Google has been promising changes to its latest search engine algorithm, Penguin, for quite some time now, and after months of waiting, its much-lauded changes are starting to take effect and it’s now officially part of the core algorithm.
There have been dozens of articles written about it, but most are addressed towards SEO professionals and not at you as a business. Whether you do your own SEO or use Melbourne Media Consulting to assist you with it, you need to understand what this latest change means.
When any fundamental change to a search engine algorithm is instituted, it can take months for its effects to be felt as Google painstakingly re-crawls the entire web and ranks or demotes websites using its new criteria. So you might be wondering if this kind of change will affect your website at all or if it already has.
To put it simply, if you as a website have been conducting your business honourably and have stayed away from shortcuts (which we as SEO experts always recommend our clients do) then you probably have not been affected by Penguin. As Google has been doing for quite some time, websites using underhanded methods of self-promotion will be targeting and penalised (we call this Black Hat SEO).
In this instance, it means identifying websites that have been buying links instead of earning them the old-fashioned way. This will take place using the Google “disavow tool”. If you have been building backlinks the right way (which can include efforts to fix broken links and to create and share quality usable content) then you will not be as negatively affected by this change.
It’s important to note that a penalty from Google can take months to recover from. If you have been buying irrelevant or low-quality backlinks, it is going to catch up with you if it hasn’t already. We suggest you contact your local SEO agency Melbourne Media Consulting as soon as possible to remedy this.
