Is your Website Affected by Google Updates?

Many companies today are wondering exactly what happened that they can no longer see their sites on Google’s top results right after the Penguin update. If you are not aware of it yet, the aim of the Penguin update was to reduce and even eliminate spam in the search results. According to research, spam on the search results mainly come from low-quality networks.

Natural links

Before we get into the details of the findings, it is important that you understand links first and what Google does with it. Links are considered as editorial votes by Google, as well as other search engines. So, in theory, the sites which have the most votes should have higher rankings on search engines because they find it more useful.

Google scrutinizes the quality, quantity and the relevance of the websites to the search queries by users. When Google looks at links, they also look at the types of websites which links to yours. How are these links acquired and how are they used by the website? It is important to take note that imbalances in the anchor text, as well as large number of new links will raise red flags.

Everyone wants to rank high in Google but this should be done in a legitimate way. Trying to do shortcuts will only lead to your site not getting listed. Remember what has been preached for years. The only way to create more links to your site is to make entertaining, informative, fresh content which is worth reading.

Do Not Put your Site in Danger

There are links which you should embrace and links which you must avoid at all times. Links which belong to the latter are unnatural links. According to experts who have checked links and who are familiar with the Google updates, there is one common theme shared by sites which rank low are unnatural links. There are five issues which must be scrutinized and avoided at all costs.

Paid texts which use anchor text

There are other companies which want to accomplish high rankings by purchasing links from other sites with the same anchor text. This is very much against Google’s guidelines because this is manipulative and it does not provide users any value.

Links from dangerous sites

Dangerous sites are sites which are known to have malware, flagged content and the likes. So, if you want to stay relevant in Google, avoid these sites.

Guest posts and questionable sites

Guest posts have always been a legitimate way to earn links back to your website and rank higher. However, there are sites dinged by Penguin and it is necessary that you be aware of them so that you do not use them to link back to your sites.

Comment spam

Always avoid spammy usernames, as well as signatures in comment if you want to rank higher.

Sites for article marketing

Article marketing sites tend to have low-quality and thin content. These are exactly the things which Google does not like so you should steer clear of these sites.