If your website has taken a sudden dip in ranking and search results and you have no idea why, it is because of the recent update in the Penguin Algorithm of Google. Google Penguin 2.0 that released in May 22 2013 affected around 2.3% of English searches and severely affected searches in other languages.
To protect your website from the penguin update or to recover from the lost ranking, SEO has to rethink their strategies. It involves White-Hat SEO techniques and NOT Black-Hat or Grey-Hat SEO techniques. It has been proven time and again that these tricks won't help for long and Google will revert back with stronger algorithms. So, to bring a long term ranking to your website follow the Google Webmaster guideline.
Here are some changes that SEO must carry out to bring back the ranking of your websites:
Stop Paid Links:
Every SEOs are aware of this technique but who used it are now cursing themselves. With the launch of Google Penguin 2.0 , the search giant made it clear that it will not entertain such methods of link building to gain reputation and come up in search ranking. Such paid and sponsored links needs to be "no follow" with immediate affect. Websites involved in such methods were hit hard and their ranking was lost. Advertorials also falls under this category. Use guest posting and social networking sites to generate genuine linking.
Stop Spamming, duplicate content and Keyword stuffing:
There was a time when pages with no content on the page whatsoever also generated clicks and traffic but not anymore. Such pages that target a particular keyword and have nothing to offer the audience and made fool of them are being cut down. At the same time content that have stuffed keywords in it just to rank high are also being penalized. Google crawlers now will analyze the content even closely. If they find excessive keywords, they are going to take action. Duplicate content are being punished, which means no more posting of same articles at different places. Use social networking sites to share data and generate traffic. Use original and informative content.
SEO must understand that their strategy to target search engine will no longer work and Google will bring strict algorithms to check such tricks and trades. So it is better to play along and work for the audience or user.