How to Tame the Google Hummingbird

For those of you still wondering what the recent Panda release did to your website, here's another update from the stables - Hummingbird. Thankfully, this creature has not disrupted any rankings (not that we know of). Although it wasn't formally announced by Google, Hummingbird came into effect sometime around the end of August or beginning of September. The main objective of this release is to handle more complex search queries.

The prime focus of Google here is inspired by the tendency of users to put conversational searches. Rather than returning page results which contain those words, it will return exact answers to those queries. Here's what you can do to make the most of this update:

Add Q&A-style Content

Users are looking for answers on the internet, so if you can adapt your site accordingly it will be conducive to attract more traffic. Using a Question-Answer format can help your website garner higher rankings. While it doesn't mean that you need to rewrite the whole content, you can follow a "How to" approach when creating blogs or articles.

Implement Schema Markup

Useful snippets such as star ratings, product price, total savings, recipe preparation time etc tend to highlight some aspect of your data and thus boost your content. Google identifies these highlighters using a schema vocabulary. It's a question of how you implement this for your industry type.  

Mobile Friendly

Another helpful practice is to make your website mobile SEO friendly to accommodate a large percentage of users who access web on their smart phones. Hummingbird also lays special emphasis on catering to the needs of mobile audience. Therefore, creating a mobile version of your website that offers fewer images, simple navigation and faster load time can help you quickly gain points with Google.

These simple strategies will help webmasters reap significant benefits and optimize their online endeavors to be more successful and fruitful in future.  

Koenig Solutions, a renowned IT training firm, offers various courses including SEO, PPC etc. that help professionals further hone their technical skills and always stay ahead in these rapidly changing times. 

Why You Got Hit by Penguin 2.1

The scary Penguin struck again! This time more fiercely than ever. This spam eating search algorithm from Google is a periodic update that finds and affects those that are spamming its search engine results, but still manage to rank well in the listings. Those websites that get affected by this algorithm show a marked dip in traffic and rankings suddenly around the date this upgrade goes live. So, if you've purchased paid links, your domain is one among the many under its direct target. 

But what if you've not resorted to any of the spammy tricks and back links to your website, and still you got hit by Penguin 2.1? Well, there are many like you who believe the same. Don't worry or lose hope. Start by taking a fresh look at your SEO strategy, and find the loopholes where Google must have gotcha! However, remember that it is just an automated system algorithm that also shows odd results owing to certain limitations.

Some official domains were not even listed while hackers sites are. Empty or fake domains with make money online messages are listed. Copied content came out higher than the places they copied it from. There are also reported cases of false positives. Spam is still getting through with flying colours while genuine sites are unfairly targeted.

How to Recover from Penguin 2.1

Earlier, you were allowed to file a reconsideration request if you thought you got in the line of fire for all the wrong reasons. However, Google now makes it clear that filing such requests won't help you recover. As I mentioned earlier, you need to take a closer look at your websites and links to find the weak spot and clear the spam up. You'll be back on track naturally within a few days.  So before you think of lodging your request with the search engine giant, make sure you follow these steps and ensure you're not at fault here:

• Clear any on-page spam on your website that you know of

• Clear any bad or paid link networks that you may be a part of

• Wait for a few days for the effects to show or wait till the next update

• If you are not able to recover your rankings and traffic even after all this, consider filing a report to Google.

Follow these steps and ensure you follow only White Hat SEO techniques to promote your online endeavors in order to stay safe from future attacks.