In case you haven’t heard, Google recently launched the new search algorithm “Penguin,” which is having a direct affect on companies search engine optimization (SEO) results. In order to truly understand what the Penguin algorithm is and how it will affect your website lets take a look back at past SEO strategies.

SEO Tricks and Strategies of the Past

 
Over the years search engine strategists have learned tricks to help website pages land in the top pages of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These tricks include link farming, hidden text, keyword stuffing, and copying content.

Link Farming & Paid Links
These search engines rank pages by the amount of websites that are linked to them and the keywords that are linked. Therefore one trick that has been used was to set up several small microsites and then link these sites to the main site. This is known as “Link Farming.” Another approach was to to pay other people and companies to link to their website. By doing this the search engines would believe that people liked this site and increased its ranking.

Hidden Text
Another way search engines rank your site is through the use of keywords. However, tricks like writing these special keywords in white text on a white background were allowing websites to be given false credit for having these keywords and search engines would improve their ranking.

Keyword Stuffing
Search engines also look at the keywords in webpage meta titles and descriptions. As a result “keyword stuffing” became another method for SEO as strategists. They would stuff special keywords into meta titles and meta descriptions where they didn’t “naturally” fit.

Copying Content
The amount of content on your site is also taken into account by search engines. This led to another SEO technique, which was to use content found on other websites and news channels and either copying it or just making slight changes to it, then posting it on their own website.

Introduction of Google Farma/Panda

 
On February 23, 2011 Google released the major new algorithm, Farma/Panda. This algorithm left a major impact on websites overnight. In fact Google themselves stated that it affected up to 12 percent of search results. This algorithm punished content farms and sites that had high ad-to-content ratios, thin irrelevant content, and paid for links or had low quality links.

Introduction of Penguin

 
On April 24th, 2012 Google released another major algorithm known as “Penguin.” This algorithm focused on penalizing sites for “over-optimization” that google calls webspam. It focused on looking at a number of difference factors that included keyword stuffing. Although it this algorithm was not as hard hitting as Panda, it still affected 3.1% of searches. If you are worried about your site being penalized then check out there SEO Tips to follow to make sure that your aren’t penalized when you are building or updating your website.