SEO | Google Penguin, the Webspam Sheriff

SEO can be roughly divided into two major parts: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. The latter is usually referred to link building. Having many backlinks linking to your website will bring you a lot of link juice, and is telling Google that your website is authoritative and trustworthy. However, some dishonest SEO practitioners create the so-called “link farm,” trying to manipulate the ranking of websites. Google definitely doesn’t allow this situation. Hence, let me introduce the topic of this post: Google Penguin, the Webspam Sheriff.

(Photo credit: Amadeus Consulting)

What is Google Penguin?

Google Panda and Google Penguin are two algorithm updates that both fight with unscrupulous SEOs who want to trick Google’s ranking system. Panda update punishes sites that are considered low-quality, thin content, or duplicate content. Penguin, on the other hand, punishes sites that have too many unnatural backlinks. Websites which buy links in order to increase their ranking are Penguin’s most-wanted. In short, Panda is the on-site ranger, while Penguin is the off-site sheriff. Websites hit by either of them will lose tons of traffic.

(Photo credit: Anna Korolekh on Moz)

History of Google Penguin

Google Penguin 1.0 rolled out on April 24, 2012. Prior to this date, it is relatively easy for a website owner to increase the page ranking on the search engine results page. All he needed to do was build a lot of links pointing to his website. Google definitely discouraged this activity. Therefore, the goal of Google Penguin is to penalize this intention.

Once a website is penalized by Penguin, it has to wait till the next update or refresh to be re-evaluated. The result could be positive, which will bring back the tremendous loss of traffic, but it could also be negative, which will maintain the ban. Google mentioned at SMX East this year that the next Penguin update, Penguin 4.0, will be released before the end of 2015. The new version of Google Penguin is rumored to be a real-time update. This means that a website can recover from the penalty as soon as it fixes the problem detected by Penguin and doesn’t need to wait for the next refresh or update.

Who Is Punishing Our Site, Panda or Penguin?

Whenever a website has a substantial drop on traffic, the first question should be asked is: Is it Panda or Penguin that is punishing me? The only way to get the traffic back is to figure out the problem and fix the problem. Otherwise you might spend a lot of time and effort improving your on-site quality while the website is actually being hit by Penguin. And here are two ways to figure out this question:

1.) Check when did the traffic drop

A site owner can turn to Google Analytics and find out when is the date that the website started losing traffic. And check if there is any Panda or Penguin update/refresh close to this date. If there’s a match, it is very obvious who is punishing your site.

2.) Check the traffic of keywords

The penalty of Panda algorithm is site-wide. When www.example.com/blog is considered low quality and hit by Panda, not only pages under /blog but also the traffic of www.example.com and other subfolders will be influenced.

However, Penguin penalizes a single page, instead of the entire site, based on a certain keyword. A site owner can turn to tool like SEMrush to find out whether the losing traffic is site-wide and whether the losing traffic is only on certain keywords. If there is one page losing tremendous organic traffic from a search query, it is most likely the influence of Penguin.

What do Penguin Penalize For?

Trying to sculpt a website’s inbound links is undoubtedly something that Penguin the sheriff is not fond of. As below, I list three possible signals that a website may be deemed as dishonest.

1.) Paid Links:

It remains unknown how Google detects whether or not a website has paid to a “link farm” to generate backlinks. But one thing for sure is that Google has been fighting with this activity for a long time. Getting thousands of inbound links in a few days is absolutely unnatural to Penguin’s eyes. Google might wipe your website entirely away from its index as a result of the violation.

2.) Low-Quality Backlinks

More or less, there are always some low-quality websites linking to yours. However, when a very high percentage of your backlinks do not have a great page authority, it’s a red flag. Imagine a local restaurant has thousands of inbound links, but only few of them is from high authority website, such as local news media, well-known foodie’s blog, etc. This might be judged as link sculpting by Google.

3.) Over-Optimized Anchor Texts

This one is interesting. A basic SEO concept is that the anchor text can be used to help search engines define the subject of the website that is linked to and the relevancy between that website and its anchor text. For example:

(1.) inSegment is the best digital marketing agency in Boston, here’s the link.

(2.) inSegment is the best digital marketing agency in Boston.

In a general situation, the latter anchor text is more helpful for inSegment’s SEO performance since it is telling Google that www.insegment.com is relevant to the term “digital marketing agency.” The former sentence, however, isn’t that helpful because the anchor text, “the link”, doesn’t tell Google much information.

Nevertheless, if Google finds that whenever there’s a link linking to inSegment, the anchor text is the exact “digital marketing agency.” Or there is an article mentions “digital marketing agency” several times and all with the hyperlink of inSegment’s website. Then, Penguin will definitely suspect that inSegment is trying to manipulate its ranking on the keyword: digital marketing agency.

Negative SEO

Perhaps you are a right-minded person and are thinking that Penguin is not something you need to worry about. You never tried to fool Google’s algorithm with dishonorable tricks. And you believe that your inbound marketing strategy can win you tons of organic traffic and shares. I’m glad you are this kind of person, but unfortunately, you might be wrong.

The link farming service and dishonest SEOs have never left this industry. Since they can’t easily increase clients’ websites ranking as they did before, they now put low-quality links linking to the websites of clients’ competitors…

(Photo credit: Marcela De Vivo on Search Engine Watch)

Yes, this is what happens on the current SEO landscape. Your immoral competitors may link to your website from a lot of link farms, where they used to build links for themselves, and get you penalized by Google Penguin. Hence, it’s still good to understand what Google Penguin is, even though you never thought of tricking Google.

Solution:

Just like a webmaster can use rel= “nofollow” to tell search engines that the outbound links shouldn’t be considered as a relevance signal between these websites, he/she can also disavow inbound links (backlinks) through Google Search Console. As a result, Google won’t take these disavowed links into account when assessing the quality of a website. The detailed instruction can be found as follows: Search Console Help: DisavowBacklinks.