5 Penguin-Friendly Link Building Tips
Since Google launched their
Penguin update
on April 24th, millions of websites have been falling down the rankings
like losing soldiers in the battlefield! Google has been cracking down
on "spammy" websites like never before.
This update has indeed been very effective at knocking down spam sites,
but many believe that some legit sites have also wrongfully been hit
and have voiced their opinions on Google's forums and social media
outlets. Google's Search Quality team listened and has set up a
form that webmasters can use to notify Google that the Penguin has been unfair to them.
If you have used any unnatural SEO techniques in the past and your
website is still proudly standing on the first page, it doesn't mean
you're safe. In fact, Google said that the updates will be gradually
deployed throughout the next few weeks. Expect a lot of movement in the
SERPs!
If you are feeling bad while reading this because you do remember using
some slightly shady link building techniques in the past, don't worry,
it's never too late to repent.
Now is the time to "whiten your hat" and re-think your SEO strategy.
Here are some valuable link building tips that will help you not only
survive the Penguin update, but safely improve your rankings for the
long term...
Tip #1 - Get More Social, Leverage Your Fanbase
In 2012, social signals are more important than ever. When you post
fresh content on your site or blog, make sure you share it on ALL your
social pages. In fact,
this should be almost like a reflex. For the lazies out there, there are tons of plugins and tools that can help you automate this process.
Twitterfeed is one of them.
I have seen too many companies posting new blog posts weekly, but not
sharing them on their Google+, Facebook fan page, or on Twitter. What's
the point of having all these fans, friends and followers
if you're NOT showing them your content?
When you share useful content, you will get likes, retweets, and +1's.
This not only gives you bonus points in terms of SEO, but it also helps
virally spread your content far beyond the confines of your fanbase. A
win-win!
Tip #2 - Link Your Inner-Pages
When link building, a lot of SEO's are still making the rookie mistake
of always linking to their homepage. I understand that your homepage is
the most important page of your site, but you can be guaranteed that
Google will raise a red flag if a large majority of your backlinks point
to your homepage and very few of them are linking to your blog posts
and inner pages. It simply doesn't make logical sense for Googlebot.
After all, inner pages are where the real content is at! When you look
at a website that acquires tons of links naturally like SEOMOZ, you'll
notice that most of the natural links they get are to their inner
content pages (blog posts, videos, SEO guides, etc...)
Also, remember that it's not just about external links.
Internal links
are also highly important. Take some time to improve your internal
site's structure by making sure the right keywords are linking to the
right pages internally. This will make it easy and intuitive for both
Google and your visitors to crawl your site. If you're lazy and you
happen to be using WordPress, consider using a plugin like
SEO Smart Links that can automate the whole process.
Tip #3 - Diversify Your Anchor Texts
Another element that Google has been cracking down on this year is
over-optimization
(both on-site and off-site). There's nothing Google hates more than
feeling like you're trying to force it to rank you for a specific
keyword. For instance, if you are targeting the keyword "
New York Condos For Sale" and you're asking all your link partners to link to you using that exact keyword, Google will think it's highly suspicious.
It simply doesn't make sense for Google that all these websites would
naturally
want to link to you using that exact keyphrase, which also happens to
be in your website's title bar and all over your homepage. *ahem ahem*
Think about it, if people were to link to you naturally, wouldn't they
all be using different keywords? You bet they would, so try to vary your
anchor links in a natural way. This will show Google that you're not
trying to force it to rank you for any specific keywords, rather you're
just trying to point visitors in the right direction. :)
Remember that Google is now smart enough to figure out which keyword
relates best to your content. I also highly recommend using editorial
keywords as anchor texts, such as: "click here," "read more," "learn
more," etc... as these look way more natural. Again, diversity is key
here.
Tip #4 - Focus on Quality, not Quantity
This has been said over and over, but it is more important this year
than ever before. The game has drastically changed, folks! Google
will penalize your website if you have a large amount of backlinks from
untrustworthy sites. (Authority Link Network anyone?)
If you are doing guest posting, I can guarantee you that one high
quality blog post from a reputable site is better than 100 posts from
low quality ones. I have seen clients in competitive niches enter the
first page with less than 30 quality links, while most of their
competitors had hundreds/thousands of them.
Also, do yourself a favor and forget about shady link building
techniques like mass directory submissions or any automated type of
link. If you know someone that has reached the first page using these
"spammy" techniques, you should feel bad for them. Google will
eventually hit them and hit them hard. If not today, maybe tomorrow, or
next month. These guys are definitely on Penguin's hit list. You don't
want to be in their shoes. Going to bed every night wondering if your
website will still be in the SERPs tomorrow is not a good feeling.
Tip #5 - Make Your Content Link-Worthy
Last but not least, make sure you are producing
link-worthy content.
Outsourcing your article writing for $5 a piece won't get you very far.
If your visitors don't like your content, they will leave your site.
High bounce rates = bad user experience. Bad user experience = lower
Google rankings. It's really that simple. If you provide content that
has value, people will stay longer on your site and possibly hit the
like or tweet buttons on one of your articles. This enhanced user
experience will pay off SEO-wise.
Always remember that content is (and will always be) king. That is the
rule of thumb in white hat SEO. Do you think websites like SEOMOZ or
Search Engine Journal need to do any link building in order to rank high
in search engines? Probably not, they simply focus on delivering high
quality content that people constantly link to from their websites and
their social profiles.
This is the safest, most natural, and
most efficient form of SEO.
Written By: AnimeR Source: SEOmoz.org
Penguins, Pandas, and Panic at the Zoo
Google’s war on lovable critters escalated on April 24th with the release of the
“Penguin” update (originally dubbed the
“webspam update”
by Google). While every major algorithm update causes some protest,
post-Penguin panic seems to be at near record levels, worsened by weeks
of speculation about an “over-optimization” penalty. Webmasters and SEOs
are understandably worried, and many have legitimately lost traffic and
revenue. Before you go out and burn your website to the ground for fear
of a penguin in the pantry, I want to offer some advice on how to
handle life after an algorithm update.
1. What We Know
First, let’s review what we know. I’m going to break the rules of blogging and recommend that you stop and read this
level-headed Penguin post
by Danny Sullivan. It covers some of the basics and is the most
speculation-free post I’ve read on the subject so far. Glenn Gabe also
had a good post on
potential Penguin factors. There’s still a lot of speculation, but likely culprits include:
-
Aggressive exact-match anchor text
-
Overuse of exact-match domains
-
Low-quality article marketing & blog spam
-
Keyword stuffing in internal/outbound links
Many people have suggested low-quality link profiles in general, but
analysis of Panda has been complicated by Google’s recent attack on link
networks, which seems to have been manual and has probably been going
on for weeks. The overlap has made analysis difficult, so let’s take a
quick look at the timeline.
What’s the Timeline?
The official roll-out date for Penguin was April 24th, and it seems to
have rolled out, for the most part, in a single day. Unfortunately, it
came on the heels of other events. On April 19th,
Panda 3.5 rolled out (most likely a data update). On April 16th, a data glitch caused a number of sites to be mistakenly
tagged as parked domains. Throughout April (and weeks before Penguin), Google started sending out a large number of
unnatural link notices via Google Webmaster Tools. Sadly, it seems that April really was the cruelest month.
How Bad Was It?
Google officially claimed that Penguin impacted about 3.1% of English
queries, compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%. Since rankings change daily – even
hourly – even with no updates, these numbers are nearly impossible to
confirm, but it does appear that the impact of Penguin was immediate and
substantial. This is an internal SEOmoz graph of Top 10 ranking changes
around April 24th (please note that the Y-axis is scaled to accentuate
changes):
Pardon the slightly cryptic nature of this graph – it’s for an upcoming
project – but the core point is that the impact of Penguin dwarfed
either Panda 3.5 or Google’s 4/16 glitch.
Is It Going Away?
In a word: no. Penguin wasn’t accidental, and Google is clearly serious
about combatting spam tactics that have been lingering for too long. As
you can see from the graph, it doesn’t appear that there were any major
reversals in the few days since Penguin rolled out. Does that mean
Google won’t make ANY adjustments? Of course not – it’s entirely likely
that they’ll continue to tweak Penguin.
For comparison’s sake, remember that Panda 3.5 came
14 months
after the initial launch of Panda 1.0. We’ve come a long way since the
monthly “Google Dances” of 2003. Keep in mind, though, that Panda was
somewhat unique – we believe that it feeds multiple variables into a
single ranking factor that gets updated outside of the real-time index.
There’s currently no compelling evidence to suggest that Penguin works
in the same way. The Penguin update appears to be integrated directly
into the main algorithm, like a more traditional Google update.
2. What to Do
Given the overlapping timelines, this advice applies to
any
Google update, and not just Penguin. The algorithm is changing
constantly (Google reported 516 changes in 2010, and that rate seems to
be accelerating), and I want to give you the tools to survive not just
Penguin, but Zebra, Skunk, Orca, and any other black-and-white animals
Google can ruin…
DO Take a Deep Breath
I’m not trying to be condescending or to minimize any losses you may
have suffered. Over 17 years of working with clients, I’ve learned that
panic almost never makes things better. No matter how hard Penguin hit
you, you need to stop, take a breath, and assess the damage. Dig into
your analytics and find out exactly where you sustained losses. Segment
your data (by channel, engine, keyword, and page) as much as possible.
It’s not enough to know that you lost traffic – you need to be an expert
on
exactly which traffic you lost.
DO Check the Timeline
Even though the overlapping timelines make analyzing the core Penguin
factors difficult, the actual timeline when Penguin rolled out is clear.
If you saw major traffic losses between Tuesday, April 24th and
Wednesday, April 25th, odds are good that Penguin is at least part of
the problem.
DO Double-check IT Issues
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been involved in a Q&A or consulting situation where a website owner was
100% sure they had been hit by an algorithm update, only to have their 17th message to me go something like this:
Oh, by the way, our site was down for 3 days a couple of weeks ago,
right before our rankings dropped. I’m sure this wasn’t the problem,
but I just thought I’d let you know.
Um, erp, what?! I’ve died a little inside so many times from messages
like this that I’m not sure that I’m technically still human. Especially
if your losses weren’t sudden or don’t match the algorithm timeline
precisely, make absolutely sure that nothing happened to your site or
changed that could impact Google’s crawlers. One of the worst things you
can do in SEO is to spend a small fortune solving the wrong problem.
DO Quickly Audit Your SEO
Likewise, make sure that you know exactly what SEO efforts are
underway, not just within your own team but across any 3rd-party
contractors. I’ve had clients swear up and down that everything they did
was completely white-hat only to find out weeks later that they hired
an outside link-building firm and let them loose with no accountability.
Make absolutely sure you know what every agent under your control did
in the weeks leading up to the algorithm update.
3. What Not to Do
Panic leads to drastic action, and while I don’t think you should sit
on your hands, bad choices made under uninformed hysteria can make a bad
situation much, much worse. I’m not speaking hypothetically – I’ve seen
businesses destroyed by overreacting to an algorithm change. Here are a
few words of advice, once you’ve taken that deep breath (don’t forget
to start breathing again)…
DON’T Take a Hatchet to Your Links
It’s unclear how Penguin may have penalized links, or if recent reports
of link-related issues are tied to other April changes, but regardless
of the cause, the worst thing you can do is to start simply hacking at
your back-links. Even low-quality back-links can, in theory, help you,
and if you start cutting links that aren’t causing you problems, you
could see your rankings drop even farther.
I highly recommend this recent
interview with Jim Boykin,
because Jim has freely admitted to dabbling in the gray arts and he
knows what he’s talking about when it comes to risky link-building.
Tackling your problem links is incredibly tough, but start with the
worst culprits:
-
Known, obvious paid links
-
Links in networks Google has recently delisted
-
Footer links with exact-match anchor text
-
Other site-wide links with exact-match anchors
Whenever possible, deal with low-authority links first. If a link is
passing very little authority AND it’s suspicious, it’s a no-brainer.
Cutting links is tough (see my tips on
removing bad links) – if you don’t have control over a link, you may have to let it go and focus on positive link-building going forward.
DON’T “De-optimize” Without a Plan
One complaint I hear a lot in Q&A is that the “wrong” page is
ranking for a term. So, to get the “right” page to rank, the
well-meaning SEO starts de-optimizing the page that’s currently ranking.
This usually means turning a decent TITLE tag into a mess and cutting
out keywords to leave behind Swiss-cheese copy. Sometimes, the “right”
page starts ranking again. Other times, they lose both pages and their
traffic.
“Over-optimize” is a terrible phrase, and that alone has people in a
panic. There’s nothing “optimal” about jamming a keyword 87 times into
500 words of copy and linking it to the same affiliate site.
“Over-gaming” would be a better word. You think you figured out the
rules of the game, so you pounded on them until there was nothing but a
pile of dust on the board.
If you think you’ve played the game too aggressively, step back and
look at the big picture. Does your content serve a purpose? Does your
anchor text match the intent of the target? Do your pages exist because
they need to or only to target one more long-tail variations of a term?
Don’t de-optimize your on-page SEO –
re-optimize it into something better.
DON’T Submit a Reconsideration Request
While I don’t think reconsideration will doom you, Penguin is an
algorithmic change, not a manual penalty, and reconsideration is not an
appropriate avenue. If you think you were impacted by the recent
crackdown on link networks,
IF you have removed those links, and
IF
you aren’t engaged in other suspicious link-building, you might
consider requesting reconsideration. Just make sure your house is in
order first.
Google has created a form for sites
unfairly hit by Penguin,
but it’s unclear at this point whether that form will result in manual
action, or if Google is just collecting broad quality data. If you
sincerely believe that you’re an accidental victim, then feel free to
fill the form out, but don’t base your entire recovery strategy on
clicking [Submit].
Fix What You Can Fix
Recently, I had a long debate with a client about whether or not they
had been hit by a specific algorithm update. In the end, it was a
pointless debate (for both of us), because we had two clear facts: (1)
organic traffic had fallen precipitously, and (2) there were clear,
solvable problems with the site. From a diagnostic standpoint, it
definitely helps to know whether you were hit by Penguin or another
update, but after that, you have to fix what's in your power to fix.
Don't spend weeks trying to prove to management that this was all
Google's fault. Isolate the damage, find the problems you can fix, and
get to work fixing them.
Written By: Dr. Pete Source: SEOmoz.org
