Google’s latest and most hated updates turned SEO (search engine optimization) upside down, well for most sites anyway. One day they were ranked near the top, and then when they woke up they had fallen right to the bottom of the search engine rankings.

The Panda and Penguin updates were designed to filter out all of the low quality websites which were full of spam; however, many fully legitimate websites reported huge losses in traffic too. This has been described as collateral damage, a necessity to add a more quality rather than quantity feel to websites.

Let’s take a look at some steps to clean up your website, to ensure it is once again…animal friendly:

Kick The Duplicate Content Into Touch

This was a killer even before the updates; however it has now evolved into a serial killer. Removing any duplicate content is a must for the search engine optimization of your website, not just any content that has been copied from third party websites, but content that may have been used across multiple pages on your website.

The duplicate content from the third party websites may not have been done by you either, it could have been done by users of your website such as in comments and guest postings. There are many useful and free tools available that can help you identify plagiarism such as copyscape.

Use Quality Over Quantity

One of the main things Google has clamped down on is websites that are not built for the readers, sites full of spammed keywords and links. Many websites in the past were built solely for Google rankings, often manipulating Google’s very own ranking procedures.

They want websites that are full of original and quality content. You may have once been able to acquire high rankings using low quality that is just stuffed with keywords, well not any more. So if that is the case, you need to improve your content. So stop using automated content generation methods or paying cheap money to cheap SEO content writers who do not even know anything about what they are writing about.

Your role as a webmaster now has to be about providing informative and extremely relevant content for any visitors to your website. Forget about how many keywords and articles you can buy for a Euro or two. If your website sells beauty products do not post articles about something that has nothing to do with your niche, all to just promote a sponsored link. Links from websites that are irrelevant to your do not hold any value anymore for search engine optimization.

If you can maintain a high level of quality, which is targeted directly at your audience you will not only improve Google’s opinion of your site, you will also improve your potential customer’s opinion of your site and therefore stand a better chance of improving your sales.

The rules for SEO have changed, so we have a choice; adapt to the new laws of search engine optimization or watch our businesses fail.

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