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Of course, I’m not talking about those cute animals living at the North Pole. Google changes ITS Penguins, ITS Penguin. If you are following mumpreneursonline.com then you have been warned before in a post of mine that Google will no longer rank sites according to backlinks and linkbuilding.
Na-a.
Bad news for SEOs, I know. And the even worse news is that, as usual, nobody tells us but bits and pieces that we have to put together like a puzzle before the entire news is broadcasted.
So what do we know about these changes in Penguin?
Not much.
BUT we know enough to be scared because we don’t know much. Does that make sense? No?
Let me put it another way. In the words of Matt Cutts, the head of search spam at Google: “You don’t want the next Penguin update”. He also mentioned that “engineers have been working hard on this update” and that it will be “jarring and jolting” for webmasters and SEOs.
Huffington Post even tells that “The Google Penguin algorithm update is the latest spam-fighting wave to crash against the shore of search and it has heralded something of a new dawn for SEO, especially in terms of offsite strategy.”
So there you have it. In just a few lines you know that you don’t know.
What you need to keep in mind though, is that Google will start ranking those sites which have good and quality content on them, regardless of backlinks. In fact, Google has been advising its users to obey the Google Webmaster Guidelines for a while now and because of the great disobeyance, in the opinion of Huffington Post, this lead to ‘the beginning of the end’ of many offsite SEO strategies.
What is to be done?
You need to obtain natural links.
How?
Hmm… Have you ever read something that you felt you NEEDED to share with others?
That’s right. You have to write that sort of content which is so good it begs readers to share it, tweet it, pin it, g+ it, etc. Your text needs to be entertaining, informative, educative, engaging – all those nice words that make you think about tickling the ‘share’ button.
It could be said that creative marketing is the future of SEO. So if you don’t have a creative DNA running through your veins, hire creative persons to do creative stuff for your creative website which will attract creative persons that will share your creative content to other creative websites and… Oh, you get it!
But that’s just part of the story. Another solution is guest blogging. ‘Yay!’, you might say. And indeed, it is a natural way of creating a brand of your own and of building brand recognition. It is a two side win: you write good content which has the potential of being shared for a long period of time AND you also attract the RIGHT audience to your own websites.
Matt Cutts’ announcement did nothing but to give a wake-up call to all those SEOers out there who have been cheating their ways into good page ranks. And now they will have no other choice than to adapt to Google’s requirements.