The Penguins are Coming

The penguins are coming. The penguins are coming!

As you may or may not know, each year, Google changes its search algorithm around 500- 600 times. While most of these changes are minor, Google occasionally rolls out a “major” algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin) affecting site search results significantly.

This time, it’s Google’s Penguin 4.0 update – and it’s approaching at full speed.

Technically speaking, these algorithms affect each search query entered into Google. The results that appear are calculated by over 200 different ranking factors within the complex algorithms. In the past year, 5+ major rollouts have been aimed at addressing unauthorized rankings boosts, thin/poor content, back linking issues, site responsiveness and overall quality – causing multiple sites to reflect major drop rates in their analytics.

So, what does that mean for you and your site?

Penguin is specifically aimed at decreasing search engine rankings for websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines — using recently declared black-hat SEO techniques that increased artificially ranked webpages by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page.

Website owners that don’t implement standard best practices for security can leave their websites vulnerable to being easily hacked — something we hate. And some purposely seek out those sites to insert malicious content in an attempt to gain rank and traffic in search engines.

Typically, algorithmic changes impact roughly 5% of queries and can absolutely kill a site’s ranking — if they are not prepared.

Can you avoid this update? No.

But, we want your site to be ready – so here’s a heads up: Google Penguin 4.0 is coming.