Penguin 2.0 Has Hit the Fan - How it Impacts Your Business & Keyword Research

Google has done it. It has done a complete wash of it’s search results. It appears that last night Google has performed some major changes within it’s search results and you may have noticed an impact on your search results and the number of Google results that have been removed from any given search.

Here is the Twitter post from Matt Cutt’s and the Google Search team on May 22nd indicating that the Google Penguin update had been rolled out.

Google has been indicating recently that major changes are coming and they have landed foot within this latest update. Some new things that Google has been focusing on lately is:

• Duplicate results under the same search term (for a specfiic domain)
• Removal of “spam” domains from it’s indexed

In fact, Google is actually asking for help with SPAM sites via their Penguin spam support via the following form so if know of any “spam” culprits, Google wants to help you out (not sure how successful and “gamer” prone this is though)

This is pretty typical and what Matt Cutts has been petitioning to happen for quite some time.

Boosted Rankings for Wealthy Affiliate Members!

MANY, MANY members are gloating about their boosted rankings. We have been saying this for so long...

“If you create quality, engaging content, Google WILL find you!”

Well this latest update has probably been the biggest evidence of this yet. I personally have noticed many of my blogs sky rocketing in terms of rankings and search traffic. This is only to be expected when you focus on quality, when you do worry about black hat tricks, when you don’t worry about back-linking and when you don’t worry about things like keyword density.

You write content that is valuable, that targets keywords that are longer tail, and that is written in a natural way that has the reader as the main focus, you will see a boost in traffic with every update
.

Jaaxy & WA Keyword Results are STILL Entirely Accurate!

There has been concern about the QSR numbers being lower. Yes, they are lower and this is a result of Google making these latest updates. They have literally washed their search of millions of pages of what they deemed as low quality content.

The data is still 100% accurate and it is the competition data that Google has always given, it has just been updated as Google has made this change.

This is OK. No need to panic, in fact it is a time to rejoice knowing that competition has just dropped to an all time low. All the folks that have been preaching “backlinking”, “spinning content”, “creating mass mini sites”, “automation” have been ripped from the search engines, leaving those of us that actually are creating businesses in tact and in fact, sitting high on the Google favortism list.

Understanding the NEW QSR

Many of you have seen keywords that you researched last week that had a high QSR, be much lower now. This is because Google has removed millions of domains and pages from their rankings.

You should continue aiming for keywords with under a 300 QSR, the lower the better. Anything OVER 400, do not even think of touching. You will be wasting your precious time. Keywords with over 400 QSR are highly competitive typically and although Google only lists 49 or so pages of results, there are typically 10,000’s if the result is over 400. So please stay away from those. We have been teaching this at Wealthy Affiliate for a very long time, so you should already be focusing on this.

Also, USE LOGIC. Keywords must make sense. Many people get trapped into using data only. Use your logical part of your brain as well when doing keyword research.

The Search Engine Strip Show...

If a keyword like “make money” is producing good data, this could quite possibly be an anomaly in Google. Their results data isn’t perfect and you cannot “expect” instant rankings with search terms that are broad or short tail in nature.

Some results are seemingly low, but that is what Google now delivers in terms of their QSR. Google has absolutely hammered certain niches and stripped in some cases 100,000’s of results from their SERP’s so these results that once seemed unattainable have now become a possibility, but you will only see the results through the content you create (and testing).

So the “make money” type niches that are riddled with spam sites, dupe and spun content, and low quality pages have likely been stripped the most and are likely left with the bare bones of quality content.

It does make sense though. A domain could have in theory had 100,000 rankings under one keyword and in some cases large content farm style sites likely did. Sites like Street Articles, Ezine Articles, Squidoo....etc with a combined millions of similar articles have been stripped outside of the ONE result and been added to the omitted results.

To me this is only a good thing as it is an effort by Google to continually improve the quality of their search.

Does this mean there is less competition now?

Absolutely. I have seen MANY of my sites DOUBLE in traffic overnight. Here is just one example from Google Analtyics.

My traffic literally doubled overnight from this one update. There are many folks here at Wealthy Affiliate that share my sentiment when Google updates like this happen, they are AWESOME and they only benefit us.

Since the Google Penguin update yesterday, I can safely say that you have less competition than ever and you should continue focusing on content quality. It is your path to long term success and Google is going to continue to find you and reward you for it.