There are those who were hurt by the recent Penguin 2.0 update by Google. If your rankings fell in the last month, there’s probably a black and white flightless bird reason for the drop. Thankfully, there are things that you can do to make things better.

Even if you weren’t affected by the change, you should still take note. There are nuances and activities that you can do to actually take advantage of Penguin 2.0 that will help you do even better. It can all be summed up in one word: “quality”.

That’s really what Panda in 2011, Penguin in 2012, and Penguin 2.0 in 2013 are all about. Panda was about content quality. The Penguins were about link and social quality. Combined, they make for an excellent algorithm that makes it harder for spammers to win and makes it more fruitful for conscientious businesses and their marketing partners to do the right things.

Inbound link quality is a tough discussion for Matt Cutts at Google. He does not openly believe in the concept of “link building” but he inwardly acknowledges that not every business is Macy’s, Apple, or the New York Times. Most businesses have a hard enough time getting traffic at all, let alone the type of traffic that can find enough value in the site to be willing to put links to it on their own sites. He’ll never say “link building” but he knows that it must be done. All he wants is for businesses to do it the right way, as organically as possible, to remain relevant, and to not use automation techniques that are designed to fool the search engines.

Those are the basics. We’ll be going over the advanced portions of this topic in my webinar on Wednesday, Penguin 2.0: What You Must Know About Google’s Latest SEO Update. Be sure to check it out!

* * *

Originally posted on the KPA blog.