We’ve been getting an overwhelming amount of inquiries and phone calls about what’s been going on in Google-land as of late. I’m sure some of you have even noticed that your website has dipped a bit in rankings, or may have even fallen all the way from page one to page three or four. Unfortunately, you’re not alone and it’s all thanks to Google’s newest algorithm update: Penguin 2.0.

It doesn’t mean much to most but to websites all over it was a radical paradigm shift that webmasters are just now starting to bounce back from.

While companies like VND were all geared for a big update from the search-engine giant, none of us knew when the roll-out was scheduled to be complete or even when it would hit our (or your) website. When in late May, Google abruptly announced the update had hit and had completed roll-out, we had to jump right away to figure out exactly what was changed and what Google’s intentions were for this go-around.

It became pretty evident pretty quickly who Google’s primary target was for this update: People who had bought links, spam-dexers, irrelevant content hustlers… in other words – the Blackhats.

What is Blackhat SEO? Typically, it is the unethical practice of obtaining search engine rankings using an excessive amount of SERP (search engine results pages) algorithm exploitation. Simply put: when an “SEO guru” finds that near achilles-heel-like indexing point, they will hammer away at it in an attempt to get their clients to that coveted first spot by any means necessary.

A lot of them got those rankings for their clients, sure; but when this new update hit, they were no-where to be found. In essence, this new Panda update more or less forces webmasters to play by Google’s rules and practice what is known as “Whitehat” SEO. Essentially just following the tried-and-true methodology of making sure your on-site content is authentic and relevant, making sure your source code is syntactically correct, ensuring your meta/title/alt tags are correctly targeted, and so forth.

You may have been a victim of this update, and that may be because of your current or old SEO company not playing by the rules or simply not paying attention; it could be because you never even knew what SEO really was and never messed with it, it could even be that you tried yourself and used some of those so-called “Blackhat” techniques as a shot-in-the-dark. If this is the case, you may want to shoot me an email: travis@vndx.com. Don’t worry – I don’t practice the sketchy techniques.

I’d be more than happy to check out what’s going on behind the scenes, and even provide you a free analysis of your current happenings. Or if human interaction is not your thing, you can always visit http://www.vndx.com and click on the ‘Free Analysis’ button to receive one as well. This is a starting point that can guide you as to some of the beginning efforts you might need to set forth to get your website to the forefront of your niche again. And naturally, any questions you have, feel free to give us a ring and we’d be happy to see how we can help.