Penguin 2.1 is technically the 5th Penguin update released by Google and it hit the web on the 4th of October 2013. For those of you who don’t really know what this means, let us make things pretty simple. Google, the search engine giant comes up with various updates periodically.
Everybody knows the importance of search engine results in today’s world. Since Google is a major player, they try to come up with methods to minimize spam content. Everyone who searches for a particular keyword on Google would be expecting valuable results and not spam. Hence, in order to safeguard its own authenticity, Google comes up with new strategies to minimize spam content. This happens in several different names and the latest one to hit the world is Penguin 2.1.
People use different techniques to improve the visibility of websites. Everyone wants their web addresses to be listed on the top pages of Google search results. To make this happen, a lot of spam content is posted on websites, and backlinks are created on top-ranked blogs.
Now, all this content is not spam but neither is all of it good either. Google tries to reduce spam in the search results and the latest techniques used to get this done have been implemented by the Penguin 201 release.
The effects
As per the official records, 1% of search queries have been affected. Now, what does this mean? A lot of websites lost their rankings. Search results will not include some of these results anymore. If your web traffic has recently dropped especially after the 4th of October 2013, your website might be one of them.
The search engine optimization strategies that you implemented recently might have done you bad. The links that you had pasted on to various sites and the comments that you had made to various blogs might have adversely affected your web traffic.
This is exactly what the Penguin update does. The unnatural links will be targeted. Bogus content that is written to promote your website or services will also be heavily penalized.
The recovery measures
You need to act very fast in order to survive with the update without being hit. You have to remove all unnatural links. Links to your website might be present in various locations in the internet world. You need to find all the unnatural ones and get them removed. You might not be able to remove some of this manually. You need to stop acknowledging such links.
You should also ensure that such unnatural links are not added to any websites in the future. This is also very important. When you clear the mess that has already been created, you should not forget to avoid this from happening in the future too. You should remove all the junk content from your pages. Make all your pages rich in content and ensure the originality of whatever is posted there.
Each update pertaining to the Google algorithm is watched keenly by SEO consultants. You may hire an SEO consultant for your website to make sure that your website is never hit by such regular updates from search engines.