It’s been about six weeks since Google unrolled their Penguin SEO update, which targeted webspam tactics like keyword stuffing, linking from unrelated or low-quality sites, exact match anchor text and more. One of the most interesting things I’ve seen since the Penguin update rolled out is that a lot of the sites impacted didn’t even realize they were doing anything wrong; or at least they didn’t think it was all that bad. Unfortunately, ignorance in no excuse in SEO. If your site was impacted by Penguin and you are still trying to recover, here are four things to look at:
1. Stop all link exchanges right now (be honest!)
A lot of website owners try to hide their link exchanges under a “Resources” or “Useful links” section, thinking that Google won’t notice. If anyone notices anything online, it’s Google. Only the search giant has the ability to crawl every single link online meaning they know exactly where those “resource links” are pointing towards. Google flat out bans link exchanges in their Webmaster Guidelines (making it bad from an SEO perspective), but also think about it from the point of view of your audience---would they find your “useful” links that useful? Why would a traffic attorney in Texas link to a pool cleaning company in Northern California? How does that help your visitors? There is nothing wrong with linking out from your site to other companies you have legitimate business partnerships with (think a B&B website that links to a local tour company), but be honest with yourself about any outbound links on your site. Who are they really helping? If it isn’t your visitors chances are they’re hurting your website thanks to Penguin.
2. Work to remove low-quality links while slowly building up new ones.
When trying to remove low-quality and unrelated links from your link portfolio (something most of the sites that I’ve seen were impacted by Penguin had) it’s important that you don’t just dump your link portfolio overnight. You want to replace those low-quality links with good inbound links that are actually valuable, but it needs to happen slowly. The search engines like to see a slow and diversified approach to link building so replacing 100 “bad” links with 200 new ones overnight still looks a little fishy to the search engines. Link building isn’t easy or quick—just accept that fact now and keep moving forward!
3. Throw your old anchor text list out.
Another big red flag for the Penguin update was sites that were investing too heavily in exact match or keyword heavy anchor text. Obviously you want to rank well for your priority keywords and anchor text is one component to making that happen, but it needs to happen naturally. The search engines know that if 200 of your links use the same anchor text to point towards your site than chances are you didn’t earn them naturally. A blogger wouldn’t know what your top keyword is, so chances are they would link to your site with “Click Here” or your company brand name. Take your old anchor text list and expand it 10 fold—come up with 30 or 40 variations of your brand name, company name, top keywords, long tail variations and more that you can use from here on out with your link building and content marketing. Don’t be afraid to link to deep, internal pages of your website, your social profiles, company blog and so forth either.
4. Invest in other sources of traffic.
This might sound strange coming from an SEO professional, but you need to manage your online marketing like Google didn’t exist. Obviously it does and you have to play by their rules if you want to do well in the Google SERPs, but what if there was no Google? How else could people find your website? These other sources of traffic are critical to helping recover from and protect against future Penguin updates. You don’t want to leave your site at the mercy of the search engines. Google cares about providing the best possible results for their users. If that means your site that’s great for both of you; it if means your competition than only you lose.
If you don’t know where to begin diagnosing where your site went afoul of Penguin, consider hiring a white hat SEO firm to do a complete SEO audit on your site. Even if you can’t afford to have them execute the Penguin recovery steps, you’ll at least know what you need to do to help your website rebound and survive any future Penguin updates.