Over the past few weeks, Google has been rolling out their anti-web spam update known as “Penguin.” Since this update has rolled out, several websites have seen their search engine rankings plummet, but why? If your website’s rankings have dropped in Google and you can no longer find your website in the search results, here are a few reasons why this may have happened:
- Your website gained too many backlinks (links from other websites pointing to your website) over a short period of time
- Using the same anchor text in too many backlinks
- Lack of backlink diversity
- Keyword stuffing
- Using hidden text
- You paid for links back to your website that pass pagerank
- Using spam in blog or website comments to get links back to your website
- A lot of backlinks in articles or content on low quality websites
- Backlinks from websites that have been deemed dangerous
Optimizing your website for the search engines isn’t a harmful act to take part in, but when website owners or webmasters decide to take part in tactics that are considered spam, that’s when problems can arise. A lot of these issues are issues that Google has been combatting for a long time, but the Penguin update caught a lot of websites who had managed to skate by before.
It’s important to remember that if your website was dinged by the Penguin update, it doesn’t mean that you were intentionally doing something wrong. For example using hidden text used to be a common practice so if you purchased a website that’s been around awhile, there might be issues with it that you weren’t aware of.
If your website has been affected by Google’s Penguin update, the best thing that you can do is remove the problems and then inform Google that you’ve corrected the issues. If your website was completely removed from the search results, once you remove the problems and ask for reconsideration, your website will be reviewed to make sure all issues have been dealt with.
