panda. If you have been using these methods earlier than stop doing it and try to remove links which you have got earlier. Build your link profile naturally and steadily and you’ll be rewarded. Check out Google guidelines about the link.
• Check Webmaster Tools for Notifications – Webmaster tool provides lots of info about your website that can improve your site health. Go there and check if Google has highlighted any unnatural links on your site. Try to resolve the issue that will help you to resolve the problem.
• End-user Focus – This is not the new message from Google. Google has mentioned so many times but everyone ignores this issue. Now Google has shown some real teeth for those who don’t listen. Web content needs to be end-user focused. Try to do something unique and helpful for users. Now this is the time for shift focus on User Experience instead of Search Engines.
• Hidden Text, Hidden Links – Google has mentioned in their quality guidelines that – try avoiding Hidden Text, Hidden Links. Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.
• Cloaking and Redirects – Cloaking has been bad as per Google quality guidelines so if you’re doing it you’ve been going wrong for some time now. Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user-agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.
• Take Control of Your Outbound Links -In order to avoid Google’s anti spam algorithm update tries to keep your outbound links down on any given page. Outbound links may have a direct impact on your site’s rankings and traffic. Google uses your outbound linking profile to determine the type of websites that you associate with. If you have a large number of links on a page, try to split a page up and increase the amount of unique content on the page. In that way you could save your site.
• Say No to Keyword Stuffing – “Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. Forget the keywords, focus on the user.
• The Penguin Feedback Form – If you believe your search rankings have been wrongly hit by the Penguin update, there are avenues of resolution. Google has created a new Penguin Feedback form that you can use to report errors applied to your site.

Google’s Rachel Searles and Brian White discuss about Tips on requesting reconsideration -


• Educate Your Team Member – You need to create company-wide SEO guidelines around best practices of SEO, specifically: on-page optimization and the right balance of keywords in content and link copy. The other initiative is training employees on latest trends of SEO. Ask them to create a case-study of companies that got hit by recent Google updates. In that way they also understand what should they do and what not.

“Which SEO techniques are important according to Google Penguin & Panda? What type of links should we be getting? What will be the marketing process after Penguin update?”

– These are the questions people asking everywhere… Here are some suggestions for them –
Before I suggest any process, first it’s important to understand a bit about Google and links. Google considers links as editorial “votes”. So, the sites that receive the most votes should rank higher on Google because more people find them valuable. Note down the term “VALUABLE”. So you have to create something unique which generates value for the users. Like -

• Attract more links by creating unique, worthwhile content, infographic that others will want to link to naturally.
• Try to get links with commercial and noncommercial anchor text. E.g., Your Website’s Title, example.com, www.example.com, “click here”, “here”, etc. At least 60% – 65% links should be with the non commercial anchor text. This will help you to maintain much more natural looking backlink profile.
• Link relevancy – Google is looking for signals that can’t be manipulated as easily as anchor text. Getting a link from an authoritative or relevant site in the same niche is much harder to manipulate. So try to get links from the pages or website which is relevant to your website.
• Guest posts have worked forever and will continue to do so. You only submit your best work for guest posts because after reading your post visitors may want to visit your website. In that way you will get some visitors too. To gain visitors from guest posts you only want to guest post on a site which is related to your niche and with lots of active visitors. The number of real comments a blog gets is a pretty good indication of how active the subscribers are and should help you find blogs to guest post on. Even really small blogs are good candidates for guest posts if the community is active.
• Spend time in answering questions. You don’t have to be the most knowledgeable person in your niche; you just need to know more than your audience. Answer questions on Quora, LinkedIn, Reddit, forums, Yahoo Answers etc. All of these activities leave backlink footprints. This is a solid SEM strategy.
• SEO people often ignore social media because they believed that social doesn’t contribute directly to search engine rankings. It’s time to update this thinking as well.
• Don’t neglect the many other avenues for lead-generating that many small businesses have yet to embrace, such as email marketing, social media and customer reviews.
• Do smart work not hard work, which generate some value for users.

I Need Help!

That’s what I have for now. I hope this post will help you to get some idea on the latest Google algorithm update. If you have any questions, or need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Google’s Anti-SEO Ads: A Wake Up Call

Google promotes its products via Google Adwords – it’s a common phenomena. When you do a site search on Google you are likely to see the Google Webmaster Tools ad. That is a consistent ad and somehow related to the search string or the requirements of the user; therefore acceptable.
But now they are using anti SEO text ad to promote Google Adwords service. If you search “SEO” keywords in Google.es then following ad is likely to appear; here is the screenshot.

The meaning of above mentioned line is – “Forget about SEO. To be visible in Google today, try Adwords” (translation is mine via Google Translate).
If I am not wrong, one of the Adwords Guidelines is to not publish misleading ads, and I believe that this ad is misleading. If someone is searching for SEO, in Google.es he is probably looking for information about what does SEO mean, what companies do SEO in Spain or if there are Guides about SEO. I don’t think they are looking for Adwords or PPC.
As per few industry experts – Google is a publicly traded stock. As such, their top priority is to maximize profits for their stockholders. SEO does not make them money. AdWords does! So they are giving more importance to Adwords instead of SEO.
Share your opinion – is it right to show such anti SEO ads? Should the SEO professionals take any step?

Welcome to Social Media Revolution,2011

Erik Qualman – the author of Socialnomics has updated and released a new Social Media Revolution video. New video is a shorter version that includes new social media statistics that have been updated for 2011. Enjoy and… Welcome to the Revolution!

Google Panda Update 2.2 – What it is all About?

This is something directly from the horse mouth. Matt Cutts, the undisputed and de facto leader of seo industry, finally confirmed that Panda 2.2 has been approved but hasn’t rolled out yet. Panda 2.2, the sequel of Panda that has left some big boys hurting pretty badly, is likely to include a change that might ( mind the word) help some website see bright side of life (get their ranking back of course what’s else there in a SEOer’s life save ranking ). Sites that are rumoured to get their rankings back are really good site, but due to Panda update they got affected for some reasons mysterious.

“Matt: We’re working on that. There’s a change coming related to scrapers outranking people for their own content that will be released soon.

Matt: It could help as we recompute data. Matt goes on to say that Panda 2.2 has been approved but hasn’t rolled out yet.”

After Panda 1.0 update lots of people complaining about being hurt by Panda. Google employees and other forum members, as expected, did not give this opportunity a miss and started filling up the Webmaster Central help centre with their suggestions about what they should do and what not to do (and a good many of them are heavily affected by the philosophy of life). However, the never-ending list of complaints have forced them see the sad side of Post Panda which every Google Employees vehemently opposed as if Google loves all and sundry and is a philanthropic organization ( do not think about Google Adwords). So, now here are they, making great fuss and busy controlling the damage.

But wait this not that easy at all, this update is not about the revoking the penalty from the sites that get effected, they are just going to re-compute the data to make the system more powerful to detect content scraper. This is not a reversal of a penalty; it is a redefinition of the scope of competence of the algo.

“Matt: The general rule is to push stuff out and then find additional signals to help differentiate on the spectrum. We haven’t done any pushes that would directly pull things back. We have recomputed data that might have impacted some sites. There’s one change that might affect sites and pull things back.”

What you will expect from this update – Improved Scraper Detection
Most of the webmaster complaining about: sites that scrape and re-publish content and are out-ranking the original source of the content. In this update (Panda 2.2) Google will do some tweak in the Panda algorithm to solve this issue.

“A change has been approved that should help with that issue,” Matt said.

If your site got affected from Panda Update and still haven’t change your website as per recommendation given by Google, then immediately do that and get your site Panda 2.2 ready.

West Bengal council of ministers and Portfolios 2011

Here is the list of West Bengal ministers with their portfolios announced Friday after midnight -

Chief Minister: Mamata Banerjee – Home, Health, Land and Land Reforms, Agriculture, Information and Cultural Affairs, Hill Affairs, Minority Affairs, Madrasah Education, Personnel and Administrative Reforms, Power

Cabinet Ministers:

1. Subrata Buxi – Public Works Department, Transport
2. Partha Chatterjee – Industry and Commerce and Parliamentary Affairs, Public Enterprises, Industrial Reconstitution, Information Technology
3. Amit Mitra – Finance, Excise, Textile
4. Manish Gupta – Development and Planning
5. Subrata Mukherjee – Public Health Engineering
6. Abdul Karim Chowdhury – Mass Education Extension and Library Services
7. Sadhan Pande – Consumer Affairs
8. Upendranath Biswas – Backward Classes Welfare
9. Javed Khan – Disaster Management, Fire and Emergency Services, Civil Defence
10. Rabindranath Bhattacharjee – School Education
11. Sabitri Mitra – Woman and Child Development and Social Welfare
12. Jyotipriya Mullick – Food and Supplies
13. Shantiram Mahato – Self Help Group and Self-employment
14. H.A. Sawfi – Cooperation, Inland Water Transport
15. Malay Ghatak – Law and Judiciary
16. Purnendu Bose – Labour
17. Bratya Basu - Higher Education
18. Rachpal Singh – Tourism
19. Hiten Burman – Forest
20. Gautam Deb – North Bengal Development
21. Noor-e-Alam Chowdhury – Animal Resource Development
22. Shankar Chakrabarty - Non-conventional Energy Sources, Correctional Administration
23. Rabiranjan Chatterjee – Technical Education and Training, Science and Technology, Biotechnology
24. Sudarshan Ghosh Dastidar – Environment
25. Ujjal Biswas – Youth Services
26. Shyamapada Mukherjee – Housing
27. Firhad Hakim – Municipal Affairs and Urban Development
28. Sukumar Hansda – Western Zone Development Affairs
29. Soumen Mahapatra – Water Resources Investigation and Development
30. Arup Roy - Agricultural Marketing
31. Chandranath Sinha – Panchayat and Rural Development
32. Manas Bhuniya – (Cong) Irrigation and Waterways, Micro and Small scale Industries
33. Abu Hena – (Cong) Fisheries, Food Processing Industries

Ministers of State:

1. Manjulkrishna Thakur – Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation (Independent Charge) Micro and Small Scale Enterprise and Textile
2. Madan Mitra – Sports (Independent Charge)
3. Subrata Saha – Public Works
4. Shyamal Mandal – Sundarban Affairs (Independent Charge), Irrigation and Waterways

Google Announces new algo to restrict Content Farms

Search algo is becoming interesting game; whenever you’ve figured out the rules, they change them right away. At least, Google likes to change the algo to keep everything interesting. Anyway I really like to be a part of this interesting game.

This time they have introduced a massive algorithm change; this is really a big change they are going to implement on their search queries. Google says the change impacts 11.8% of its search results. So it’s going to be big challenge for SEO guy. For the time being the change only impacts results in the US. It may be rolled out worldwide in the future. It’s a change that should dramatically improve the quality of Google’s search results.

Google says that they have revised the algorithms to reduce rankings for low-quality sites that add little value for users, especially those who copy content from any other websites. The main problem here is that Google does not define the terms “quality site”, “content farm” or “low-quality”. In my opinion this change will be beneficial for those website who provide quality and research oriented content and its going to affect those sites who are blatantly copying content from other website or just rewrite them.

After this change content will be the strong SEO tool. Now this is the time to believe that “Content is King” until we haven’t found any other tools to match the changes that google have introduced. I am eagerly waiting for how following websites get affected for this algorithm change ehow, answers.com, mahalo and the all article directories like ezinearticles, single-page sites like hubpages or Squidoo.

View Movies Free Online From Youtube

There are many websites that currently offer the opportunity to watch movies free online. While these sites are “Illegal” offering up the chance to see films, even before they are released .

But now it has enabled YouTube a new section called “Movies” In which we can see totally free online movie (though this section is available for quite some time , YouTube just shown recently). The new section has categories for different genres, among which are : Action and Adventure , Comedy , Documentary , Horror , Mystery & Suspense , Drama , Animation, etc .

While we will not be able to enjoy movies, is a very good chance if we want to see free movies and high quality. Undoubtedly, there are films that have premiered in 2009 , and probably many others will love it.

New features on Orkut!

After trashed by Facebook last year, Google is now planning to do something different to recollect its lost reputation (Read – User). In this regard they have introduced some new features on Orkut. Few days ago it changed its design a bit too. But that was a minor change to the design, which made me visit Orkut again, but found nothing as much interesting as it should have been.

So let’s get onto the new features that Orkut has to offer for better user experience,

• Group Scraps
  Group Scraps is similar to the groups we create on facebook for Facebook chat. But fb doesn’t allow us to send updates to each group selectively which we choose. This probably is the only stand out feature when you compare the new orkut & facebook. It’s pretty simple. Create a group which includes people whom you would like to send your updates to. Choose that group while sending a scrap & that it!
• Send scraps to Selected people
  This would take care of privacy & ensure discussion among the people you have selected to make your scrap appear to them. You can select ‘n’ number of people among your friend lists to view your scrap. Suppose you’re a blogger & you want a discussion regarding blogging but pro blogging, then you can select some pro-bloggers & discuss your issues with them.
• Better Privacy
  Privacy is the main issue when it comes to Social Networks. With this additional privacy feature you can select from the drop down to whom you want to display your update to. To Select individual users look for the above (second) option.
• Post an Update from any profile page
  Previously Orkut had a scrapbox for every profile page to send an update to them. Keeping that feature intact, it has now added an option to send updates to all your selected users from any profile page. Now its like you can add recipients to your updates.
• Tab System
  Now you can change the last tab in your profile page. Unfortunately you can’t add/remove but only change the last tab. This seems like a feature which either should be enabled completely (enabling add/remove tabs) or it shouldn’t have been added at all.
• Application Box
  Now your homepage would be having an Exclusive box on the sidebar for the applications you use, just below the Friends & the communities’ box. This would make it easier for the user to access the application directly.

I don’t think that Orkut will regain its popularity with all these new features. It’s more look like Facebook. They just want to create another Facebook with different look and feel. Copy Cat Google What do you feel?