Penguin: The Google Webspam Update

Google has just recently released their most recent update. The Google webspam update, also known as the Penguin update. The goal from this update was to try and cut down on the amount of spam that people see in their searches, and to stop rewarding some shady or manipulative practices that websites may have been using. Google has said that this change should impact about 3% of all searches. While most sites should not have any issues with this update, it is still important to know of the changes Google is making.

Here is a quick run down of some of the things that we recommend watching out for.

• Excessively long or manipulative page titles
• Meta keyword tag stuffing
• Stuffing your page content with keywords
• Aggressive internal linking
• Manipulative anchor text from external links
• Reciprocal link pages
• Footer Links

They key thing to take away from this update is that it is more important then ever to focus on the end user. If you design your site around usability and emphasize quality content and you should be fine. Our very own Brian Wood has written a fantastic post on the danger signs and what to watch our for. He has a more in depth analysis of each potential issue and what to do about it. If you would like to know more, then I highly recommend you go read the full web spam article as Brian has a lot of fantastic insights into this update.