The Penguin Update Part-2 Knowing Filters

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Hey Everyone – When we left off we had basically gone over “what’s” happening and I introduced you to my “tinfoil hat” theory about why it was happening. Ultimately, you can decide for yourself when it comes to the WHY part, but one thing is for certain..PENGUIN IS REAL and could likely be the most damaging or maybe even the most helpful “slap” we’ve ever seen.

Hopefully you read over part 1 and understand that Penguin is a FILTER and not necessarily a slap in the traditional sense that we are used to.
So, let’s talk about filters…

Sites CAN BE and ARE affected by the Penguin filter in both positive and negative ways, which we are going to cover. Before I do that though, it’s disclaimer time again.

DISCLAIMER: The information in this post as well as in ANY POST here on this blog are my opinion and are based on observations that I’ve made either currently or in the past.

The thing about it is…it’s EASY to identify the people that are promoting things like ClickBank products, CPA offers, and even those that are trying to make a couple bucks from Adsense. We all do THE SAME THINGS as far as things like On-Page SEO go, don’t we? Bold this, underline that, italicize this, link here, there and all around the square, right?

So, to some extent Optimizing a post, page, or site to a degree where the pattern is recognizable very well COULD HURT OUR EFFORTS. We as marketers have been trained to do things a certain way – The rationale has always been the more you optimize, the better chances that Google knows what your content is about, and the better your chances will be to get ranked for whatever keyword that you’re targeting.

First, let’s talk a bit about how the new filters can affect us as marketers negatively.
One of the things that I talked about in my last post was about how i BELIEVE that one of the big reasons for the new “filter” is to take market share away from marketers like you and I and distribute that market share to branded business entities and advertising partners.

But, what if by doing “everything right” you were actually giving Google all the information they needed to identify you and your sites as things that they don’t want displayed prominently in their index?

Consider this for a minute…

99.999999% of the people that I’ve spoken to that said that they were affected POSITIVELY by Penguin, when asked what they were doing gave an answer like this…

“I don’t understand how it happened…I didn’t do anything…my keywords weren’t even bolded, etc”

In other words, they weren’t aggressively optimizing their posts, pages, or sites for the keywords that they now have a better rank for. So, what am I saying here…Not to optimize for your keywords? No, that would be DUMB! What I am saying though is that you want to try to be as natural as possible and a “regular” business or individual trying to sell a product doesn’t bold, underline, etc every single instance of a keyword or a variation of that keyword – They just don’t

When you are putting up a piece of content or mapping out a site, you want to try to do it in the most natural way you can. Use your HTags like most professional webmasters would do, maybe bold a few things site wide, etc but don’t go nuts. The last thing you want to do  is to give Google any ammunition at all to help them “identify” you.

Now let’s talk things that caused a POSITIVE difference with the filter…

The days of throwing up a 1 page sniper site and ranking on the first page of Google for a keyword that pays you a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars a month are over…FOR NOW. All things point to the fact that Google wants *REAL* Businesses represented in the higher spots in it’s index. So, we want to do everything we can do to give off that *REAL* Business vibe…

• We Want to have an active social footprint
• Real Businesses have contact information
• Even something as small as a logo COULD help

Now, obviously you can find examples of keywords that don’t match up with what I’ve just shown, but keep in mind that I’m talking about “marketers keywords” aka Long tails, which for the most part have been what many of us have made our money from since jumping in the “game”.

From what I can see, and again, feel free to poke around and explore a bit so you can come to your own conclusion, but from what I’m seeing, it’s pretty damn obvious that the end game here is to make it so people searching are diverted to a higher CPC situation. Like in our example “best diet plan” came back as something like “diet programs” etc which is most definitely a higher CPC keyword.

I’m sure that some will say…”they’ve been doing that for years” and that they are just trying to provide the best user experience possible, but I don’t agree…not even a little bit.

In some instances, a keyword like best diet plan will return a page with NOTHING but some sort of calorie calculator, or a site that sells supplements without a single work about diet plans or ways to lose weight. Plus, if you look at MANY of the pages returned, they have 1 of 2 things.

1. Adsense ads directly on the site

2. Adverts for 1 or more BIG advertisers

To me, all of this combined is just too much and too consistent to be coincidence…But, what do I know?

In the next post, we’ll talk about what I’M PERSONALLY DOING to “beat the filter”, so you can see if there is anything there that you can work into your own routine. As always – Any questions, comments, or suggestions, use the comment box below.


Source: jeremykelsall