What is Google Penguin? Understanding Google’s Engine

In the world of SEO, content may be king, but Google keeps the keys to the kingdom. Among the larger search engines out there, Google is the undisputed king. As per Statista, for the past five years, Google has held well over 80 percent of the global market share in all things related to search engines. When you want to look something up, you “Google it.”

That doesn’t mean capturing other search engine demographics isn’t important, but even then, there are similarities across all search engines in the way that they work. In fact, as per SEO Book, Yahoo! Search is powered by Bing.

Still, following and understanding Google updates is the biggest obstacle and basis of research for SEO professionals. Knowing how Google works is key to a good SEO service, and it’s no easy job.

Google’s search algorithm has existed for years, but it’s only recently been named. As of 2013, the company’s 15^th anniversary, Google’s algorithm according to Search Engine Land, is called Hummingbird. Within Hummingbird, however, the company has employed several different programs to optimize the way it works and categorizes websites.

These are programs like Google Panda, Pigeon, PageRank, and Penguin. These programs or ingredients number in the hundreds. No one in the SEO world really knows how Google works a hundred percent of the time, but we do know enough to optimize websites. So the question is this: what are these programs, and how do they affect your company’s SEO?

Tackling Google Penguin

Google Penguin was first announced in 2012, and since then, it’s been assigned the job of crawling through websites and penalizing those that were buying links or utilizing other black hat methods to generate inbound links.

To understand what Google Penguin does, you have to understand link building. Link building is the activity of building your website’s reputation and search engine rank through inbound links. Inbound links are links on other websites leading to your own website.

How Link Building Works

In the past, just having inbound links was enough to generate a great rank on your website. Inbound links are used as a factor for search engine ranking for a simple reason: if people link to your website, it’s a sign that there’s something there that’s worthy of a read or visit. Basically, your inbound links are a sign of popularity, and quality.

The problem, in this situation, is the way marketers and SEO specialists abused inbound links to artificially inflate their SEO rankings. Through private blog networks and rewritten content, websites could get quick, cheap, and often self-generated inbound links that helped boost their ranking for little legwork.

Getting Help

Today, link building is a little more complex. You can’t buy inbound links, and inbound links from less reputable or unknown websites doesn’t account for much. In fact, these can even get you penalized. The holy grail these days is being mentioned in mainstream news media. Second to that, you have educational websites, like university blogs and article entries, which are also highly reputable. If you’re looking for affordable SEO solutions in Los Angeles and Ventura, you’ll need the services of a qualified local provider, like SeoTuners.

While search engine specialists argue that website reputation doesn’t matter much, there is a little controversy in the issue. The point, however, is this: spamming links no longer works, and probably never will. Google’s algorithms are updated on a regular basis to weed out quick and easy ways to raise your company’s ranking, placing value on good content and organic ranking techniques.