The Top 10 Tips for Loving (Or Living With) Google’s Penguin

Never before (except perhaps in the baneful reviews of the box office bomb Happy Feet Two), have penguins been so universally despised as in the latest iteration of Google’s algorithm modifications. If you thought Farmer had ploughed you into the ground and Panda had eaten your most successful shoots, the Penguin will ice your SEO efforts and freeze your income. To beat that Penguin into submission apply these tips:

It’s All About Quality – Even though there has been more than enough public discussion about what constitutes quality and depth in writing articles, it’s very obvious what constitutes poor quality and shallowness. Any spun or transparently rewritten articles are going to attract the full wrath of the Penguin From Hades, so make sure that your content is eternally fully unique and well-written.

Limit Your Links - Too many links within a page are a clear trigger for Penguin’s bots to kick you down to Antarctica so keep the number of links to an absolute minimum and always integrate them logically and in a reader-friendly manner within your text, never in a list of links plunked into a sidebar.

Keep Your Links High Up – Above the fold is the critical place for links to be placed as they bear the most weight as well as attract the most reader attention. Penguin appreciates high up links and is not so kind to those which are dumped into a footer or at the end of an article.

Drop the Dropped Domains – One of the old standby SEO strategies is to pick up dropped domains to benefit from istorical links or PR and Google’s little polar bird is completely up to speed on this ploy so avoid it like a Penguin plague.

Never Stop Validating – Ensuring that your site is completely free from validation errors and each page is of a strictly limited file size to ensure easy loading is critical to keeping that tuxedo-wearing little bird happy and chirping away… if Penguins chirp, that is.

Stop Worrying About Negative SEO – Only in the most extreme cases do you have to be concerned about one of your rabidly vicious competitors setting up a few thousand links pointing to your site overnight to get Penguin to target you. Not only is it a whole lot of work for very little result, but the Googleplex has very few birdbrains so they’ll see through that.

Fry Up Your on Page Spam – Hawaiians believe that fried Spam is delectable, so go ahead and fry all the spam you currently have. That equates to: hidden text, keyword stuffing, thin content, cloaking, paid links, link spam, and the rest of the naughty black hat stuff which is nothing more than rancid canned meat product that is toxic to Penguins.

Bad Link, Bad, Bad Link – Come on, you know which of your links are nasty, so just go ahead and kill them now. Keeping them alive on your pages will do nothing but cause the evil Penguin Penalty to rear its ugly head from the snow and ice.

Know When to Start Over – Perhaps your current site is so riddled with Penguin Pathogens that it just may be at the unrecoverable stage. In these fairly rare cases you might be better off to just can the entire site and start completely fresh at a new URL. If you do take this extreme step, ensure that you are not carrying over any of your old calamitous habits, as well as not a single iota of any text or image content from the dearly departed site.

File the Google Feedback Form – If you think that you have been penalized by the Penguin through no fault of your own don’t listen to the paranoid hyperbola on the various SEO forums and go ahead and file The Form. There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that filing The Form will “out” your site so file with no fear and confront that rascally Penguin.

You can live happily with Penguin. Just try not to mind the ammonia odor!

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