Yep- another algorithm update. The penguin algorithm was officially released in April of 2012 and has seen numerous updates since. It was released to work with the Panda Algorithm which rewarded sites with a good user experience and penalized sites with a poor one. Penguin goes after sites using “Black Hat” SEO techniques. It penalizes sites that appear spammy or un-natural. This means if you have spam links you better watch out because Penguin 3.0 is going to hurt. Spam links could be a multitude of things from paid links that are not advertising to links in directories outside your industry or even irrelevant forum conversations.

What does Google Penguin 3.0 mean for you?

If your business has been hit by the penguin update here is what you need to do:

1. Fire the current person or company handling your SEO. (Penguin has been around since 2012 and if you are being affected by it they don’t have your best interests in mind.)
2. Find a competent SEO (oh hey, like us! ). Make sure they know what they are talking about and have a solid plan of attack to recover your rankings and get rid of any penalties.
3. Make sure your new SEO is getting all of the bad links removed, either by contacting the webmaster or using a disavow.
4. Sit back and wait. If you have been hit by Penguin you will have to wait until the next update rolls out to see if the changes worked.

All of the early data seems to suggest that only 1% or so of search queries will be affected. So the chances are slim that your site was penalized. Now, just because you traffic has taken a hit, that doesn’t mean your site was penalized. One of the reasons may simply be because one of your competitors was hit by the last update and they remedied all of their issues so they are now ranking higher than you. SEO is a constant dance, requiring a lot of attention, tweaking and strategy in order to be successful.

If you were one of the 1% that has been affected negatively by Penguin, you need to act fast since you can only have the penalties removed from your site when an update is released. If you or your SEO work diligently to get all of your problem links removed, you should recover with the next update. But since Google never tells you when the update is coming, you had better work quickly.