This Penguin update has been rolled out across all Google data centres, including Australia, and will affect around 3.1% of English Google queries. Further to this, the update will also have an impact on around 3% of German, Chinese and Arabic search queries and 5% of Polish search queries.

Based on initial analyses and reports, sites affected by the Penguin update tend to show the following patterns:

• They possess high traffic, keyword matching domains;
• They have a high proportion of links with the same anchor text;
• They have a lower number of site pages; and
• They generally have higher keyword density throughout the site.

This update has been targeted at reducing the the prominence of less reputable websites in the search engine results. However, as with all Google updates, some genuine sites have also been affected. Google often makes changes in the following weeks to correct any obvious adverse algorithmic side effects.

So what is the purpose of the Penguin update?

This seemingly harmless penguin has been released into the wild with the sole purpose of penalising any site which it believes is involved in ‘Over Optimisation’.

The general consensus within the SEO industry is that this crafty Penguin is actually hitting some websites harder than its black and white cousin – last year’s Panda update.

The sites that have seen significant drops for a majority of their keywords (drops of between 50 – 100 places for major keywords) are those sites that have been marked as receiving too much obvious over optimisation. However, sites that have only dropped a few positions appear to have only had a few of their search signal factors  over optimised.

Have you been affected by Penguin?

Here are a few quick tips to discover if the Penguin has waddled through your site:

• Check keyword rankings for your high rankings terms and compare now with dates prior to April 24;
• Check your webpage analytics to see if there has been an obvious traffic drop after April 24.  Another way to confirm this would be to compare weekly traffic from April 24, with previous traffic;
• You should also note that, if your rankings and traffic have increased since April 24th, you might have actually benefited from the update!

How to recover?

The Penguin update targets sites, which they believe have been involved in over optimisation.  If you are one of those affected by Penguin, we recommend following these tips:

Vary your anchor text: Penguin hates optimised anchor texts.  For example, if you’re targeting the keyword ‘Hotels Sydney’, and you’re building links using the exact keyword, Penguin may penalise your website. We recommend building links to your site with varied anchor texts.  For example, use anchor texts like ‘Hotel Accommodation Sydney’, ‘Your Brand name’,  ‘Accommodation Sydney’ etc.

Get Social:  Google plus has changed the way Google ranks organic results. Social Media should be an integral part of any SEO strategy.  We recommend promoting your site on Facebook, Twitter and especially Google Plus.

Usability:  Redesign your website to ensure visitors find what they are looking for. Follow Google’s guidelines to ensure, you are not affected by any search algorithm updates.  For more information visit http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Content:   There is a saying in SEO Land ‘Content is King’. Quality content provides value to users, which make them stay longer and hopefully recommend it to their friends through social media.   This in turn will generate more backlinks to your site, without any link building!

And on a final note, stay away from keyword spamming, high keyword density and remember to write content which provides that extra value to your users.

If you find that your site has been penalised by mistake, Google has provided form to submit reconsideration request.

Let us know in the comments section below how the Penguin has affected you. Was the Penguin warm and cuddly or did you get a flipper slap?

We expect Bing to increase its global market share over coming next few years. Hence, it is very much essential to target your business on Bing, to gain that 15% traffic. As Bing powers Yahoo, who has another 15 % market share, there is a possibility to attract 30% visitors.

One can easily track their site performance through Bing webmasters tool. Some of their main features are:

Traffic Summary

Traffic summary displays 6 month history of traffic and search query performance. It provides great insight into top performing keywords for your site. The data is drilled down into impressions, clicks, CTR’s. Average Search Position & Average Click Position. Bing has also included Yahoo traffic stats, into this.

Page Traffic Report

The Page Traffic report shows the same charts as the Traffic Summary page with the exception of the bottom chart, which shows page level metrics.

Index Explorer

There is a great feature called Index Explorer, where we can block specific pages or directories from the Bing index. You can block the cache of pages or entire directories with ease.

Submit URLS:

This feature allows webmasters to submit url’s previously not indexed. However, there is a limit of 50 URL’s submission per month.

Inbound links:

This section displays inbound links to your website. It details inbound links for specific page along with their anchor text. This is one of the most important tools to check site authority and see how your keywords are linked. They also provide an export functionality to download the data.

Deep Links:

These Deep Links are assigned to websites which are seen by Bing to be “authoritative” on the topic which they target. They are similar to Google site links.

URL Normalization:

It allows you to specify query parameters for Bing to ignore. This is useful when urls encounter parameter issues, which can lead to duplicate content issues.

Crawl Summary:

It shows total number of pages crawled, along with crawl error of the landing page for this category. You can review data for past 6 months.

Sitemap:

This is where you’d submit your sitemap to Bing. This is very useful to inform Bing about your site’s structure and discover pages not indexed.

User Management:

It allows webmasters to grant admin, read/write or read only access to other users for their site.

However, getting visibility through the search engines is critical to success and one of the most cost effective marketing approaches available.

As search engines becomes more complex with the introduction of social networking feeds (Twitter) into their results, it’s high time for businesses to optimise their websites. Hence the New Year’s resolution for a business should be to get to the top of Google.

The power of search engines can only be experienced once your site is optimised and ranking well in the search engines. As the competition becomes fiercer amongst search engines in the coming year, it is very important to make sure your business is visible on all the major search engines.

This year is all about entering new markets and reaching the unattainable heights that is only possible through digital marketing. The success rate of SEO Marketing is higher compared to almost any other form of online marketing. Each and every single day, several billion users log into various search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo to locate business services and products. SEO can help your website to gain higher Search Engine Rankings and thus help in improving online visibility of your website.

SEO marketing is surely one of the ground-breaking marketing techniques which will help your website to gain more exposure on various search engines. It will also help you to reach out to a large number of potential customers resulting in increased revenue and ROI.

This is a New Year’s resolution you need to keep!

This is great news for users as it means they will be shown real time content based on popular user tweets. As the competition in Search Engine Space becomes more intense, Google and Bing are trying everything to attract users. The big news, however, is this officially makes Twitter the most influential social networking site on the web.

Bing Tweets pulls in trends from Twitter and filters into categories such as “Popular Now”, “People”, “Places” and “Products”, supposedly providing easier navigation to changing trends. When you do a search, you’ll get tweets at the top of the page and shared links at the bottom. The result displayed removes duplicate tweets, and filters out any adult content for better usability. When you do a search, by default new tweets will flow automatically into the tweets section of results.

Google, on the other hand, displays the five most recent tweets for the query the user has searched, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page. So users can not only view the pages indexed by Google but also see relevant Twitter conversations happening for that particular search query.

This will result in companies marketing aggressively in the social media space. It also creates challenges for businesses to ensure that users are updated with latest offerings and ensure customers are satisfied with the products and services they provide, in order to maintain their brand image.

The inclusion of Twitter into the search results will change the internet marketing space, but only time will tell how users respond to those changes.

It works just like eBay, where users can check the credibility of the buyer or seller. But, at the same time it also makes it really easy for people to leave malicious and/or untrue comments about your site or business, and there’s not a lot you can do about it.

However, the tool is fantastic for obtaining general information about a site, finding out if a company is credible or reading a comment that corrects errors from an article.

The main challenge for Google will be to ensure appropriate comments are posted and ranked accordingly. Sidewiki uses an algorithm to verify the quality of comments and ranks them accordingly, just like regular Google listings.

The algorithm takes into account feedback from users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals, according to the Google Blog.

It’s an easy way to share your knowledge and insights about any page on the web. However, it also presents a challenge for website owners as they have to deal with reputation management on a routine basis. This added functionality has the potential to change web users’ surfing and online shopping patterns, and Google is way ahead of its competitors in terms of providing these kinds of innovative new services to its users.

It represents exciting times for online businesses who believe in providing quality services and products to their clients.