The SEO and the webmasters community is worried again. The day before yesterday (i.e. May 13th), many people noticed a major shuffle in their site's search results. If you remember it, the last Panda update (version 3.6) was rolled out by Google only after 8 days of the previous one. And once again, there are reports that Google may have launched yet another update. So, did you notice any major changes in your site's traffic?

According to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Round Table, this may be the second Penguin Update (1.1) by Google. However, there are no confirmed reports about this update as of yet. Google spokespersons are also denying that any new search algorithmic update (whether Panda or Penguin) has been launched by the search giant.

News of Recovery from Penguin Attack
There are also a couple of reports that suggest many sites' recovery after they were penalized by the last Penguin update. Webmasters that removed thin content from their site (after being hit) saw a boost in their keyword traffic in the last two days. All these reports of recovery also suggest that Google might have launched some freshness update.

Though there are news of recovery, one thing that you really need to be sure about is whether your site was penalized by the Penguin update. You can never reach a suitable conclusion until you know what type of penalty caused your site's ranking to drop in search engines.

So, be careful before making any decision regarding the SEO of your website. It's not always wise to jump at every little indication of change in a site's SEO. Don't ever act until you have traced the exact reasons.

Advice for the Post-Penguin/ Panda Era
If your site traffic depends largely on Google searches, you should start making the necessary changes to your SEO strategy in the light of the Google webmaster guidelines. While Google Panda doesn't like thin or low quality content, its Penguin hates web spam (keyword stuffing or unnatural backlinks profile). That's why it's important to abide by the guidelines that can save you from Panda or Penguin attacks in future.

Some of the most important pieces of advice to abide by include :

Stay away from using hidden text or links
Say 'No' to cloaking or deceptive redirects
Stop sending automated queries to Google
Avoid using substantially duplicate content across multiple domains or sub domains
Make your affiliate sites content-rich to provide value to the user
Avoid underhand tricks to steal your way to the top of search results
Avoid participating in dubious link schemes
Don't use unauthorized software programs to submit pages
Create web pages primarily for people, not for search engines

You've seen the attacks of Google's Panda. You've also faced the wrath of the Penguin : the new inmate from Google's zoo. And you never know how many more are yet to arrive on the scene. It's just the right time to quickly analyze what you're actually doing and how you can get rid of things that violate Google's quality guidelines. Act in time so you don't have to repent in future.

Did you see any major change in your site's organic traffic over the last two days? Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Until now, Google Panda updates used to happen after an interval of every 5-7 weeks. It's the first time that Google updated its Panda algorithm (with version 3.6) only after an eight day's gap. Now, there are confirmed reports that Google rolled out Panda 3.6 on April 27. Panda 3.5 was launched on April 19. Can webmasters expect to have Panda updates so frequently?

Shortly after Panda 3.5, Google had rolled out its first Penguin algorithmic update on April 24. It seems webmasters are now caught up in the midst of Google's Panda and Penguin. I am highly suspicious whether Google has an entire herd of animals to pounce upon sites, one after another.

About Panda 3.6
According to Google officials, Panda 3.6 update was not a major update. This update only refreshed Google's Panda. Since it was only a minor update, as per Google's confirmation, it didn't impact a lot of sites. If you remember Panda 3.2 (which happened around January 18 this year) was also a minor data freshness update, it brought about losses and gains in search rankings for many. Google says that all of its Panda algorithmic updates are aimed at returning top quality search results to the user.

Google's Panda uses artificial intelligence. During any Panda algorithm update, human quality testers grade a large number of websites on the grounds of overall quality, time spent of site, design, download time etc.

Advice from Matt Cutts to Recover from a Panda Attack
Matt Cutts, via Google's official YouTube channel (Google Webmaster Central) continues to provide good pieces of tips and suggestions. If you're looking for resources related to crawling, indexing and rankings issues of a site, you should always keep visiting this YouTube channel for latest useful videos.

In a video, Matt clarified that any site that's hit by a Panda Update isn't actually providing real value to the user. And if you are ready to fix the issues that caused the downgrade, it's not going to be very tough.

Even a couple of poor quality web pages can cause harm to the entire site. If Google's Panda finds stuff that's not very useful, it might impact the overall search rankings of a site. That's why it's crucial to find those bad apples and remove them before they spoil the whole bunch.

Here's what Matt has to say to Panda victims :'Fat Panda' Hates 'Thin Content'
Think content comes in many forms. If multiple URLs on your site contain similar content, you have thin content. If you have similar pieces of content on many of your domains, it's also a case of having thin content. Whether your site's content is 'true duplicate' or 'near duplicate', you're going to be on Google's radar. Excessive navigation and repeated use of images also results into hampering the content quality of site. The first thing that you need to do to recover from a Panda attack is get rid of all the low quality pages on your site. Second, you should focus on the increasing the uniqueness of your site's content.

Was your site hit by any of the Panda updates by Google? Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments section below.

I'm often contacted by clients who complain that their link building efforts don't work. I tell many of them to re-evaluate their strategy first of all. What I've experienced is that most of the webmasters and small business are making some common link building mistakes. Though creating explosive content is the best way for building more top quality links the natural way, there are also a couple of other things that you should keep in mind so that you get faster results.

Given below are five reasons that can make your link building efforts almost fruitless. Make sure you avoid these mistakes.

#1. Your Links Lack Relevance
In terms of link building, what search engines are really concerned about is relevance. It's not actually the number of links that matters. Instead, it's the relevancy that makes a real difference. If your link building isn't bringing you the desired results, it's just the right time to analyze whether those links pointing back to your domain have any relevance. Relevance in a conversational term will mean why one site should link to another.

#2. Link Variety is Missing
The variety of links is the second most important thing that you should focus on. If you want to climb up the ladder of organic ranking, you should try to bring good variety to your site's links. When the inbounds links pointing to your domain belong to many different sources (that are also relevant), it sends good signal to search engines. While building links for your site, you should try to get different types of links including links from blogs, links from Wiki directories .net links, .com links, .edu links, .org links, blog comments links, no-follow links etc.

#3. You Manipulate Anchor Text
This is one of the most common link building mistakes that I see many webmasters make. If you're obsessed over the use of exact match anchor text, you should say goodbye to this mindset right away. Instead, you should try to diversify the anchored text as much as possible. You can use your brand name, URL name, long tail keywords or short tail keywords to diversify the anchor text. If your anchor text link looks manipulative, you can get your site quickly penalized by search engines like Google.

#4. Your Links Don't Look Natural
The pattern of your links should also look natural. Remember the best links are those that you get unasked. This is because these links look very natural. There are different dubious link building schemes. If you use any of such link farming schemes, you'll make search engines suspicious. Getting 1,000 links in a day is never something that can happen naturally. Make sure your links look natural to attract the maximum attention from search engines.

#5. You Are Not Consistent
This is again one of the most common problems that I've noticed. If you think link building is a one-time task, you're making the biggest mistake. You can never expect good results until you are consistent in your link building efforts. You'll see no improvement in your site's SEO if you build a couple of links and then sit idle. Search engines like Google also pay close attention to the pattern of links as they build over time.

Are you ready to reassess your link building strategy? Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts and opinions.

After Google's Panda, it's the Penguin that's making webmasters feel scary. Google officials had pre-announced about this update. Google terms its new update (launched on April 24) as the Penguin Update. According to officials at Google, this update is rolled out to target those sites that indulge in web spam or don't abide by Google's quality guidelines.

Google's Matt Cutts had already warned about this update. He said that many Google engineers were already working on this. And this update would punish those sites that are overly SEO'ed. Now that the Penguin Update is fully alive, many webmasters have started to feel the heat, and get the burns.

The big question now is whether your site was also hit by this recent search algorithmic update. To find it out, you can simply log into your site's analytics and start studying the organic search traffic pattern immediately after April 24. Then, you should compare this with the search traffic your site got a day or two before. If there's a sharp drop in organic traffic immediately after April 24, it's clear that you've joined the line of the victims.

Given below are a few good pieces of advice you can use to recover or prevent being hit by Google's Penguin.

Don't Cheat Users
Whether your site was hit by the Penguin update or not, make it a point that you don't engage in deceitful behavior. While creating web pages, focus your mind on benefiting the user. Make sure the pages on your site provide real value to the user, solve their problems and make them happy. Avoid cloaking.

Avoid Shortcuts to Improve SEO
All of the last updates rolled out by Google clearly suggest that there's no magic formula or shortcut to improve your site's ranking overnight. Don't use cheap or dirty tricks to climb up the SEO ladder. At the same time, pay heed to Google's words that you shouldn't get caught up in SEO trends.

Build a Natural Backlinks Profile
Participating in dubious link building schemes can cost you heavily. Link or blog networks are already on Google's radar. Make sure the backlinks profile of your site doesn't look manipulative or suspicious to search engines. Most importantly, stay away from linking to web spammers, as it can impact your site's ranking negatively. Focus on building a natural looking backlinks profile.

Don't Send Automated Queries to Google
Sending automated queries to search engines via an unauthorized software program is strictly against Google's quality guidelines. If you use such software programs to submit pages or queries to search engines, you'll be a surefire target. Avoid these bad practices at all cost.

Get Rid of Duplicate Content Immediately
If you've several pages on subdomains on your site with considerably duplicate content, you should get rid of the same as quickly as possible. Forget about the days of the past. Now, you can never get away with having almost similar content (with little variation of keywords) on multiple pages or subdomains.

Google's Penguin Update is all about web spam. If your site was hit by this update, you should closely review your site and get rid of the spam activities as quickly as possible. Since this is an automatic penalty without any manual interference, you won't be able to file reconsideration requests. All you should do to recover your site is make it completely spam-free.

Was your site hit by the Penguin Update? Please feel free to talk back in comments.

The tactics of link building are fast changing. Therersquo;s one thing that you can be pretty sure about is that there's no shortcut to SEO. You can no more depend on one blog or link network for building backlinks for your site. And you can't build too many links too fast the unnatural way. So, how do you build links?

The best tactics to build links is to build them naturally. If your link building efforts look manipulative, search engines can become suspicious quickly. In one single update, your blog can go straight to hell.

Don't worry though.

Here're four creative ways that you can use to build backlinks for your blog the natural way. Search engines will love these links too.

#1. Publish Book Reviews
This is a proven strategy. Writing reviews of books (relevant to your audience) is a wonderful tactic to generate quality backlinks. If you cover all the best things about a book and talk about the author in your blog post, the author is most likely to link to your page in their sitersquo;s media or press section.

Writing a book review sounds a lot of task for too many bloggers. But the effort that you put into writing the piece can bring surprising results. Before you start writing the review, don't forget to think about the readers.

#2. Offer Free Webinars
A webinar is an awesome relationship building tool of the modern day. Webinars work because your attendees can hear you and interact with you. Most of the professional bloggers conduct free webinars to build email list, create awareness about their product, share interesting ideas and create a sense of community. If your webinar is truly useful, attendees will be compelled to share it with others. This social sharing can generate a good amount of quality backlinks.

#3. Share Infographics
Infographics are all the rage today. Infographics are a lot more attention-grabbing than text-based posts. If you've the required resources, you can create your own useful infographics and publish them on your blog. If your infographics truly hit the chord with your audience, the results can be extremely surprising. You'll soon want to create more of them.

There are several free tools that you can use to design your own infographics. Some of these include Creately, Wordle, Inkscape, Visual.ly etc.

#4. Create Resource Pages
Creating a couple of resource pages on your blog is also an excellent idea to get others to link to your blog. But do you know how to create resource pages? Well, it begins with selecting those blog categories that have too many useful posts. Then you can hand-pick the best posts from a specific category and create a new page on your blog with those links (add only the post titles and link them to their respective pages). You can also group them under different suitable subheadings to increase readability. In any case, don't forget to add a good introduction to that page. Resource pages work really well.

Have you tried any of these tactics to generate quality backlinks for your blog? Please feel free to talk back in comments.