Google Penguin is the latest update from Google that may have impacted your SEO ranking.
There are three key areas that Penguin targeted.
- Websites that consistently use the same anchor text in their links
- Websites that have a lot of links back from low quality sites
- Websites that have a lot of links back from the same sites.
There is a famous case where WordPressMU were giving away free templates with their website linked back in the footer. Google saw this as a major case of spamming, and in the most recent update, slammed the main WordPressMU site.
The lesson here is, even the best sites are getting hit, and you have to look at what your link profile is to see what Google is targeting. Here are a few quick ways that you can give your website the best chance of recovering from Google penguin;
- If you are exchanging links, try mix up the anchor text
- Find out if you have purchased, or been given, any site wide “blog roll” or footer type links, and see if you can change the anchor text.
- If you are blogging on wordpress and have a seperate site, just have a look that you are not spamming those links back.
- Focus your efforts on gaining links from good quality sites. These might include social media, PR release sites, big news sites etc.
- Look at the link profiles on your own sites. If you have footer links that are not really meant for the user, think about changing those to links that might interest the user, like “most commented” pages etc.
- Use tools like OpenSite explorer or Majestic SEO to find out what your link profile looks like. See if there are ways you can de-optimise the most spam-like links.
- Keep working on content that other users will want to link to or share. Right now the most valuable links are from social media and news sites. You only need to create a few good articles each month to super charge you link building abilities.
- Keep working on multimedia content. There are affordable ways to produce video and audio content from your posts. Multimedia content is more easily shared than just static text, and it makes your website look great.