Google has reportedly name it’s latest algorithm update. Google “Penguin” is aimed at over-optimization. Here are the key points to consider:

1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.

4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

6. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

7. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

8. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

These guidelines are nothing new, which makes you wonder if something else has actually changed, or if they have really just implemented a way of better enforcing these guidelines.

As with Google Panda, the actual results of the update appear to be that spam sites have been promoted and many quality sites have been smoked. The assumption is that a lot of blatant spam has been removed from the index, and additional tweaking is needed. We’ll see if that’s the case as things progress.

There’s been a lot of talk recently in the SEO world about over-optimization penalties that Google has apparently been rolling out over the last month or so. Many sites have already lost ranking or have been de-indexed altogether. Google hasn’t announced anything officially yet, but announcements from them generally come shortly after a major change has been completely implemented.

Rand at SEOMOZ put up a great summary of six really spammy things that webmasters and SEOs should stop doing in anticipation of the over-optimization penalties full implementation:

1. Use of unnatural Page Titles

Bad: A list of  keyword phrases, then “your brand” tacked on at the end.

Good: Your brand, and then a natural description of your services, which will include the most important keywords anyway.

2. Manipulative Internal Linking - Linking every instance of a keyword with identical anchor text in body of your content or in a side bar  to same the page. Only the first instance will count and the rest will tag you as a spammer.

3. Keyword stuffed footer links. Don’t use  keyword link lists in the footer of your website.

4. Keyword stuffed content blocks.  If it has no value other than the keywords in contains, get rid of it.

5. Backlinks from penalty-likely sources. (Check out this detailed article on how to monitor your backlink profile for penalties)

• Link Networks
• Comment Spam
• Automated Software
• Forum Signature Links
• Reciprocal Links
• Article Marketing

6.  Similar pages targeting different keywords with only slight differences in content. Instead, optimize a single page for the multiple keyword variations.

Making these changes may be a hard pill to swallow, especially if your success has been based on some of these shady tactics. It will be better in the long run to take a small hit right now than to get completely pulled from the SERPs by a Google penalty that is just around the corner.

In late February, Google gave webmasters a rare treat by supplying a detailed list of updates to their search engine algorithm. Continuing with item-by-item analysis:

10. “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

The “site:” operator is a handy advanced search tool you can use on Google Search to see the pages that Google has indexed for a Website.

Judging by the description it appears that Google is now more carefully selecting URLs to display for this advanced search query. This would help the display for larger websites that have many URLs, as well as many different types of pages. Rather than displaying page after page of results of a similar type up front, you should now be getting a more diverse mix of pages that will better help you understand the website more quickly.

When using the “site:” operator, Google will also display an ad encouraging you to set up Webmaster Tools. What you, as a webmaster, will gain from Google Webmaster Tools is not an improved version of the “site:” operator, but other data that will help supplement it.

Previous Articles covering Google Panda 3.3

No. 1 -More Coverage for Related Searches
No. 2: Tweak the Categorizer for Expanded Sitelinks
No. 3: Less Duplication in Expanded Sitelinks
No. 4: More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page
No. 5: More locally relevant predictions in YouTube
No. 6: More accurate detection of official pages
No. 7: Refreshed per-URL country information
No. 8: Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search
No. 9: Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms

Continuing with analysis of Google’s search quality updates back in February with:

9. Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms. [project codename “Suggest”] We have a narrow set of policies for autocomplete for offensive and inappropriate terms. This improvement continues to refine the algorithms we use to implement these policies.

Google’s search “autocomplete” is an import tool in driving searchers to more “popular” searches. Among other things, this makes the popular Adwords (pay per click) terms more competitive and more expensive for advertisers. This, of course, earns Google more money.

Google “Instant” is a heavy handed and widely hated feature with the same goal as Google Search “autocomplete.” The difference is that you can turn Google Instant off.

This particular change is aimed at removing offensive terms from autocomplete, which as been an embarrassing problem since its inception. You would think Google would take this problem as a clue that trying to drive searchers to popular searches is a BAD idea. But maybe Google is just a bad company.

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

8. Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search. [launch codename “terra”, project codename “Images Universal”] We launched a change to expand the corpus of results for which we show images in Universal Search. This is especially helpful to give more relevant images on a larger set of searches.

You may have noticed, that images are showing up on a wider variety of SERPs. I have some blogs that get most of their traffic from image search, so selecting quality images and properly tagging them is of the uttmost importance. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Include keywords in the filename
2. Include keywords in the img “Alt” tag (important for the visually impaired visitors as well)
3. Include keywords in the img “Titile” tag
4. Use microdata and create a Rich Snippet 

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

Refreshed per-URL country information. [Launch codename “longdew”, project codename “country-id data refresh”] We updated the country associations for URLs to use more recent data.

A translation from this French SEO Expert points out that Top Level Domains (TLD) are the best identifiers of the country that the content of a website is intended for. It would follow that Google would want to keep up with the most recent TLD data.

Having worked on sites that have targeted Japan and mainland China, I can attest to the fact that getting country-specific domain names isn’t always easy if your business is not based in those places. To those of use who got by targeting those countries without the advantage of the appropriate TLD, our work might have gotten harder. Probably, though, this is just a clean-up, rather than a tweak that puts more weight on those country-specific TLDs.

I am, in fact, set to relaunch one such site in the coming weeks. I’ll update the blog with any new information I gain. In the meantime, anyone in a similar situation who is having problems as a result of this update, please comment!

Troy Philis

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates, now referred to as Google Panda 3.3:

More accurate detection of official pages. [launch codename “WRE”] We’ve made an adjustment to how we detect official pages to make more accurate identifications. The result is that many pages that were previously misidentified as official will no longer be.

Google (or at least their CEO, Eric Schmidt) sees Brands as the way to sort out the cesspool that is the internet. So making sure that the official pages, especially of big brands, are properly identified, should be a priority of Google’s search algorithm.

As this seo blogger points out, the change is probably aimed at sites that attempt to identify themselves as official pages, but aren’t, thus taking advantage of that boost in ranking that Google gives to official pages. If your site attempts this, your ranking may have been hurt, and rightfully so. Most SMBs (small or medium sized businesses) were probably unaffected by this particular tweak.

Google “Suggest” is one of the 40 search quality updates Google implemented last month.

5. More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

Suggesting queries as you are typing in the query box has two main purposes

1. For you, the searcher, it can save you time, as you may see the full search query displayed among the suggestions as you type.
2. It helps Google direct searchers towards the more popular search queries, which are the “suggestions” it gives.

It is likely that if you see something close to what you started to type, you’ll click on it rather than complete your originally intended query. If you fail to see helpful suggestions, you’ll complete your own query.

Now the suggestions for YouTube will have a local component, and serve up suggestions that are more relevant based on the location Google believes you to be searching from. More relevant suggestions means there is more chance that you will click on one, and that is what Google would like you to do.

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent (February 2012) search quality updates:

4. More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page. We’ve adjusted the thumbnail size for most image content appearing on the results page, providing a more consistent experience across result types, and also across mobile and tablet. The new sizes apply to rich snippet results for recipes and applications, movie posters, shopping results, book results, news results and more.

Not a big deal in itself, as far as I’m concerned. The most interesting detail is the mention of Google’s use of “rich snippets” that supplement the display of images for things like recipes, applications, movie posters and shopping results. Rich snippets are basically a method of tagging data and relating it to a type of information. For example declaring this in a tag itemtype=”http://schema.org/Recipe” tells Google that the information is related to a recipe, and further specifying predefined attributes such as “cookTime” and “photo” gives Google the information they need to confidently display that information and the image, knowing that it will make sense to the user.

Google’s preferred rich snippet format is microdata. Web developers can create a wide variety of rich snippets and test them using rich snippets testing tool.

And of course rich snippets have potential for search engine performance. Here’s a great article on using rich snippets for SEO.

Continuing with analysis of Google’s recent search quality updates:

#3. Less duplication in expanded sitelinks. [launch codename “thanksgiving”, project codename “Megasitelinks”] We’ve adjusted signals to reduce duplication in the snippets for expanded sitelinks. Now we generate relevant snippets based more on the page content and less on the query.

This update is closely related to the previous updated item “2. Tweak to categorizer for expanded sitelinks.” Apparently duplicate snippets were a big problem, and an additional step was taken to eradicate them. By basing the snippets more on the page content, and less on the search query, less duplication is expected. So I take it that when pulling up the same site in number one position using different search queries, where sitelinks are generated, they should now be more consistent and less prone to duplication. Ok Google, I’ll have to take your word for it. Less duplication should be an overall win for the searcher and webmaster alike.