A fluffy penguinGuest blog by Percy the Penguin – direct from SEO Centre, Antarctica (aka Jeremy Nelson-Smith, Internet Marketing Expert).

Hi Folks!

First of all, what exactly is Google’s obsession with naming its algo (I use the short version for algorithm, the full version is too difficult for us penguins to spell) updates after animals?

We’ve just had the Panda update and now, for some weird reason, Google has decided to name its latest updates after me and my pals! Bizarre but strangely flattering to be recognised at last by the Big G. What will the next one be called? Camel? Cormorrant? Civet Cat? Suggestions to me on a postcard please c/o Google Algo Updates, Post Office,  Antarctica.

Not content with their only recently issued Penguin 1.0 update, hot on its heels has come Penguin 1.1. According to the nice Matt Cutts (never met him but they say he is) at Google this latest update ‘affects <0.1% of all English searches’; which is good news if you’re using the Mother of all modern tongues (yes, we use English down here as most of my pals just can’t get to grips with Penguin grammar), but what if you use Serbo Croat, Polish or Urdu? Who knows?

Power is with the People: what you do with ‘traditional’ on and off-site SEO will cease to matter much. Google is pushing all you website owners ever so more firmly into a position where it’s not what you (as the website owner) do on your website (on-page SEO) or even with off-site SEO with your backlink portfolio, it’s what other people say about you and how they vote the popularity of your pages, that’s going to really, really determine how your pages rank in Google.

SEO ‘Manipulation’ will soon be dead: the days of website owners being able to ‘manipulate’ search results or even heavily influence them is coming, and coming fast folks. Google wants us all to work a lot harder to give web searchers want they really want, which (not surprisingly) is content very, very specific to what they’re looking for. So the more genuinely valuable, authoritative and downright interesting your web pages are to your particular audience(s), the more likely those people are to vote and share their satisfaction via all those social networking channels that are becoming so popular these days. And the more they vote with their ‘Like’ buttons, Tweet about your content, share it on Google+, the more their preferences will positively influence your search engine rankings.

Think ‘Cream’ from now on: if you think about it what Google is doing is really the way it should be; the cream of website content will rise to the top whilst the dregs will slowly sink to the bottom.

So, folks, if you want to outrank your competitors ‘think cream’ from now on and start focusing on generating loads of useful, interesting, authoritative content and getting it out there for everyone to see (i.e. get blogging!) and share.

Have to go fishing now so all the best and thanks for reading!

Percy x