Brand endorsement or brand marketing has now moved to internet. Google, the most preferred search engine across the globe plays an important role in online marketing. It is a business's visibility on Google that drives its popularity and revenue. SEO or search engine optimization strategies are focused on optimizing websites to make them user friendly and full of informative content so that Google's web crawler or spider finds and indexes them. When users enter a query in its search box, Google search this index and returns the matching pages that it considers most relevant to the user.

Google makes use of more than 200 factors to rank a website, but no one knows what these factors are. Google keeps changing these algorithmic factors to improve search result quality and penalize the websites that do not follow its quality guidelines. When websites began to use illegitimate ways to gain higher search result rankings, Google launched its Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to identify those sites that were breaching its quality guidelines. These websites got downgraded with low search result rankings. Google first released Panda on February 2011, followed by 25 updates till March 15, 2013. The first Penguin update was released on April 2012 and there have been three updates since then. Google has confirmed that the next Penguin update will happen in 2013. Google has also said that they will be integrating Panda updates into their regular algorithm updates, which means that website rankings may not be affected too drastically. In any case, SEO experts are getting ready to deal with these updates by optimizing client websites for long-term success in search engine marketing.

How Panda and Penguin Have Changed the SEO Scene

Google's algorithms target websites that use the following black-hat SEO techniques:

• Targeting keywords by creating internal duplicate web pages is a one illegal optimization tactic. URL factors such as session ID on those pages can result in a website having several identical pages to target multiple keyword variations.


• Panda penalizes sites that contain low quality, thin, irrelevant content, including sites that contain too many ads and links. Only sites that have content that is helpful to users are ranked high by Google.


• Your website will be at risk of a Panda penalty if your site contains empty pages.


• A high ad ratio also puts your site at risk of a Google penalty. If a user reaches your page and is confronted with too many ads and no good content, get ready to face Google's wrath.

How to Avoid Google's Penalties

With Google release their updates time to time, you must reconsider your SEO strategy to survive these updates. Here some tips that help you in avoiding penalizations and to survive future updates.

• Do an SEO audit on your site regularly to identify broken links, internal duplicate pages, and empty pages. Utilize canonical tag and 301 redirects to rectify these issues.


• To attract organic visitors and get more social interactions, replace thin content with informative and useful content in your site. This will find you favor in Google's eyes, increase traffic to your site, and get you more organic links.


• If you want to put ads on your site, make sure that the Google updates don't penalize you. You must come up with an intelligent design to place ads along with quality content so that a user finds your site more interesting and stays longer.


• Build quality links as these can provide value for a long time. Use Google's disavow tool to clean up your backlinks.


• Online reputation and social engagement are ranked high by Google. So optimize your Google+ profile and add authorship mark-up to your website.

Organic SEO service provider can help you optimize your site and prepare for Panda and Penguin updates. The firm can help you maintain and enhance your online visibility, gain more targeted web traffic, and enhance your sales with customized SEO services.