# Google Panda and Penguin



## parodi (Mar 15, 2010)

Spring 2011 Google changed their search algorithm and launched Panda. Panda was designed to increase search quality and targeted spammers and content scrapers. If you had duplicate content on your site that you lifted from somebody else there was good chance you suffered in Page Rank.

One month ago Google pulled another tweak to their algorithm with Penguin. 

The target this time is poor quality back links and link spamming. What Google is looking for---and penalizing sites for---are unnatural and non-relevant links to your site. If you ever got into "link farming" which was a "you scratch my back and I will scratch yours" by trading links, you need to now check the quality of those links. Your friend whose wife had a cupcake site linked to yours needs to be cut loose and you should ask them to remove the link to your site. Quality guidelines are still in effect. If your friend has a scaffolding business, a paint store, property maintenance site by all means trade links.

The only problem is that it is about 3X more difficult to get people to remove links from sites than it is to get them to add links and that itself is hard enough.


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## Delta Painting (Apr 27, 2010)

Thanks for sharing this.... I sent you a PM...


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## RH (Sep 7, 2010)

I clicked on this expecting to see some zoo story. Didn't notice it was in the tech sub forum.


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## MartyDukes (Mar 22, 2008)

I haven't seen any real drop in traffic because of this. If anything, my sites are even stronger. 

The take home:

Don't participate in any unscrupulous activity when promoting your website. Be as honest as you can, don't trade or buy links or take shortcuts. Get them naturally and in your market and you will be fine.


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## Temple (May 25, 2012)

Just heard that there moving alot of google places stuff to google +
Some people are loosing their "write a review" links on their places page. Get a google + page going asap.


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## MartyDukes (Mar 22, 2008)

Temple said:


> Just heard that there moving alot of google places stuff to google +
> Some people are loosing their "write a review" links on their places page. Get a google + page going asap.


Weird. I hadn't heard that but I'm not surprised.


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## y.painting (Jul 19, 2009)

This stuff was announced yesterday. I'm just now catching up on it.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/05/30/google-places-pages-are-no-more-but-what-has-changed/


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