Did a Penguin make your website disappear?

Thousands of websites have mysteriously vanished in the last year – and in most cases a Penguin is responsible.

This may sound ridiculous, but it’s true. However, the pilfering penguin in question is not one of the cute variety found in Antarctica but part of Google’s attempt to clean up it’s listings.

Until last year, Google’s search algorithm (that’s the criteria Google uses to rank websites in its listings) placed a lot of importance on your website having good quality inbound links. That is to say, if there are sites that Google ranks highly (such as Facebook) and they link to your site then this boosts your standing with Google.

As you can probably imagine, this prompted a global scramble for not only people to try and genuinely build these links, but for less scrupulous ones to try and cheat the system by creating spurious ones – and then of course you had so-called SEO companies ‘selling’ thousands of ‘good quality in-bound links to your website’.

As is often the case, Google doesn’t like its methods being abused and so unveiled a brand new algorithm last year, nicknamed ‘Penguin’. This not only penalised sites that tried to trick the inbound link system, but also genuinely high ranked websites that had real, good quality in-bound links. The only websites to survive were the ones that remained well-built and well-maintained and didn’t waste time trying to trick Google into thinking it was better than it actually was.

Bad luck for those chaps who had genuinely good inbound links though, but then, as the teacher used to say at school, there’s always a few who spoil it for the rest of you, and just think of all the poor penguins getting it in the neck from irate ill-informed website owners.

We don’t believe in trying to trick the system or fool Google. We recognise that a well designed, properly built and regularly maintained website is all you need to keep Google happy. Which is why we’re pleased to say that our SEO customers’ sites stayed right up at the top while all this Penguin palaver was going on.