In the wake of a fourth Penguin chapter, utilizing new “Penguin 2.0” technology, around 2.3% of all English search queries will have been affected. The Penguin update is planned to combat manipulative (spammy) link building practices, and punish those who’ve indulged in the darker side of link building by throwing them losing the rankings. This includes by automated link building services and submission software.
Hopefully, this article will give you an overview of how to tell if you’re affected by Penguin and what to do about it!
Hopefully, this article will give you an overview of how to tell if you’re affected by Penguin and what to do about it!
Have you been hit by Penguin?
If you know you’ve been using dodgy link building tactics, or believe that you might be a aim for Penguin, then your first port of call is to check your analytics for a rapid drop in traffic. If you can clearly see a drop, then you’ve probably been hit.
If you check rankings, check these carefully, and be sure to turn off any location settings and personalization by adding “&pws=0” to the end of the query string in the address bar, to get as true a result as possible.
Look to see if you’ve dropped off for any exact keywords. Penguin operates at page level, so checking your home page might not be enough. You can verify your analytics and webmaster tools accounts to see if you’ve lost any traffic or imitation for certain keywords.
If you think you’ve been beat, then run a full Majestic SEO report and take a look through your backlinks.
What types of links caused the punishment?
If you’ve been beat for a specific keyword, then check all the links that used that fix text. You’re specifically looking for:
Paid directories & “search engines”
Social Bookmarking
Thin Content / Article Syndication
Paid links
Site-wide links
Hidden links
Anything that violates Google Search Quality Guidelines
I’ll go into detail on the three most common of these link types, so you can recognize them yourself and take suitable action.
Paid Directories – what’s the problem?
A lot of directories will have several options for addition. These are usually a “featured” and “regular” listing or “express” and “3 month” review time. The problem is that if you buy a link, then that link must be marked with the “nofollow” attribute, to prevent that link from passing any SEO profit. Most of these types of directories do not use this quality when they sell links. In fact, they rarely differentiate between a paid listing and a free listing at all.
If you’re linked to from these kinds of directories, then make a note of them and be ready to undertake a link removal movement. It’s easier said than done. Many webmasters of these directories will attempt to blackmail you into paying through the nose to take your link down
Social Bookmarking – asking for danger!
Social Bookmarking was all the rage once. You could buy 1,000 social bookmarks with one or two different secure texts and you could achieve a slight boost in SERP’s for those terms. The whole principle was riddled with danger from the word get go. Since the links carried so little weight, you would had to obtain in thousands to get any real movement. Even then, you risked over optimising
Identifying these types of links is easy. They all follow a typical format like the one below. The linking URL and domain name are a giveaway.
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