EXTERNAL FACTORS TRIGGERING PENGUIN

EXTERNAL FACTORS TRIGGERING PENGUIN

Anchor Text Should Have Disproportional Numbers of the Same Anchor Text

I’ve talked about this in the past, but I think it holds true, probably even more so NOW with the new penguin scheme in place. When you build links, you need to imitate the natural link process. And natural links don’t consist of your money keyword as 40%-100% of your backlink anchor text links. Seriously, think about this. If most of your links contain the exact same or semantically close keywords, it’s likely the links are artificial.

I would recommend trying to keep your “money” keywords between 10%-30%. I know most people ignored this in the past because, frankly, it simply worked having your money keywords as the anchor  text in most of the links you acquired.

I suspect you can get away with a higher number of exact keyword anchors in your anchor text IF you have the exact match domain for that keyword. This would make sense since the “name” of your site would more often be referenced exactly natural links to your site.

Too Many Links to Either Just Pages or Domain

Most “viral” links go to a specific page, NOT the domain usually. I’d recommend having most links as deep links (direct links to pages) rather than the homepage.

Links NOT from Relevant/Related Sites

Quite a few people made a habit of spamming links. Most such links ended up on blogs that are not in the same niche / completely unrelated. I would speculate that a certainly number of links from unrelated sites (sites not in your niche) don’t hurt at all (probably helps), but too much may impose a penalty. Unless your site/page goes viral, most natural links you get won’t be from unrelated sites to yours — they will be somewhat related in semantic content.

This also means that links from so called “bad neighborhoods” can actually hurt websites. Read into this, but it’s from this that the whole “Negative SEO” talk has exploded on the web. I’ve seen enough experiments done online to KNOW that negative SEO works. It worked before the penguin update, but I suspect it’s even more devastating now. Sites that are most vulnerable are new sites / medium sites that don’t have a strong link profile to balance any “bad links” out.

#3 makes gaming the SERPS much harder now. If you need to keep links from related sites (especially sites in your niche), that means you are going to have to work your ass off to get those links by:

• Marketing (Linkbait, Social Media, Creating Compelling Content then promoting it, etc)
• Networking
• Paying for Links

Spammy Backlink Profile of Sites Linking To You

This has always been important, but I think google really looked deep into the profile of every link pointing to your site. That means links from strong authority sites (especially sites in your niche) count even more than they did before. Links from shoddy sites (especially sites not related to your site) may not do anything for you, very little, or in quantity actually hurt your site.