Avoid the Google Penguin Slap
The Google Penguin was created to clean up the Internet website database for Google. Simply put, Google wanted to get rid of the junk by assessing the quality of the backlinks for websites. Google now looks at many factors to determine the quality of a website’s backlinks. One being the anchor text variations, as it gives them an indication of its authenticity of being a natural link.
ANCHOR TEXT
Anchor text are the words that make up the clickable link on a page. Google has said in so many words that too much of the anchor text found in links looks suspicious. Google slapped those sites and now triggers a penalty on any sites they find with unnatural backlinks. Many of us saw the warning with Google’s Panda update. Those that did ensure their links had a large amount of variety in their anchor text terms did okay. Sites with good anchor text variety were not effected much by the Penguin.
Well What Makes a Back Link Look Suspicious?
- Too much of the identical anchor text in your mix of links
- Too many links as blog comments
- Too many links in the forum profiles
- Too many links going direct to the home target page for the niche
- Not enough links from other niche websites to the site
- Not enough contextual links
- Too many links from low quality sites
TOO MUCH OF THE IDENTICAL ANCHOR TEXT
You must have variety in your anchor text for your backlinks. I monitor my anchor text usage and use the same anchor text only about once out of six times. Make sure some of your backlinks are just the URL itself. I noticed that some keywords are spelled wrong a lot so I have used the misspelled words as anchor text. You might want to check out my recent post of keywords in regards to this.
BLOG COMMENTS AND FORUM PROFILES
These kind of links are popular because they are easy to get and are considered low quality by Google. I use very few of these kind of links for my sites anymore. Not saying I don’t use them at all, just not very often. Use to give a more natural variety to the links.
Not Enough Related Niche Links
Getting links from sites in the same niche or a very similar one is important. If your site does not have any links coming from other domains in the same niche, then this can look pretty suspicious to the Google Penguin. Some of the easiest ways to get links from related sites are: using good blog networks, guest blogging, forum commenting, contacting webmasters for link exchange.
CONTEXTUAL LINKS
An contextual link is found in the actual context of the web page, not in a side bar or footer area. I try and develop as many of these contextual links as I can. Google knows these links are harder to get. But on the other hand they also know that the main way marketers get them is by using blog networks. That is why Google is trying to destroy blog networks.
TOO MANY LINKS ON LOW QUALITY SITES
If most of your links are from sites that are low quality then it doesn’t help your back linking program. You need to work harder to get good quality links, like from guest blog posts, or emailing webmasters and offering to do a link link exchange.
If most of your backlinks are on websites that visitors leave quickly, you are dealing with a more risky Google territory. A smaller percentage can be from these style of sites but not all.
NO SOCIAL LINKS
If your site has no links from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus, it looks strange to Google. You need to make sure all your sites get social links. In a perfect world you would build the kind of site that get social links naturally. If you are in a niche that normally gets social links and you are not getting any, then you’re into the risky Google area again. You should re-evaluating your websites content to see if the quality and relevancy is right.
Backlink Layers In-directly
You need to build your backlink profile in layers. What this means is that all your links can not go directly to the page you want to rank well. Link in-directly by linking to another page that is linked to the page you want to rank. Sometimes I go down a few layers and link to all the pages above it that will eventually link to my ranking page.
The links I use on my first layer pages (not homepage) are ones that are consider higher quality. The lesser quality links I use on the second layer. This second layer gives power to first layer and the power of the first layer links gives power to the homepage which is more effective.
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Natural link building, natural link building, natural link building……okay do you get what I am trying to say.
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About the Author
Hello, my name is John Arend and owner of Google Keyword Success Steps. Good luck with your back linking and I hope this article helped. If you want to rank high then you need to build back links everyday.
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