Why Google’s Penguin update could be bad for your business
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- Category: Our Blog
- Created on Thursday, 17 May 2012 02:51
Find out what this update is, why Google did it, how it could effect your business and what you can do about it.
Penguin is a code word used for an update (April 24th 2012) to Googles ranking algorithm. This update is focused on improving search results, for end users, by eliminating (by penalizing) website that use what Google considers “shady” SEO practices.
However these updates sometimes have the unintended consequence of penalizing legitimate sites. You just have to Google “Google penguin update” to see a lot of chatter by SEO folk detailing the negative impact this update has had on rankings, particularly for small business.
Unfortunately it seems that Google have weighted the penalty of these bad links where it only takes a few to blow your search ranking out of the water. Potentially undoing months, if not years, of work. A good example is the discussion about WPMU.org (a large and authoritative site for Wordpress themes and plugins) who has see a large fall-off of traffic after the update, due to just a few bad backlinks.
These bad SEO practice's include link stuffing, and particularly those spammy links found in comment spam (if you have a wordpress website you will know what this is). However, the update could also affect your site (which is not doubt 'legit') if you have backlinks that have…
