If the title sounds like something out of a classic late night horror flick, it was a nightmare for many web site owners. I was also recently hit by Google's Penguin. If you have a website, by now you have already heard of Google's latest Penguin release, if you are a SEO you was most likely prepared and it did not affect you". Well I am not a SEO so I was not prepared.

I own a company named Billboard Brokers of America and my web site was one of those that got my butt kicked by this little Penguin guy, there must have been 100 or more (lol).

I did not see him coming, I did not even know what hit, then it was lights out on Google. I was penalized for 30 days. I lost approximately 60% of my daily hits plus my page 1 Google position.

Like thousands of others I was not aware of the many guidelines out there such as too many keywords on a web page is not considered Internet etiquette.

I am certainly not an SEO by all means so this whole Penguin thing caught me by surprise. It started when I wanted to clean up my web site. I basically had many of the keywords combined with the names of the many cities my company services throughout America. My largest competitor does the same but he does not do what they call masking. I wanted the search engines to find my information but I did not want to clutter up my web page so I took the next step, I made all this copy the same color as my background, this is masking. I did this because I wanted a cleaner looking page. Well, if you don't know already my friend masking will get you penalized and so will too many keywords. To many key words is considered spamming to the search engines and that will get you penalized to and removed from the search engines that consider this spamming.

I did some serious research to find out what Google considers a good web site. I found out they are looking for unique and spam free content, back links to websites that are very similar to the continent on the web site it is linked to.

The Penguin is one of two of the latest updates Google has released to improve the quality of websites they direct traffic to.

In reality Google did not take anything from anyone they just forced several site owners do a little house cleaning and clean up their site or or get left out.

Penguin's update is really an aggressive SEO beast to deal with and I am sure in the future there will be many more to follow, so check out the search engine guidelines and be more prepared next time.

Google's latest action will encourage development of better websites with less spam by far, discouraging keyword packing and keyword masking. Hopefully you have been sparred and not hit by "The Attack of the Penguin" and for those of you that did get hit by the beast you have my sympathy. Clean up your site, follow the instructions they sent you and you will be right back in the game.

As for me I cleaned my web site up and filled it with new content. I have three keywords that has me right back on Google's front page. My traffic is coming back up; I hope to be back to normal within the next month or so.

In summing it all up the Penguin update didn't really change anything that Google had not already deemed unacceptable. If you are really interested in building and maintaining your own web site check out what the search engines are all looking for if you want to be better ranked by them.

Good Luck!