The Google Penguin update was rolled out in April 24, 2012. Many sites are complaining that they were severely hit by the update and Google is actually favoring sites with no SEO or very less SEO. And the worst thing is most of the companies do not know whether they were hit by this update or not.
There is an easiest way to find this by checking your Google analytics and analyzing the search related traffic for past weeks and this week. If you had paid links or spam links in your site you are probably hit by the update.
While most of the webmaster whines that they are severely hit by the update there were few websites who had benefitted from the update as well. It’s very early to take them as a sample so how penguin evaluates a website of spam link is yet to be determined.
There are few points to be noted. This is completely an automated update. And Google has openly said that there will be no reconsideration for manual exceptions. Google has given a form to report if you think you have been wrongly hit by this update.
How do you recover?
Try and remove the spam as soon as possible from the links from which you’ve been getting traffic. This is critical because the update is targeted on spam. Most probably Google could have sent you a message of what are all the spam links you have your website. If you didn’t get any such messages from Google and still if you think you have it by the update remove anything that looks like spam from your site.
As said earlier, manual reconsiderations will not be accepted because the algorithmic change is automatic. That is there was no human touch involved in verifying spam or not. When the algorithm thinks that you are linked with spam, you are hit. If the algorithm thinks you are clean, you are good for the moment.
Will Over-Optimization exist?
Google first said that its going to crack down its whip with the Over optimized websites too. But as far as the complaints we see on the Google Forum only the website with purchases spam links were hit hard. And for Google also it will be tough to target some overly optimized blogs or websites.
To make the life easy for the searchers and the audience Google is constantly trying to make changes and updates which means we have to catch up with it or we will be losing the race with the planet’s biggest search engine. Though there are alternatives Google is the primary search engine in most of the countries and you won’t regret changing few things to be in first page of Google Search results.
