If old MacDonald had a link farm, there’s one animal that would be burning it down… The Penguin. Ever since Google’s latest Penguin 2.0 update this May, people participating in link farming, paid links, or link spamming is being penalized severely by this cute and cuddly bird in a butler’s tuxedo. Years ago, having an abundant amount of backlinks across spanning from the farthest reaches of the web was actually a good thing. However, like everything else in the SEO world, people started to severely abuse link building. Did we actually bring this angry bird upon ourselves?
Google’s chief objective is providing searchers with the most accurate and reputable results as possible and linking is one of the biggest of the two hundred signals that Google uses to determine what websites and webpages should rank higher in organic search results. In the past, the more people linking to you, the more popular and reputable your website and pages seemed to be. Many people still believe this caveman method of link building is still effective – well they’ll find out differently when they’re Penguin Slapped lol
What Is Penguin Looking For
When Penguin looks at your website, this cute, ferocious, flightless bird is looking for obvious paid links within your content – not only your home page like many think. No, this arctic terror is going through your entire website with a fine toothed comb. Other things it’s looking for is pages with slews of links to other websites. So old McDonald, your link farm is going down!
- Link Farming
- Linking networks and schemes
- Links from irrelevant websites
- Link Spamming
- Keyword stuffing in anchor text
- Links from poor quality or shady websites
- Paid Links
How to Please the Penguin
Pleasing this penguin is going to take a little more than some ice and mackerel! But don’t be worried, if you’re sliding fast in ranking or have been obviously penalized by Penguin, there are still a few things you can do to get back on the good side of the birdy.
Manage Your Site Profile
Google Webmaster Tools allows a free and outstanding way to manage your site profile. Make good use of it!
Disavow Bad Links
Disavowing bad links is an absolute must. It may be painful, it may take a while; but it’s necessary.
Anchor Text in Links
If you’re over stuffing keywords in Anchor Text, you’re going down. So clean it up and make it better. If you have great links with bad anchor text, contact the admin of the linking website and ask if they can change it up a bit for you
Build Links Naturally
Don’t run around in one hour and spam the web with thousands of links. Write amazing content and share it through social media and let the links build naturally.
Quality of Links
If all you have is links for poor quality websites, then Google will think you’re website is also of poor quality. So make sure you’re paying attention to link quality. One good quality link from a great reputable source is worth more than one hundred random links from poor quality websites.
If you’ve been Penguin Slapped and don’t know what to do or where to begin, then it’s a good idea to check out our SEO Services. We do Penguin clean up.
How to Help the Penguin
If you’re searching around Google and see a site that should be clearly Penguin slapped, you can always hit up the Penguin Report Form. It’s always good to contribute to keeping search clean so the better, more reputable sites have room to shine and not the just the sites that over optimized and “gaming” the search results.
