The slightest change to Google’s algorithms can send shockwaves through the SEO community. While Google constantly makes changes, sometimes the search engine giants makes such huge changes at once that SEOs give the event a name. Two examples are Panda and Penguin. These are two massive algorithm changes. Google Panda took place in February of 2011 and Google Penguin took place in April of 2012.
Every time a big change like Panda or Penguin comes up, those who work in SEO scramble to understand the change as quickly as possible and get back on top in the SERPs. These two big algorithm changes differed sharply in what types of sites they were targeting. The following is a brief explanation in these differences in targeting and how the changes made to penalize certain sites influenced site optimization in general.
Google Panda
In the world of SEO, it is nowadays widely understood that, in implementing Google Panda, Google was targeting generally low quality sites. Previously, Google had worked by looking highly on sites that included a lot of content and that had a lot of content linking back to them elsewhere on the Web. However, Google Panda recognized that not all content is created equal.
With Google Panda, Google attempted to highly high quality content and bring sites that offered valuable content up in the SERPs. Google Panda penalized sites that offered junky content or were heavily optimized.
It was especially hard for webmasters to recover from Google Panda because Google wasn’t really inclined to help anybody out after this change. Site designers had to realize on their own that they’d need to resolve various on-page issues to get back to where they were before the update.
Not only was content of a poor quality downgraded by the update, but poor overall site design was also targeted. Any pages on a site with too little content or no content whatsoever were targeted. Website owners could work toward recovery after the implementation of Panda if they were hurt by the update by offering more information on their sites.
Google Penguin
With Google Penguin, Google really tried to reenforce its own Webmaster Guidelines. The Google Webmaster Guidelines basically sought to define any “black-hat” SEO techniques and inform website owners that these types of techniques would get them nowhere. While emphasizing more the Webmaster Guidelines, Google Penguin was much like Google Panda in one respect. It also was further step toward weeding out poor content and removing sites that offered only poor content from the top of the SERPs.
Tactics that Google penalized with Google Penguin included too much link building, keyword stuffing, offering inaccurate content or content that didn’t relate to a particular search query, and doorway pages.
Unlike Google Panda, Google Penguin came with a helpful tool that Google offered to allow website owners to recover. Google offered a “disavow links tool” with among its webmaster tools. This tool allowed a webmaster to distance itself from a low quality site linking to it. Otherwise, manual link removal was used after Google Penguin by many website owners to get rid of spammy links that were hurting their rankings after the update.
Google Penguin is still in use by Google. In fact, a most recent update to the Penguin update itself was made as recently as September 23, 2016. Altogether, there have been seven confirmed updates to Google Penguin.
Takeaway
To a large extent, Google Panda and Google Penguin are essentially both trying to do the same thing: prevent manipulation of the algorithm. The two updates try to do this differently. While Google Panda focuses on getting rid of what are outright “spam” sites, Google Penguin goes a step further and addresses manipulation of the algorithm through backlinking and overstuffing keywords.
More Recent Changes and What to Expect for the Future
Google Panda and Google Penguin are not the only major Google search engine updates to date. There have since been two others. Google Hummingbird and Google Pigeon are two additional updates that have been made. Google Hummingbird went into effect in late August of 2013 and Google Pigeon went into effect in late July of 2014.
Marketers wondering how to cope with Google updates should consider what Google’s goal is in making them. Google is simply looking to get internet users where they want to be on the Web. Over time, it stands to reason that manipulating the algorithm by showing up inappropriately in search results is going to become increasingly difficult.
Instead of fighting it, marketers need to actually be the site that search queriers want to land on, whether it’s because of informative content, brand recognition, or exceptional product or service offerings. This will bring the best results not only in terms of ranking well in Google, but also in terms of bringing in sales from site visitors.