From time to time search engines change or tweak their algorithm so that they keep the search results relevant. Penguin update is one of those tweaks.

Let us just say that “Penguin update” is Google’s commitment towards a cleaner and relevant search experience for searchers.

If you have been employing SEO that essentially follows the SEO best practices, you have nothing to fear, just keep working on optimizing your website the way you have been. If not, and you find that suddenly your website’s rankings have gone, what do you do?

I recommend that you do a quick analysis of the following :

1. Number and quality of incoming links
2. Content of your website
3. Html tags and any technical issues

If you have created doorway pages, hidden text etc start by removing them, that should be your first step. Creating doorway pages just for the sake of ranking may prove fatal. If you find any issues with the above mentioned, work on correcting those issues. It will take some time for you to come back to your earlier position.  But remember that it is better this way that the other way where you might get instant gratification but there is no guarantee if your site will stay in the index of the search engine or get thrown out.

There is another important message of this update and that is the relevance and the role that social networking sites play in SEO. You can’t and must not abuse any of these mediums, providing updates on Twitter and Facebook is one things but abusing these mediums by spamming them will most definitely not fetch you brownie points.

The idea is to keep a balance and work on creating good, useful and relevant content for your visitors.
Any black hat SEO is a complete no-no, check out my earlier article on black hat SEO and the need to keep true to SEO best practices and ethical
SEO practices.