Penguins may seem all cute and cuddly but, when they’re owned by Google and they’re looking for low quality paid links to your website, they can be vicious, powerful little blighters ready to take your site down in a flurry of screams and feathers.

Penguin is the adorable name Google gave to one of its big updates over the last 12 months. Penguin’s job is to crack down on the low quality paid links some websites and SEO companies have relied upon to gain better rankings.

Google is always keen to clean up its rankings of sites that don’t deserve to be there by identifying sites which have used paid links instead of building up quality, useful content and attracted natural links. This update affected approximately of 3.1% of search queries in the English language, and a further refresh of the update recently affected (more…)

There are few industries with the type of dark and shady reputation seemingly reserved for search engine optimisation and Internet marketing. If truth be told, some of the industry probably deserves this reputation and has done little over the years to dispel it.

Many SEO companies have, over the years, contributed to this clandestine image by employing what is called ‘black hat’ tactics with clients’ websites, such as renting links, spinning articles and filling websites with nonsensical content just for the sake of adding keywords.

These things were done, in short, because they worked.

Much like Anakin Skywalker turning to the Dark side and becoming Darth Vader, this represented the quick and easy path. Sadly for them, Google (more…)