So, what’s the Google Penguin update all about?

So, what’s the Google Penguin update all about?

Introduction

There is still a very large proportion of business owners that still haven’t the foggiest as to what the Google Penguin update is.

But why should a business have to understand this, surely that’s what SEO agencies are paid for, right?

Well, kind of but we think its always a good thing if your business has some seo knowledge, especially when it comes to important updates.

The reason being is some marketing agencies may try and pull the wool over your eye’s, and if your wise to this, well you can help your business to avoid incurring a penalty.

So, how exactly does the Google Penguin update work?

Us SEO’s can fall into one of two boxes, that’s the consultants that want to do a good job, and abide by white hat rules, and then there’s the consultants that want to cut corners.

Now cutting corners is never a good idea, as it’s a one-way street to incurring a big fat penalty!

So, we believe white hat seo is a must. However, there’s always going to be companies that want to do things the easy way. This often means trying to build backlinks without exerting any effort.

Low quality backlinks, or spam links as some people call them will result in your business incurring a link penalty.

So how do you avoid this? Well, you or your appointed seo agency must abide by white hat rules.

Why was this update even created by Google?

Low quality backlinks wasn’t a small problem, it was a truly massive problem. So many agencies were building low quality backlinks on mass, in an effort to try and fool Google’s algorithm.

This meant that sometimes some websites would rank on the first page, but once the algorithm did catch-up then the website would incur a penalty.

So in a nutshell the algorithm change was to clampdown on websites that tried to fool Google into thinking the business was more important than it actually was.

So does this mean that the marketing agencies that offered low seo prices, were all black hat?

No, you do have to take the price of seo services out of the equation, it really does just boil down to was the work implemented white hat or not.

So it really doesn’t matter if you paid a million pound a month, or a fiver, it does come down to was the SEO correctly implemented, or was it low quality?

And a lot of marketing agencies were caught out for building rubbish quality backlinks, so a lot of businesses would have received a link penalty as a result.

Thankfully now more and more businesses are aware of the Google Penguin update, so are now choosing seo companies that are white hat.

 

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

What will happen if our website does get hit by the Google Penguin update?

If your business has loads of spam backlinks, or low-quality backlinks then Google’s algorithm will detect this.

Then the website may receive a penalty, if this occurs it normally means that the website will suffer a drop-in terms of where it ranks.

So, for example, you may run a solicitors practice that specialises in employment law. Now before the Google Panda updates your business may have ranked number one for “employment solicitors”- yet after the update it may rank on the 11th page of Google.

This is how severely the update could impact a business, this is just an example of course.

What does it mean to disavow backlinks?

Before you start to disavow any backlinks, you really do need to know what you are doing. As what can sometimes happen is a business thinks its received a link penalty, then disavows the backlinks incorrectly and actually makes the problem worse.

That’s to say more often than not there will normally be some good quality backlinks, so these shouldn’t always be disavowed.

Yet our best advice is this, before you disavow any backlinks, make sure you talk to a white hat seo agency.

 

Why should my digital marketing agency be checking our backlinks?

You should make it your digital marketing agencies responsibility to regularly report on the health of your websites backlinks. And of course, you should be using a white hat agency one which you know you can trust.

You should obtain regular reports on the health of your website’s backlinks. The reason for this is if spam backlinks are allowed to accumulate, or low-quality backlinks are obtained, then this could affect where the business ranks.