Have you checked the ranking of your website lately? Google is known to update their search settings in order to give users better information when they are conducting online searches. The recent Google SEO updates are termed Panda and Penguin.

How did Panda and Penguin updates impact your website’s status? Positively or negatively?

What exactly are Google Panda and Google Penguin? And why do these updates have such a big impact on websites across the web? In this whitepaper, we look at:

• What are the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates
• How these updates affect websites and searches
• How these updates affect your website ranking
• How to improve your website ranking

The Google Panda Update

Google has been updating their search algorithm Panda for many benefits to Internet searchers. Panda was designed to reduce the amount of websites that delivered poor content to viewers.

So now, because of Google’s algorithm enhancements, viewers can see better quality results when they search in Google.

With Panda, Google now assesses your website based on how your viewers rate your content. Now more than ever, you need to build a brand that people trust and come to for their needs. Sites that are liked more are rated higher; sites that are liked less are rated lower.

4 Key Things Not To Do:

1. Don’t stuff websites with advertising
2. Don’t make it hard to maneuver around your site.
3. Don’t have link errors, grammatical and spelling errors on your site.
4. Don’t have an outdated website look.

4 Key Things To Do:

1. Reduce the bounce rate of your website pages. Bounce simply that the viewer did not find what they wanted on your site.
2. Make your content original and liked (shareable)
3. Increase the amount of time a user spends on your site by improving yoursite content and design.
4. Create,or redesign, a website with great user experience in mind.

The Google Penguin Update

The focus of the more recent Google Penguin algorithm update was to reduce the amount of websites that violate Google’s guidelines. Sample illegal tactics include keyword stuffing, cloaking, duplicate content and link exchanges. These are all categorized as black-hat SEO techniques.

These black-hat techniques led certain websites to rank higher than others. This Google Penguin update is designed to reduce the rankings of websites that are practicing such black-hat SEO techniques.

3 Things Not To Do:

1. Keyword stuffing.
   This is the process in which a keyword is inserted in the text of a website multiple times, sometimes without even making much sense. This had allowed the website to rank higher in the past.
2. Cloaking.
   This is a technique by which the website code shows Google something different than what a user sees. So Google would index a website inaccurately.
3. Link Exchanges.
   This is a method of building ranking.

3 Things To Do:

1. Cleanup your keywords
2. Make your link text (Anchor Text) relevant to the content.
3. Provide the viewer with fresh, relevant content and relevant links.

How These Updates Affect Your Website

While the Panda and Penguin updates have many a bit worried about how these will affect their sites, in the end, these Google updates improve the viewers’ experience in searching for their interests. Websites that hold no relevant information for users will no longer appear at the top of search listings. These updates help to solidify good SEO practices across websites.

So if you follow proper SEO conventions as outlined by Panda and Penguin, your site will rank higher in the search results and viewers will be better able to find your website now.