Jason Wersits, May 21, 2012
Tomorrow marks one month since the debut of Google's Penguin, and everyone is still trying to make sense of the update. While a couple websites have come into existence as a response to Google's most recent revisions to its algorithm, little has been made in the way of progress when it comes to actually puzzling out how Penguin works. Although it is highly unlikely that the company will ever reveal the mechanisms behind the update, the SEO community has at least come up with a few useful tips for creating content that Google's search engine wants.
Don’t Repeat Content
Regardless of whether a website is reposting text from elsewhere or pulling materials directly from other online properties, businesses should take care to never duplicate or steal content. Aside from the obvious moral implications inherent in this sort of black hat SEO activity, content reposting is one of the many optimization behaviors that Penguin explicitly punishes. Every day, Google crawls millions of websites and then compares what it finds against existing pages. Should content be discovered as having been taken from elsewhere, then that page's rankings and SEPR rankings are dropped as a result.
In order to avoid this issue, webmasters and business owners need to remain consistent in their efforts to create unique content for their pages. Since Google's intended goal is to create a network through which users can find useful or interesting sites quickly and effortlessly, 100% original work is far more likely to show up in the company's SERPs than copy-pasted material. As such, every website owner should create their pages from scratch or from personal templates when generating content.
Only Write when It's worthwhile to the Reader
Mismanaged SEO campaigns often end up creating mountains of blogs, social media posts and webpages that lack any true substance. In an ongoing mission to secure popular keywords and gain additional indexing opportunities, many people blunder in their SEO efforts and simply generate new content that holds some SEO value but offers nothing of worth to potential readers or site visitors. Although this sort of content may initially get picked up by site crawlers and show up on search results, a lack of user engagement means that it will only end up falling down the SERPs rather quickly.
In order to create webpages and blogs that retain decent rankings and respectable traffic, businesses need to provide users with content that is worth interacting with or sharing with others. Well-written and informative pages tend to be the same ones that appear to users in their initial search results most often. While it may be tempting for a company to arbitrarily create new pages and blogs for link-building purposes, business owners should make certain that any new content made for them is interesting and engaging.
For additional information about creating quality content post-Penguin, I can be contacted at jwersits@webimax.com.
