Recently I had showed you the infographic view on How to protect your blog from Google Penguin Effect but today I will mention some important ways by which one can save his/her blog from Google penguin algo by optimizing it so that is does not break any of Google’s rules and codes of conduct. This article gives you some great advice on how to optimize your blog so that Google penguin cannot touch it. Have a look!
Important Steps to take while Protecting your blog from Google penguin 2014:
1. Optimize the loading time of your blog
Optimizing a blog is simple, and complicated at the same time. Everything depends on your skill level, hosting and the time you spend on it. There is no recipe that will do everything for you in 5 minutes. The quest for performance is more a balance between several points. Take some time to make measurements using the tools you can get for free online. Then see what you think is the most urgent.
2. Use Copy-scape
They offer five free webpage plagiarism checks per day. So every day you should check five pages. If you find any copied content and it is yours, go on a crusade to have it removed from every site but yours. If YOU were the one to copy the content then delete it immediately.
3. Tools you already use
If you are already using SEO tools and tracking tools for your blog, you may wish to check them to see if your ratings have fallen drastically. This may indicate a penguin impact. However, you should remember that your click rate will fall at a very steady and slow rate if your blog is a good one, because you will still receive traffic from loyal viewers.
4. Remove hidden text
Ooooh we have all considered it. If you don’t put a Meta description in your webpage, Google will simply list the first few lines of your website as default. Even if you do put a Meta description in, they will still show the page before the Meta description. In some cases, because of your page layout, the first lines they show are the disclaimer or something like a price and product code.
So you consider hiding a bit of text, making it the same color as the background, so that Google reads that first. If you are doing this then stop, as Google will suspend your site from indexing. They may even ban your IP address.
5. Good WordPress plug-ins
WordPress is interesting mainly because of the multitude of plug-ins. While some are horrible ball, there are quite a few interesting regarding optimizations. For example “WP Super Cache” is really good. Also try “Hyper Cache”. You can also try W3 Total Cache if you have a dedicated server.
6. Remove plug-ins
When you installed your blog, everything was fine it was lightning fast. Then you have plug-ins installed. Each plug-in is potentially dangerous in terms of performance. Some are particularly resource intensive, especially when doing API calls (e.g. Twitter and Facebook). So be careful to measure the potential impact of adding a new feature.
Disable all plug-ins and take a measurement–Firebug is perfect for this. Then reactivate plug-ins one at a time so check its impact on loading time.
7. Fix up your grammar innit
You gots to fix up da grammar, and ya stylee, on da pages, wad up. Otherwise your page(s) may be deemed non-useful, and therefore knocked down the search engine results, or kicked off the index (if the content is really that bad). You do not need it to be Oxford standard grammar, spelling, style and syntax, but it does need to be web content readable. This is a standard in which people write so that the reader can understand the written style’s flow.
8. Disable editing articles on WordPress
WordPress backup all backup versions of an article. It is rather nice, but a load time killer if you post often. To disable this function, you will need to change the wp-config.php file which is at the root of wordpress, and set the value to false:
WP_POST_REVISIONS: define (‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
If you intend to manually delete the post revisions, run this SQL command (make a backup, you never know):
Delte from = wp_posts
Where = post_type = ‘revision’;
9. Shared hosting and display speed
Once you apply the basics, there are some best practices that will make all the difference to your susceptibility to penguin. In the case of shared hosting, use Htaccess to make a site faster. It is not very complex, since it involves modifying a single file at the root of the site.
10. Delete bad links
If you paid for links from a link farm, you should have them removed. If you cannot have them removed then you may be in a dilly of a pickle. What you can do however is delete the pages that they link too, (you are probably quaking in your boots if you had them all link to your home page). Delete the page and have Google un-index it. If you struggle to do that (maybe you can’t reach your websites root directory) then leave the page as an error page missing (404) page.
Eventually Google will delete the index. Do not put a page in its place, even if you have the no-follow bot embedded. Just leave the one that Google placed there.
Thats it! Enjoy…
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