3 Reasons Why The Google Penguin Update Stole Your Search Engine Traffic & Recovery Tips

Lost traffic caused by the latest Penguin update?

Regardless of whether your traffic from Google got hammered after the Algorithm update on the 24th April or not, these SEO tips should be factored in to your online marketing, SEO and content writing strategy in the future.

Keyword Stuffing

‘Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the content’.

Innocent mistake or trying too hard to rank higher?

Many search engine optimization specialists recommend using keyword tools like the Google adwords to find related words which have the same meaning. Using too many keywords in your post & page titles (including duplicate keywords), headings and sub headings, can be make your site look spammy.

Yes its correct to use descriptive keywords in all these areas, including image file names, titles, alt text and descriptions, however don’t over do it. If in doubt, check out Google’s quality guidelines which also include examples of good SEO practices and whats not.

Solution – Avoid keyword stuffing by checking the density of keywords to make sure you haven’t stuffed too many in your content.

There is also a plugin for checking your content doesn’t contain too many keywords.

Article Spinning

Solution – Stop spinning articles with similar recycled content that you or someone else has rewritten to link farms in order to try and build back links and traffic to your site.

Websites that recommend or link to article spinning software: If you’re following any blogs, no matter how popular they are and how much money they say they are making, STOP and unsubscribe from receiving any more article marketing scam newsletters from them.

Anyone that recommends them as well and knows they use affiliate links to this type of software is doing you no favors.

Same Anchor Text

Any of these type of links can be penalized: paid text links using exact match anchor text, comment spam, guest posts on questionable sites, article marketing sites, and links from dangerous sites. Solution: Check your anchor text from incoming links using Bing's link explorer tool: Not a lot you can do about this especially if a bad site has scraped your content or performed negative SEO on your site. You can use different tools to check your link profile like Open Site Explorer or Google webmaster tools. Here's an example of 5 domains with excessive incoming links to my site which i detected in using Google webmaster tools,. Here's some examples of incoming link profiles from micrositemasters post on Link Over Optimization. Resources On How To Fix & Recover From Google's Algorithm Update

1. Search Engine Land
2. WebProNews
3. Google Penguin Fixes
4. Seround Table
5. Distilled - Strategies for Diagnosing Penguin and Recovering

The Bright Side

Bing now accounts for over 30% of all searches while Google's market share is falling. If your traffic hasn't been effected from Bing, it would be a good idea to find out the reasons you have been penalized and fix the problems before Bing gets you as well. Bing webmaster tools help you discover which areas of your site may need work to comply with SEO best practices. Whats you take on the Penguin update? Where you effected positively or did you suffer and try to recover?