Google's Penguin Update

In the past couple of days Google once again modified their algorithms - the factors they use to determine where a website will place in a Google Search - calling their new update "Penguin". (The last update was called "Panda" - maybe I should check Google Maps to see if their home office is somewhere near a zoo.)

If you have a website that doesn't comply with Google's standards, your ranking may be severely penalized....dropping you from a first page result to a listing in the stratosphere.

Google's very specific Guidelines make good common sense and if followed, can produce top rankings in the search results.

The primary guidelines are simple and easy to understand, even for a non-techy:

1. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

2. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

3. Don't "webspam" with multiple instances of keywords.

There are other guidelines, of course, but if you and your web developer keep Google's business plan in mind, namely serving up quality sites to their customers, people searching for information, Google's frequent algorithmn changes should have no impact on your placement.

Low Quality Content can mean a low Google ranking

Google's recent Panda 2.2 update - completed about June 20th, may have adversely affected your website's ranking in the search results.

Searchengineland.com reports "Panda is a filter that Google has designed to spot what it believes are low-quality pages. Have too many low-quality pages, and Panda effectively flags your entire site. Being Pandified, Pandification -- whatever clever name you want to call it -- doesn't mean that your entire site is out of Google. But it does mean that pages within your site carry a penalty designed to help ensure only the better ones make it into Google's top results."

You can't blame Google - they know that to stay on top of the Search Engine game they have a responsibility to serve up the best quality web pages to their customers, internet surfers searching for information.

Learn more about how Google's frequent updates can penalize websites with low quality content or non-original content. Copying content from other websites or redundant, shallow, or poorly edited content can seriously drop your website's rankings.

At JWD we believe in providing quality, original content and have a renown professional jewelry writer on staff writing unique keyword-rich (but not keyword stuffed) content to ensure that visitors will find valuable information on jewelry, gemstones and various aspects of the jewelry trade.

If your site was hit by the last Panda update, take at look at this article: Hit By Panda Update? Google Has 23 Questions To Ask Yourself To Improve

Meta Descriptions Can Affect Your Google Rankings

Meta descriptions (the text snippets of the webpage you see in search results) used to be an important ranking factor. Until not too long ago both Google and Yahoo! officially announced they no longer used Meta-descriptions in their search algorithms. But recent changes in Google's search algorithms bring Meta description back to life as a ranking factor and your page meta descriptions can now significantly affect your rankings.

Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History which in turn helps put your site into their personalized search results.

Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results. Since everyone now gets personalized results, the impact your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can become enormous. That's another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Many websites have exactly the same meta description for every page - this often occurs when a site is built using a template or site builder program which doesn't permit unique descriptions for each page. To see how your page descriptions are displayed in Google, go to the Google search box and type in - site:yourwebsitename.com (substitute your actual website name, of course).

Go and see how your website appears in the search results and find ways to improve it. With personalized search or without it, having a catchy compelling text in your search results snippet will get you more clicks, more traffic and more customers.