What’s The Difference Between Google’s Panda And Penguin?

In the world of internet marketing, SEO is one of the most powerful tools to keep your webpage at the top in search engine ranking.  Google has a complex algorithm to keep things as nice and tidy for their searches.  They also want to make sure people are getting quality content quickly and easily instead of spending countless hours searching for the right website.  Google’s Panda and Penguin may sound cute, but they both play a huge role in keeping SEO marketers in line.

Google Panda was released in 2011 and is an update to Google’s secret algorithm for its search engine.  Panda’s main job is to keep higher quality content near the top of the rankings and send lower quality sites to the bottom.  Google is allowing more thoughtful, insightful, engaging quality content to hold more value than those just putting up content; allowing search results to become more effective and efficient for web searchers.  Panda also looks for content farms and webpages producing high bounce rates.  Combining these tactics make it harder for websites to throw senseless material around.

Google Penguin was released on 2012 and was Google’s second big update against questionable SEO tactics.  Penguin searches through various websites and penalizes those who do not follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.  A few techniques that can penalize a site include keyword stuffing, linking low quality links, excessive link building, and duplicate content.  All of this prevents websites obtain search engine rankings.

The penalties issued by Panda and Penguin are different.  A website penalized by Panda is an easier fix than Penguin.  Both are time consuming to fix, but it also helps weed out the bad from the good.  Panda looks for content and keeping up with quality updates and postings can easily fix a penalty from Panda.  Penguin on the other hand needs more fine-tuning.  Usually the use of obsessive link building can easily cause a website to be hit by Penguin’s penalties.  Google’s Disavow Link Tool is the main tool to help remove Penguin’s penalty.

SEO’s game has been always evolving thanks to Google’s algorithmic updates such as Panda and Penguin.  Maintaining a site from not being penalized is easy when all the guidelines are followed.  There are many ways to keep your site at the top of the search engine results, but many – if not all – techniques will take time to gain those rankings.  Websites need to have a strategy to organically grow in rankings and avoid any penalties whatsoever.