Google penguin SEO

With the recent Google updates many people have started receiving the dreaded message in their google webmaster tools accounts about “unnatural links”. Once you get this message there are several things you can do.

Panic and remove all the links you have paid for. Doing this is the worst thing you can do. You might as well hold a sign above saying “guilty” and unless you are sure you are removing the right links you may end up doing more harm than good. Not to mention the fact  you are in a lose-lose position with  the search engines doing this. Regardless of what anyone says if you start removing backlinks by the bucket load you site is going sink anyway.

Put in a reconsideration request with google. This may deliver results that are worse than the first  step in a request. You may get a manual review of the site and if you have been using links google do not like you could end up with a manual penalty. If this happens you are toast.

The last thing you can do is to examine your linkbuilding carefully and offset any damage that has been done. This may take a while. The fact is though that the drops people are seeing are algorithmically determined and you can recover from them.

What can you do?

The first thing you should do and what we do with customers is to examine their backlinking stratetgy. Since the penguin update it is really easy to see why sites have been hit. Look at your anchor text. If  half your backlinks are using using your money keyword in the anchor text you are going to get penalized.

Below is an example from one customers site. The keywords have been encrypted? but it’s a site that had plenty of content and were keeping panda happy.. Then the penguin came along..

The figures on the right are the percentage of backlinks  for each keyword or anchor text.  As you can see from the first link, 95% of the backlinks were pointing at one keyword which was their money keyword. Once this happens the result is below.

You should aim is to keep all your anchor text down to the same level. If you have been hit by this over optimization penalty stop using the keyword(s) in the anchor text until you can reduce the level. The best way to do this is by targeting LSI keywords and related keywords. Do not target your money keywords directly and throw in random keywords as well to keep it natural.

Diverse link building should be what you are looking at. If you are getting all your backlinks from blog comments of forum profiles you are heading for trouble. Diversify your backlinks before google penguin gets you. If this has already happened to you contact us for a google penguin recovery strategy.

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