There has predictably been a fair bit of fuss online over the recent penguin update. I’ll admit that over the last few weeks I’ve paid 3% more attention than usual to our client’s rankings, but no more than that. It just isn’t that important.
There was a time, not so long ago, when penguin was the absolute centre of my universe. Sleepless nights followed by frantic mornings. Phone calls with ecstatic clients followed by phone calls with furious (soon to be ex) clients. But that all changed.
A tipping point was reached. Google’s goal all along had been to get websites owners and SEOs to grow up and focus on building real brands that offered genuine value to their user, and finally they had achieved it.
For at least the last 2 years it has been far better to focus on your brand, content and social than it has been to agonise over link portfolios, not only because it diversifies your traffic sources but also because it makes your SEO infinitely more robust (even your link acquisition becomes about a thousand times easier). My next post will cover that in more detail as it amazes me how hard we all used to make our lives as SEO’s, but the hard fact is that if the recent penguin update derailed your rankings then you almost certainly deserved it.
In truth I should concede that we have had one site take a 10% hit, but needless to say that was the one with only a very basic brand/content strategy in place. That particular client just hadn’t taken our recommendations seriously but guess what, they definitely are now.
Dan
