Google Penalty World

Robin Good: This is an excellent and thorough guide on how to find out whether you have been hot by Panda and on how to fix Google's most feared automatic penalization algorithm to date, based on the Panda fighting experience at SEOgadget in 2011.

From the article: 

"Panda is about dealing with bad content, not bad links. Bad content comes in different flavours: duplicate, weak, thin and template.

Panda acts like a domain wide penalty: your whole site is affected and your good stuff is dragged down by your bad stuff.

Web crawler accessibility issues affect how search engines see, and therefore assess, your content.

Often, badly designed Information Architectures compound the problems with already weak content.

Large sites that have many pages, templated content and lots of sub-categories are the most at risk.

If you haven’t been monitoring and fixing your accessibility issues, as highlighted in Google Webmaster Tools, you are at risk."

Three key takeaways:

"1) The world is not as it once was.

Crap websites trying to masquerade as decent websites are being hunted down and sunk below the quality line.

2) Google owes you nothing.

Tactics to just barely raise your quality enough to recover your rankings are unlikely to pay dividends. You may well find yourself a loser again the next time the quality bar is raised.

3) Google is judging you.

Google is going to continue to raise the quality bar with future updates. When your competitors improve their websites, you will be weakest and in line for the chop at the next quality update."

Highly recommended. 9/10

Full article: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/8583-how-to-identify-and-fix-google-panda 

Robin Good: If you are looking to understand more about Google penalizations, whether "algorithmic" (like Google Panda) or "manual", here is a great guide by David Harry to dive into.

Key sections in this guide include:

• Have You Been Penalized?
• What Can You Get Penalized For?
• Diagnosing a Google Penalty
• How to Deal With a Google Penalty
• Dealing with Algorithm Changes
• What Data to Keep for the SEO Doctor

Recommended. 8/10

Full article: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2141098/Google-Penalty-or-Algorithm-Change-Dealing-With-Lost-Traffic 

"Penguin has now been reverse engineered. The results are shared including what is likely wrong and what you can do to fix it.

This is totally different than what most of the SEO world is telling you to do these days."

(Source: http://www.senuke.com/blog/?p=276)

Josh Bachynski reports in this video that the biggest surprise for most people will be the fact that Penguin has NOTHING to do with your backlinks, as it only targets on-page factors.

Key take-aways from the video:

1) You need to fix on-page issues as the top priority

2) Penguin-based negative SEO is not possible

3) No need to delete links - Google is already taking care of that by devaluing those

4) Add quality links to your key content in ways that make them look "natural" to Google (30% exact match query, 30% partial match, 30% url-based, 10% generic/other stuff)

5) Do not overoptimize - Google knows what your page is about - don't overdo it with keywords. Check with Google Webmaster Tools and see what Google thinks your page is about.

6) Try always to look and be as "natural" as you can be. 

Must see. 9/10

Watch the video for a complete explanation: http://vimeo.com/42939368 

(Thanks to Nicoleta Leon for pointing me to this) 

The Google Panda visual history laid out in a visual infographic poster. The nine Google Panda updates release dates and key traits and a summary reminder of what are the key things that this automatic filtering algorithm is after.