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.

Thoughts on Beating the Penguin Update

Thoughts on Beating the Penguin Update

And The Game has Changed (Again). Panda then Penguin. Seems like SEO’s/Internet Marketers can’t get no love.

I won’t rehash all that’s been said about the April 24 Penguin update — there’s PLENTY of hubbub online about it. Chances are, if you’ve SEO’ed your site in any significant way the past 10 years, you’re sites will have been smoked. Some less than others, some more than others. Plenty of innocent casualties thrown into the mix as well.

If you’re hoping that Google is going to reverse the update or change anything they’ve done, keep dreaming. They won’t. The update is here to stay, the game has changed again. Hoards of people are bitching about the update, saying the search engine is even worse than it was before the update, that Google is now a giant turd. I hate to break it to you folks, but outside the SEO/IM world, no one gives a damn about this update. Your mom, boss, and ex are still using Google search just like they did before and likely don’t notice a single change. They are not going to sign some dumb petition to get Google to revoke some 50 million dollar update on the bases of a few thousand signatures from webmasters who gamed the system with spam. Sorry, ain’t going to happen. Penguin is not going to fly away anytime soon.

The trick now is to game the search engines without actually looking like you are gaming them. Kind of funny really, one could almost call that marketing instead of SEO.

There are all sorts of theories about where to go and what to do post Penguin. Here’s my take on how the new Penguin algorithm works, based on what I’ve seen happen to some of my own sites. I had sites completely untouched and sites that were partially hit, and other sites that were completely smoked from the SERPs.

In general, it’s the sites that had NO SEO done, very light SEO, or careful “natural” link building type SEO that remained untouched by the update. Sites that I went too heavy with on the link networks / spam links, or aggressive link building usually suffered. Not all, but most such sites.

Frankly, I think the Penguin update did a very good job at weeding out many of the shitty, over-SEO’ed sites that shouldn’t have been ranking in the first place (or ranking because some SEO is paying Indians to slam non-stop spam links at the site for a year). However, the winning sites that replaced the victims of this update more often than not seem to be old articles from authority brand type sites or abandoned niche sites that have not had any SEO done on them in 10 years because the author practically gave up on the site.

The truth is that SEO’s/Marketers often put a lot of effort into a site’s content while doing serious SEO to compete.  Which means that more often than not, the sites ranked because of “dirty SEO” were actually pretty decent and certainly better than the abandoned crap that’s replaced them. SEO has kind of been like the website version of steroids: you have to do it because every one of your competitors do it.

Anyways, here are my thoughts on how the update works. I can’t be sure of course!

General

From what I’ve seen with my own sites, the update looked at both external factors and on-page factors. For the external factors, I believe google took a look at the overall quantity of anchor text used for a site’s total links (i.e. the same anchor text over and over) and also deeply evaluated the QUALITY of the link (i.e. where the link came from — good neighborhoods or bad, related sites or unrelated). I suspect google probably profiled other sites in the niche and some sort of bell curve for the expected link profiles for each NICHE. Your site’s one-page and off-page profile went into some sort of quality score which was evaluated against the niche’s bell curve and if you fell outside of a certain range, you get smoked.

Ono how the Penguin treats “bad” links to your site: Google may have simply devalued the (bad/suspicious) links pointing to your site or actually imposed a penalty. It’s either one or the other rather (though it could be some complicated combination of the two). My guess is that it’s probably some combination — bad links are devalued but if a site is way out of the normal range of what a proper link profile should be, a penalty is imposed in addition to the devaluatino (this would explain why some sites didn’t just lose SOME ranking as would happen if links were devalued, but actually were completely tossed out of the SERP’s).

Option 1: Link Devaluation

If it’s devaluation, then you may be able to scoop an increase in ranking by simply figuring out this new algo scheme and getting future links that don’t set any flags off.

Option 2: Link Penalty

If a penalty has been imposed by penguin rather than a link devaluation, you may be looking at a long road to recovery. Mixing in new link signals and modifying any offending on-page content triggers may reduce the penalty and over time a site may recover.  There certainly is probably a time factor involved before any site hit with a penalty can make any sort of recovery (3 months? 6 months? a year?). A penalty scheme gives rise to Negative SEO (more on this later) however, because one can easy simulate “bad/artificial” linkbuilding with run-of-the-mill link automation tools on the competition.

Option 3 (most likely) : Link Penalty and Devaluation

I think this is the most likely scenario and would explain why the whole Negative SEO scare is making big waves. Bad link get devalued but have too many bad links and you get a penalty.

I’ve had sites that have been completely dropped from the SERP’s to the point where they don’t even rank for the exact keyword (and I own the exact keyword .com — i.e. the BRAND of the keyword). If there were no penalty imposed, these sites would lose long tail traffic, but should still rank somewhat high for the domain name itself (but they don’t).

Strategy 4: Get Different Types of Links

Strategy 4: Get Different Types of Links (but mostly links from pages/posts)

You don’t always want links from the same source, unless those sources are self-hosted blogs. If your links are ONLY from comments, directories, web 2.0′s, RSS, or other low quality link fodder, you absolutely want to make sure you are getting OTHER kinds of links, mainly links from real sites. I’ll take a properly anchored link from a self hosted blog / static website any day over a comment link, profile link, RSS links, web directory link. Web 2.0 links (ezine articles, goarticles, and such) are better than the lowest tier links (comment/profile), but not by that much these days (the exception being if the web 2.0 actually has some PR + backlinks to it).

FILED UNDER: BACKLINKS, SEO TAGGED WITH: HOW TO RANK AFTER PENGUIN, LINKBUILDING AFTER PENGUIN, PENGUIN UPDATE, RANKING POST PENGUIN

Strategy 3: GET LINKS SLOWLY

Strategy 3: GET LINKS SLOWLY

Don’t build links to fast. There is nothing more suspicious than a website suddenly getting dozens or hundreds of links over a short period of time and you could trigger a penalty. As a rule of thumb, one or two new links every few days. This depends largely on the number of links you already have. If your site has thousands of links, then a handful of links every day won’t hurt. If you have 20 thousand links, then you could probably get dozens of links every day. If you have no links or a couple hundred or less, only a couple links every few days!

Strategy 2: Create Related MiniSites to Support Main Site

Strategy 2: Create Related MiniSites to Support Main Site

The idea here is not to set up a bunch of general (and shitty) mini sites and hastily link them to the main site. That’s asking for trouble. Minisites are highly focused sites that often can rank faster for a specific topic/keyword because they are so focused. Yes, they’ve been slammed the past few updates, but with proper links and good content (both in quality and number of content), mini sites can still rank well. The key now is to develop quality mini sites solely to SUPPORT your main site/es.

The basics of a mini-site network:

• Mini Sites are semantically related to whatever they are linking to — Having a “payday loan mini site” link to a “dog training” site will not be a topically related site and may trigger flags now. A general “pet mini site” or a cat website or a website about animals linking to a dog training site IS a topically relevant link and wont’ trigger flags. I’m not saying every link from unrelated sites will hurt, but too many of them will. It’s best to try and keep everything related now.
• Links (preferably quality ones!) to every mini site – if you set up a mini site network with a bunch of new domains that have no links at all to them, don’t expect to shoot up through the rankings. True, the links will count and make some difference (especially if the whole network is a year or two + in age), but not anything like if the mini sites have links to them. The better quality links your mini sites have, the better your main site will rank.
• Min Sites don’t link to each other — you may be able to get away with some linkage, but for the most part, try and keep all the mini sites distanced from each other.
• You don’t have mini sites (and the money site/s) on Google Webmaster Tools, SAME google adsense ID, or google analytics — This is a dead sure way to let google know these sites are all a network.
• Different C-Class IP’s, unique RDNS, and unique name servers. Basically, proper SEO hosting — there’s a lot of debate about SEO hosting, but I’d say bite the bullet and get it if you plan to set up a network of mini sites to support your money sites. You should make sure your mini sites are all on seperate C class IP’s, RDNS’s and name servers. This is most easily achieved with SEO hosting, though you could just get a ton of cheap hosting services and spread things around in a pinch.
• Privacy WHOIS Enabled on Every MiniSite

Strategy 1: Vary the hell out of your anchor text links to your sites

Strategy 1: Vary the hell out of your anchor text links to your sites

This should be quite obvious to you by now, but if you are slamming links with the same anchor text over and over to your site, you are going to end up on the wrong site of the penguin updates. SEO’s often are faced with choosing a keyword they want to rank for or a keyword they don’t want to rank for when selecting the anchor text for a link. It goes without saying that most choose the later. You should really now be ensuring MOST of your anchor text is for keywords you are not directly trying to rank for.

I’ve given a basic breakdown. This is not necessary scientific or anything, but rather a safer rule of thumb to follow when building anchor text. The basic idea is to keep your exact keyword anchors (especially the main keywords you want to rank) well under 50% of the anchor links you get. I’d say between 10-20 percent of the links should have your exact anchor text. The other 20-50 percent of the time, you vary the exact keyword with other words included, as part of a sentance, or just use semantically related keywords instead part of the time). The other 30% – 40% of the links should straight out just be your domain name exactly with or without http:// (vary it) or without the domain extension and some spaces between each word. The rest of the time, use CLICK HERE, HERE, WEBSITE or some bunk word you absolutely don’t want to rank for.

The whole goal here is to simulate natural link anchor text patters. MOST real natural links won’t have your exact anchor text. This is where having an exact keyword domain comes in really handy for natural link building — many of the links (which are usually your domain name or some variation of the keyword in the domain) will contain the exact anchors you want to rank for. More general sites that don’t have the keyword in the domain will find it much harder to rank for that term.

THE 60%

(40%)

yourdomainname.com

yourdomainname

your domain name

http://yourdomainname.com

(30%)

CLICK HERE

HERE

website

THE 40%

(50%)

(Title of Website)

(related keywords to the main keyword, i.e. “pet clothing” instead of “dog clothing” or “short term loans” instead of “payday loans”)

(50%)

(main keyword you want to rank for)

(main keyword + extra stuff/sentence)

(h2 title of a page on your site)

4 Surefire Linkbuilding Strategies for Ranking After Penguin

4 Surefire Linkbuilding Strategies for Ranking After Penguin

Quick article today. SEO is not dead, nor is link building. But you’ve got to be very careful with it. Of course, I advocate trying your best to build a website that can attract natural links. And if it’s such a niche where this is very hard to do, network with other people in the niche and build relationships which can translate into natural links over time. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely throw away manual link building; but if you choose to “linkbuild” you need to be careful about how you do it. Since I know that 99% of you won’t just sit back and wait for links to come to you, it’s important to link build the RIGHT way.

These strategies are strategies many of us have been talking about for years; the difference now is that NOT doing them can get your site penalized far easier now than in the past.