Anthony Ricigliano — Isn’t This What Google Didn’t Want All Along?

The recent algorithm changes by Google, namely Panda and Penguin, have set forth a “punch list” of what the search engine wants from an SEO campaign. The beauty of these revelations is that what they want now is pretty much what they’ve wanted all along. The bad news, at least for some of the ongoing SEO campaigns out there, is that Google is getting much better at discerning practices that are designed to manipulate their ranking algorithms - in other words, the practices that they didn’t want all along. The latest algorithms focused on the following:

Panda – This algorithm focused on content and hammered websites that had benefitted by distributing low quality articles all over the web to build incoming links that resulted in web pages that ranked well on the search engine results pages. Many of these articles were under 200 words in length and were published with horrible syntax and grammatical errors. What did make sense was the information box at end of these articles containing a link to the destination website. Armed with improved methodologies in detecting crummy articles, Panda punished websites that had ranked on the front pages of Google’s search results.

Penguin – The Penguin algorithm update targeted one of most marketed SEO “alternatives” on the web; link-building en masse. While it’s true that legitimate link-building is a vital aspect of ranking web pages, the intention of the search engines is for those links to be naturally occurring, which had been corrupted by the creation of link farms that generated hundreds or even thousands of links with a couple of key-strokes. With a newly designed capability to define links that were originating at link farms, the Anthony Ricigliano Penguin Update gave the same treatment to sites using abusive practices as Panda did, sending them careening down the search engine results pages with many of them never to be seen again.

The surprise of these two updates is not the practices that were targeted, but that Google had figured out how to discover the sites that were using these unethical practices. The reality is that more of these types of practices are still being used. The question is, “How long will it be before an Anthony Ricigliano Google Algorithm comes out that can define and crush them?”