The Google Penguin is a code name for a search engine update that was released by Google in 2012. Since a whole lot of people were using the loopholes and black-hat methods of getting links and traffic pointing to their sites to get their page ranks higher up the ladder, something need to be done about it. These techniques were found to be in violation of the Guidelines provided by the Google Webmaster. Thus this algorithm is aimed at decreasing the page ranks of those pages that were found violating the same.

So how does the Penguin affect your search results?

It has been found that approximately 3% of the search results have been affected by the Penguin. Although update was released in the form of Penguin 1.1 to reduce the affected pages, some legit pages and SEOs were caught by it. This was in turn against the whole idea of stopping spammers and reducing page ranks of the sites that didn’t follow the webmaster guidelines. Some sites even lost rankings cause of usage of certain keywords.

Presently penguin is in its updated version 2.1. And it has affected approximately about 1% of the search queries. And it basically targets all the same malicious contents and methods, but does a deeper analysis to identify spam activity at a deeper level.

So how to know if you site has been affected by the Penguin or not?

You can’t find out if your site has been hit by Penguin in one shot. You’ve got to monitor your site’s organic search engine traffic for about a week or two after the Penguin update. If traffic falls dramatically during this time, make no mistake, your site has been affected by the Penguin. Google Analytics is the best way to monitor your organic traffic.

So how do you recover from the Penguin effect?

If your site has been affected by the Penguin, you page ranks are going to fall drastically. And you might want to get it fixed, especially if your site and SEO is legitimate.

Here are the steps to follow to recover from Penguin effect:

  1. Identify the backlinks that are offending the guidelines, that is the inbound links that are targeted by the Penguin.
  2. Get rid of as many such offending backlinks as possible, if you have access to the sites easier for you. Otherwise contact the website owners and request them to remove the links. This is an essential step, as Google keeps track of this.
  3. Use Google’s disavow tool and get rid of the remaining backlinks which you can’t remove.
  4. Request for a reconsideration, if you have been meted with a manual penalty. If it is an algorithmic penalty, then this step can’t help you.
  5. Come up with a new content marketing campaign which is both strategic and top quality. You shouldn’t back away from your site just because it’s been hit by the Penguin. Try to replace the cheap or low quality and paid backlinks with high quality links. Backlinks are still an important factor in page rankings. And fulfil the three important requirements of SEO; Quality Content, Links and Social Media.

The Google Penguin affecting your website can hurt you real bad, like loss of revenue and traffic. Penguin was aimed at reducing web spamming, but has hurt legit sites as well. So if your site has proper in bound links, your site will most likely survive on the long run without getting hit by the Penguin effect.