Everyone wants their website to reach as high as possible on the search engines. People who want to have a higher ranking website on Google in the Bay Area and other places will have certain keywords for which they hope to have the top – or at least near the top – results in the major search engines. In order to achieve this goal, many site owners have resorted to such questionable practices as keyword stuffing, copying content from other sources, and other similar things. Google decided to try to keep these sorts of sites from getting the highest rankings by changing up their algorithms.

Panda and Penguin are what they called these algorithm updates. Panda was released first, and its purpose was to move the sites up that had more content and did not rely so much on ads and standard SEO techniques without any real content. Since people tend to prefer sites that are actually useful and not just pages of ads or links, Panda was created to try to serve them the kind of pages they wanted. There was a problem with Panda, however. The problem was that, when people realized what the focus was, they began using public domain content to fill in the pages. Unfortunately, this made the web pages look like they were content-rich without actually offering value to their readers.

This resulted in the creation and implementation of Penguin. Penguin looks at the content that will be shown “above the fold,” or the area that is at the top of the page and shows without scrolling. When a site had unique content there and a minimum of ads, its rank was increased. If a site had duplicate content (such as the public domain text mentioned earlier) or an excess of ads, it was ranked lower. When a person is concerned with ranking their website on Google in the Bay Area or other areas, they want the rank to be as high as possible.

The best way for a site owner to optimize his or her site for the new Google algorithms is to offer unique, useful content. When a site has valid and useful content on its pages, more visitors will find it useful and tell their friends about it. The more people who share the site, the better its rank will be, due to quality links. Creating a site that encourages a user to become a loyal follower is the best form of SEO there is. It proves the worth of the site both to other users, and to the search engines. In order for users to have the best possible ranking website on Google in the Bay Area, they will have to concentrate more on what it offers than with advertisements.