What Is A Penguin Penalty

Before we get into this we need to make something very clear, Penguin is nothing more than another layer to Panda it is not a standalone update.

The whole concept of the Penguin roll out was to target sites that were over optimizing, not just on page factors but off page factors as well.

Understanding The Penalty

The idea behind the update was an attempt by Google to try to stop the thousands of webmasters from gaming the system and getting good rankings.

So for any webmasters that were keyword stuffing or how I like to put it writing content for the search engines rather than people and over optimizing their on-page, which is the actual article content and then the off-page which is mainly related to link building and density of your incoming text links.

So why did this penalty hit some sites and not others?

What were the elements that were looked at to determine a penalty or a pass, lets dig a little deeper. To get a solid understanding of how this worked you will need to be aware that sites are allocated a quality score. The first major update which was Panda actually focused on your sites quality score and user experience such as bounce rate, time on site and social influence.

What Is A Site Quality Score

How is the quality score calculated?

The best way to describe this is by looking at it this way [Static Elements] x [User Experience] = Your Panda Score

Static Elements are all your on-page and off-page elements where your User Experience is what you call the bounce rate on your site, if you have a bounce rate higher than 55% you may start to see a decline in your listings unless you have really strong static elements.

The next layer of the updates after Panda was “Penguin” this was designed to be focused towards on-page and off-page optimization. You know the type of page that has a site title like “Affiliate Program” with keywords throughout the content as well as H1, H2, H3 tags and bold, italic and underlined text, then you build a bunch of back links to that page using the primary keyword with very little diversity in the anchor text. In saying that many very high quality sites were caught up in this for one reason or another without actually over optimizing anything.

The more we look at this and analyze sites that were penalized against those that were not, much of the data coming in from the experts is really not adding up. Having been online for many years I have had the opportunity to look at many sites in all different niches. We own some of these sites as well have admin access to others due to our collaboration with many influential bloggers online.

• Setting Up Your Analytics Account
• Do You Know That Duplicate Images Can Hurt Your Rankings
• How To Lower Your Bounce Rate And Increase Your User Experience
• Site Navigation How It Can Effect Your Bounce Rate Significantly
• Get Better Results With Your On-Page Optimization
• Are Exact Match Domains Still Effective
• Are Exact Match Links Still Effective Post Panda & Penguin
• Building Links And Growing Your Site Traffic

What we are seeing is not adding up, this is why we are releasing these posts about all the updates that are happening, firstly to allow you to get your head around what is happening and secondly to use this research to find the best solution for your online business in surviving 2012 and beyond.

You need to remember that many of the sites writing about this never experienced a penalty of any kind, so in reality the authors do not know what the actual impact is or how severe it can be to an online business.

If you have been hit by a penalty from Google we would really like to hear what has happened to your site and whether or not you have been able to recover…