Penguin 4.0 : How to Plan Off Page SEO Strategies for this SEO Update?

Google finally released the much awaited Penguin 4 Update on September 23, 2016. Let’s see important facts about it and impact it has on the off page SEO strategies.

 What is Penguin Update 4?

Penguin is now a part of Google’s core algorithm. It is penalizing websites that use various black-hat link techniques to manipulate search engine rankings.

Important Facts related to Penguin Update 4

i.Penguin data is now refreshed in real time, so any changes now will be made as soon as the web page is recrawled and reindexed if it's affected.

ii.Penguin is now more granular and devalues only the offending pages, rather than affecting the whole site.

How to identify that your site is affected by Penguin 4 update?

i.The site shows irregular falling or raising of Google rankings.

ii.Organic traffic to the website is decreasing.

Pros of the Penguin Update 4

  1. When the webmaster optimizes or updates the website, search engines will now make the changes more quickly to see if it is affected by penguin 4.

  2. If you are penalized by this update, so try to recover from this update using disavow tool. You can see the ranking changes immediately once the disavow is done .

  3. It will penalize the competitors those who practiced black hat techniques to rank in the search engines. So, if you are doing it authoritatively than you may see positive impacts on your rankings.

Cons of the Penguin Update 4.

  1. You need to optimize your website properly, due to this update Google will find the errors at a faster rate that will alter your ranking.

  2. You need to do regularly analyze your Backlinks and disavow them if it's affected.

How to Plan Off Page SEO Strategies for this SEO Update?

Follow the below-mentioned points to avoid the link penalization by Google

  1. Do link building for your inner web pages and target them more and more in your link building methods.

  2. Try to do link building activity based on local SEO.

  3. Don’t buy any back links or avoid link exchange.

  4. Focus on creating a quality backlinks instead of quantity.

  5. Don’t over-optimize your content and avoid spamming the content with keywords.

  6. Follow white hat SEO techniques only.

  7. Content is king so try to build unique and great content in all the off page SEO strategies.

  8. Monitor the backlinks you have and do backlink audit on a frequent basis to remove the affected links. Check the spam score of links before submitting it for removal.

  9. Do link submissions on Low Alexa rank sites only and build the links on authoritative sites with high Page Authority and Domain Authority.

  10. Monitor your positions in SERPs on the constant basis.

  11. Avoid over-optimized anchors and focus on building brand variation instead.

  12. Don’t do too many keyword rich anchors especially if anchors are not making readable sense then don’t use it.

  13. Avoid linking to the same target URL’s again and again, instead link to other content pages like blogs or infographics.

  14. Avoid many links like to low quality web 2.0’s directories and networks.

  15. Do variations in your link type and get citations, infographics credits etc.

  16. Last but not the least setup properties in Google Search Console for each important domain, sub-domain and update a disavow file as needed. This should be done regularly to stay competitive in the online industry.

How to Disavow bad links?

Page Rank is based on the incoming links coming from other sites according to Google. Page Rank is an important factor while doing the link building or planning off page SEO strategies. In general, a link from a site is treated as a vote for the measurement of quality of your site.

Google works very hard to make sure that links from third-party sites do not affect negatively a website. You should remove all the low-quality links to your site that are spammy. According to Penguin part of Google’s core algorithm, it will penalize your web page having bad or low-quality links so its removal is very important. So, to do this use Disavow tool.

Disavow tools is an advanced feature and use it cautiously. If this is used incorrectly, it  can harm your site’s performance in Google’s search result pages. It is  recommended that you disavow backlinks only if its spammy, or low-quality links pointing to your site. And if you are confident that the links are causing bad effects to you site.

Disavowing is a two-step process. First, you’ll need to download a list of links to your site that needs to be removed. Next, you’ll create a file that contains all the spammy or low-quality links.

i.Go to this URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main.

ii.Select your website on which you want to disavow files

iii.Click the Disavow links tab

iv.Choose the file having all the links to be removed with .txt extension.

I hope following these off page SEO strategies will avoid penalizing your web pages for link building or prevent it if it is affected by Google Penguin 4.