What should you do if the Penguin update affected your site?

As we all know, Google has implemented the “Penguin update” in their search algorithm. There have been some serious issues with webmasters who have been ‘unjustly’ affected by this change as they claim that they do not engage in any kind of  bad neighborhood links. What should you do if the update has affected your site?

If you have been affected I advice you to take the following measures.

1. Continue building links. If you stop building links then it will only hint to Google that your links are unnatural as your link velocity will drop suddenly.

2. Check your Google Webmaster Tools but there is no real need to them asking for a “reconsideration”. There is no need to tell them that you have not done any link building that violates their Terms and Conditions. This step can be done once you have reviewed your link profiles and if you don’t see your rankings bounce back.

3. Continue to add more unique and valuable content to your website. Feed new content consistently to your site at about 2 to 3 articles per week.

4. Do not just build links on your  homepage but build links across all you pages. This will makes things look more natural to search engines and if you are not doing this yet, I advice you to do this now.

5. Rotate and use multiple keywords  variations. Use words like “click here”, “read more” and “visit this site” in your site.

6. Check your site for duplicate content using SEOmoz (paid version) or Screaming Frog to check 500 pages of your site for free.

7. Check your site’s page loading speed and increase your site speed if needed.

I would like to hear from you what you think was the reason why you have been hit by the recent Google penguin update.

Inbound Marketing Certification

Few days back, I stumbled upon this exam from Inbound Marketing University and decided to take it on that exact moment. Today I found out that I passed.

IMU is an educational program powered by HubSpot, a software company that helps marketers and small businesses grow their business online through inbound marketing. IMU is collaborating with colleges and MBA programs such as Harvard Business School, Northeastern University and UMass Dartmouth to offer college students tools and resources to become masters in inbound marketing.

New Google Algorithm to Detect and Fight Content Spam

Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts announced last Friday the launch of a new algorithm that is intended to better detect and fight spam in Google’s search results. Google’s main objectives are those sites that copies content then republish them on another websites.

Cutts said the change was approved last Thursday and released earlier this week. Cutts announced its intention to combat spam in his blog post last Friday.

Matt also wrote on his blog:

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Say Goodbye to Google Real Estate Search

The search giant Google will no longer support properties or real estate listings uploaded to its site on Google Maps and they are taking it off the market on February 10, 2011.

In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.

Real estate is a huge category and too big to ignore or to realize its full potential online and they will be back soon. Or maybe we can expect an acquisition by Google of one of the large real estate portals in the future.

Virgin Radio Belly Flop Competition At Wild Wadi

Everyone who’s been and had lived in Dubai knows about Wild Wadi. Wild Wadi Dubai or Wild Wadi Water Park is considered to be among the top ten Dubai attractions. It is one of the few places where you can spend a whole day with your family and friends. It is ideally located in Jumeirah near Burj Al Arab. Yesterday happens to be Virgin Radio’s Belly Flop competition at Wild Wadi.

And the winning belly flop move and winners.

Congratulations to all the winners. Shiv was the winner of AED10,000 from Speedo and an annual Wild Wadi Water Park pass. He told Virign Radio that his birthday is coming up soon and he’s going to spend the money on a great party for him and his friends!