Monday, June 10, 2013

Guidelines to Save Your Site from Getting Penalized By Google Penguin Update

Yesterday, I read a post about future Google penguin update by Berry Schwartz. In that article he talked about the release of new penguin update soon. I thought Google had slowed down its back to back updates chain from 24 January 2013, but this update made me to rethink about ways to stay safe from the impacts of the approaching Google updates.

As Google is trying to get better the quality of search results, many previous techniques do not work now. After research I found some techniques which can be successful to avoid penalty from Google penguin updates:

Content Marketing

Creating and sharing an informative content to get the attention of people to market business online is all about Content Marketing. Sometimes people think that blogging is the only way of content marketing, but they are wrong. Here I am explaining all possible ways of online content promotion:

Promote your content socially amongst your friends and colleagues on different sites like Facebook, twitter, Google plus etc.

Promoting the content in the form of videos on different quality sites like YouTube, Vimeo,Viddler etc.

Documents, slides and PDF are also good ways to share content on dissimilar websites like, Docstoc, SlideShare and AuthorStream.

“By creating almost 50 infographics, we were able to make over 2 million visitors and 41,000 backlinks for under $30,000”- as quoted by Neil Patel (Co-founder of Kissmetrics). So it is excellent idea to use blog content in the form of an infographic and post it on different sites.

Guest posting is also one of the best promotion techniques to increase awareness about your products and services. It helps to construct more links for your blog or site. Interviews posting is also a possible way to engage users on your blog or site.

Podcast is another good way to use your content in audio form and then share it on other sites.

Content on a blog alone is like “a tree falling in a forest and no one is around to hear it”-Wikipedia. So you should know the mediums that people are using to share their contents.

google penguin update


Social Media

Social media sharing is the finest practice to connect or attract users through social media sites. Social media sites allow people to like, share, update and join activities & gain traffic from people that are using the social sites.

Why people are connected with different brands and businesses publicly? What people find in those brands”? The answer is simple. People are connected with a brand in social media due to three basic factors:

For enjoyment like “Barack Obama”, people are encouraged of his personality and people enjoy updated information on their Social Media pages.

35M Facebook likes
2792315 Google plus ones
139K Twitter Followers

For interest like “Ford Motor Company”, people love cars and are interested to know more about the advanced features and quality design of new cars.

1.8M Facebook likes
2,068,190 Google plus ones
199K Twitter Followers

For information, a good example is “SEOmoz.org”. It is an organization which provides information linked to internet marketing.

109K Facebook likes
33,133 Google plus ones
208K Twitter Followers

I read one article on Mashable about “Social Media Lessons from a Successful Food Truck” and I learned some very good things about social media promotion:

Linking of social media sites makes it easy to endorse content from one site to another automatically.

Social media is not only about engaging people but is also about encouraging them to vote, like and share your information among their friends too.

One thing I like the most is sharing “the story’s behind your brands”. It inspires users to follow you and grow your business in a cost efficient manner.
Site Structure and Navigation:

Site structure and navigation is a very significant factor as it influences SEO authority of a website. An organized navigation structure not only help visitor to locate about what he is searching for, but also encourage the people to search other sections of the site also. An optimized web page structure is a good practice to make your website SEO friendly. It is also significant to direct the course of link equity throughout the site.

I will not talk much about the patterns of site structure as you can easily find several examples on internet. I just want to share the significant factors to design the site structure and navigation properly.

It is always necessary to connect each page of website to the home page so that when visitors go deep in the site, they can get back to home page with just one click.
A breadcrumb trail is helpful to navigate visitor within the site. It enables user to know at what page they are and also helps them to get back on parent page easily.

Internal linking of web pages is very significant to control and decrease the depth of website.

Internal linking also allows the usage of anchor text around the site and improves the visitor’s experience as well. Site structure and navigation are the crucial elements for an outstanding SEO practice. It makes the content easily findable within the website for both users and search engines. Effective changes in site structure can present solid SEO benefits to your site and moreover, the spiders will also think your site as a high quality one.


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