Five Great Resources for Understanding the Penguin Update

The Penguin update has sent many webmasters into a blind panic. Whether you do your SEO alone, or have an SEO agency to handle things for you, the thought of Google making sweeping changes to its ranking algorithms is understandably scary. If you’ve been hit by Penguin, don’t worry too much. It is possible to recover. Check out these handy resources, courtesy of Posts about Penguin on Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/boomweb/posts-about-penguin/), for getting your SEO in check.

1. 2001 Called – It Wants its SEO Back:
This interesting blog post dissects a recent article published by Tom Gregan in .Net magazine. The author wrote to .net to complain about the quality of the article, and posts the resulting back-and-forth exchange. It’s interesting reading, although the flow of the conversation takes a bit of work to follow. It’s well worth reading through the entire thing so that you’re armed with knowledge from all sides of the Panda and Penguin debate.

2. Matt Cutts at SMX (http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-you-a-with-matt-cutts-at-smx-advanced-123513)
Who better to talk about link building and quality SEO than Google’s own Matt Cutts? This article talks about a recent Q&A session where Cutts explained the nature of the recent update, answering several burning questions, including whether the ranking changes are a penalty (Google prefers to say they’re “manual action”), and whether negative SEO is a real problem (the answer is, it can happen, but they try to protect against it).

3. Link Building Means Earning Hard Links, Not Easy Links (http://searchengineland.com/link-building-means-earning-hard-links-not-easy-links-123767)
Your SEO agency has probably been telling you to earn “hard links” for ages, but it’s taken the Panda update for people to take this point seriously. This article highlights that links meant for humans are the most important kind of link, and explains why directory links, footer links, and other “easy” backlinks are becoming so de-valued.

4. How One Company Recovered from the Penguin Update (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update)
In April of this year, WPMU.org was hit by Penguin, losing 81% of its Google traffic in one week, as it almost completely disappeared from the SERPs. The site is a reputable site that contains plugins, articles, and resources for WordPress users. However, because the themes that it offers tend to have a “Powered by X” link in their footer, the site had a large number of sitewide links on low quality blogs. It was these low quality links that caused the site to get penalised. WPMU.org managed to recover, however, by removing links from the themes that were under their control, and asking WordPress-Mu powered site owners to remove as many theme links as possible. By acting quickly to clean up their link profile, they were able to see a SERPs recovery in just a few weeks.

5. Lost on Google (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2179377/Lost-on-Google-Small-Businesses-Seek-Answers-After-Penguin-Update )
In this article, Danny Goodwin explains his perspective on the Panda updates. He believes that a huge number of companies simply never took the time to learn good SEO, and that if they’d hired a reputable SEO agency they could have protected themselves from penalties. The secret to ranking well is to earn the rank through a high quality and diverse link profile. The sites that are hurting today aren’t being “punished”, they’re simply getting the rank they should have had in the first place.