It seems so easy when we “google” something and results just appear on our screen and we have nothing to do but to choose and browse our options. In fact how Google’s system works is a little bit more complicated than that. It uses algorithm system in order to value the existing web sites according to their quality, uniqueness and other criteria and rank them in its index. So the higher the ranking position the better the web site and its content are.

And this is of course of high importance for everyone who is in the internet marketing business. What is even more important is when Google updates its system, choosing as priority different criteria to track down web sites that have flaws. Its latest update is called “Penguin Update” and before that there was the “Panda Update”. While the Panda mainly concentrated on the quality of the content, enormously affecting many web sites, the Penguin is focused on the SEO techniques that don’t pay attention to Google’s “rules” for healthy web site.

More specifically Google Penguin Update ranks the web sites low when they use SEO methods that violate Google’s Guidelines. Methods such as using a big amount of keywords that are not properly putted in the content affect the quality and therefore will be out of the search engine result list. Google is known to be one of the biggest and more important search engines and if you want your web site to succeed in any way you will have to pay attention to these rules.

Other factors affecting Penguin ranking is the content itself. Many web sites in order to gain more visitors steal content from other pages, which is against the rules. According to Google Guidelines the content of every web site must be unique and representative of the web site’s purpose. So if there are two or even more matching contents Google Penguin is notified to clear that out. To add to that, even the same names of web sites (domain name) are tracked and may be included to the black list of low quality web sites.

So far Google Penguin has been updated three times, having a major impact on web sites, even bigger than Google Panda had. You should keep in mind that when you website receives a low rank it will be hard to regain its traffic. Even if you make all the necessary changes to upgrade the content of your web site it still will take time to recover. And you will notice if Google Penguin has an eye on you by checking the traffic continuously and if you see a slow down then you should be worried and act fast.