How to Remain Competitive After Google’s Penguin & Panda Updates?

Webmasters are having a tough time redoing their website after Google came up with a couple of revolutionary algorithms based updates namely Penguin and Panda. These two updates brought in a paradigm shift in the way search engines ranked websites. Voluminous backlinks are passé, spun content is a crime and black hat SEO is dying a natural death. The latest updates use artificial intelligence to inspect websites on the basis of their quality, authenticity, usability and popularity. Only those sites are awarded a high rank which toe the guidelines laid down by Google webmasters.

Google compares and ranks websites from the end- user point of view. Simply creating backlinks and navigating through a big number of sites is not going to work anymore. The new algorithms are based on user experience. From its database, the updates run a check for the credibility, loading time, quality of information, natural links, a relevant network of supporting sites and blogs and appropriate ads. In order to climb the SEO rankings ladder, many websites resort to using black hat SEO techniques, and Google has devised this technique to actually downgrade such sites. This has caused no less than 12 percent loss in ranking for several web sites.

How to remain competitive after Google penguin & panda updates is perhaps the most frequent query from webmasters. It is important to learn the Google game if one has to stay alive in the competition. Both Google Penguin and Google Panda are attacking dishonest websites from two different angles. Penguin is punishing websites for duplicate content, overuse of keywords on a page, purchasing or sharing bulk links and other shady but widespread practices. Panda, on the other side, is busy downgrading websites it considers ‘thin’ or low quality. It has simultaneously upgraded sites which conform to white hat techniques.

In order to survive the continuing arm twisting by Google, webmasters must keep in mind a few handy tips. For example, overstuffing a page with dozen ads is not going to work in their support any more. Instead, they should look to include the most appropriate and genuine ads on the page. It helps to remember that the algorithms affect the entire site and not just a page. Therefore, the complete site needs to be checked for possible oversights. Google was built with the idea of providing information to users. E-commerce is simply an accessory. Thus, any site which gives out information that the user is searching invariably gets to a higher rank.

Websites need to be of high quality in order to remain competitive,. It is well known that links are not built in a day nor do guests start pouring in from day one. If one is able to check these practices, trust Google to reward the site with a higher rank and greater visibility. To attract more traffic, the entire online marketing and search engine optimization practices have to be altered. There are no short cuts to success, either in real life or in the virtual.