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.

Today I am going to give the best way to overcome Google penalty. First of all I would suggest you all to read my previous blog "How I overcome the Google penalty for a website within 5 days?". In today's post I am going to give you more ways to overcome a Google penalty.

I have got a penalty lately for one of the websites I work. I did a serious diagonsis and found that the possible reason for the penalty is duplicate content (Different URL/Webpage indexed with same content). The search for domain name without TLD (Top Level Domain) showed my penalised website homepage around the fifties. I have been doing PPC for the domain for long and I have used URL tagging. The URL tagging feature uses GCLID (Google Click Identifier) is a globally unique tracking parameter used by Google to pass click information from Google Adwords to Google analytics. As per the Google webmaster guidelines each webmaster should block Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links using robots.txt file.

Step 1: I checked my Google webmaster account and found that my GCLID links are indexed.

Step 2: I checked my robots.txt and found that the Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links aren't blocked.

Step 3: I downloaded the robots.txt and added "Disallow" syntax for Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links and uploaded the new robots.txt

Step 4: I filed a Google reconsideration request.

My homepage was back in the first page of the search within 24 hours. Hope the posted helps someone in overcoming Google penalty.

Search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising usually exist in two separate spheres, but it looks like the two worlds could be even more related that we had previously thought. A recent forum thread in Webmaster World asks an intriguing question: do AdWords prices go up each time Google pushes out an update to its search engine algorithm?

This almost makes sense, especially if your web properties were recently punished by Panda or some other Google algorithm update. Google could then artificially inflate the AdWords CPC pricing, since it knows that these publishers will be interested in regaining their traffic. Even if the inflation is real, thanks to an increased "flooding" of advertisers to AdWords, it means that the prices go up.

One forum user, "netmeg," brings up this exact point: "Changes in the algo could increase the number of advertisers because not everyone can afford to wait around to see if their SEO tinkering will bring the traffic back. In the short term, they may turn to AdWords."

Another theory is that Panda punishes the "lower end" publishers and pushes them off the AdSense map, thus reducing the overall inventory from which AdWords can pull. If the number of advertisers stay the same, then the bid prices naturally go up. Or it could all be in our heads.

An informal poll has been set up on Search Engine Roundtable, and it looks like 37.5% agree that AdWords prices go up after a Google algorithm update, whereas 22.5% say no. The rest don't know. What do you think?

Yes, it might be a little hard to believe, but Google rolls out its first Panda update exactly one year ago today on February 24, 2011. Panda was designed to be a "filter" that would penalize content farms and other websites on the Internet that were deemed as being too "thin" to be useful to web users.

Not surprisingly, Google Panda (and its various updated versions) has created many problems for professional SEO specialists and webmasters alike. An infographic has been put together by Search Engine Land and BlueGlass that does a great job of outlining exactly how Panda works and what impact it has had on the Internet at large.

The first version of Panda was designed to target "scraper sites" that copied copyright content from other sites. Google says that 12% of searches in the United States were affected. Subsequent updates expanded language support and made "minor changes" to the algorithm. Now that we are a full twelve months after the initial Panda update, only 13% of those polled by SE Roundtable said they have fully recovered. Only 29% have recovered partially and a whopping 58% say they have not recovered from Panda.

And Panda hasn't only impacted smaller "scraper sites" and "content farms" either, as bigger players like About, Yahoo, and Demand Media have all had their ranking significantly impacted by Google's bamboo-munching creature. So, where do you stand with Panda? Have you recovered? What are you doing to avoid getting hit by the filter?

And Google has once again ascended to the top of the heap for another one of our online necessities. It's already the biggest search engine in the world and YouTube is probably the biggest video sharing site in the world. Now, Google Public DNS has officially become the world's largest public DNS service.

This news comes by way of SE Roundtable, reporting that the public DNS service from Google is now "handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day." When they first launched this service, Google said that it's goal was to speed up the web-browsing experience for the public, pre-caching the sites that it deems to be the most popular on the Internet. Of course, we have our suspicions that they have ulterior motives.

That's why webmasters were so wary of Google Public DNS when it launched back in December 2009. It represented yet another way that Google could collect user data, tracking their web surfing habits so that they can supposedly provide better, faster, and more relevant search results. But it's not like Google isn't already tracking your habits as you use Google Search or surf with Google Chrome.

Most people just use the DNS provided by their ISPs and some of the more savvy opt for OpenDNS for various reasons. What about you? Do you use Google Public DNS? Are you concerned about their data collection habits?