Penguins are adorable animals, but the Google Penguin is far from adorable considering that it has been responsible for large-scale panic on the SEO arena since its launch in April 2012. The message that Penguin sent is strong, laying emphasis on SEO basics in order to survive future updates. Take it as Google’s early sign of the importance of content relevance, regardless of whether you are into white hat practices or black hat tricks. Therefore, as you consider whichever strategies are trending, look through this lens.
Understand one thing- Google doesn’t really give a hoot about what practices used to work in the past. The reality is that providing relevance has become top priority for the search giant, and you must race fast to keep up. This means that in the aftermath of the Penguin update, you have to recreate your link profile.
It is essential that you gain an understanding of your link profile and avoid using low-quality links that are combined with anchor texts to try and enhance their value in order to improve your ranking. Penguin certainly comes with intolerance for such manipulative link-building strategies, and it is just safer to keep away from them. Consider the following metrics:
- The distribution of anchor texts.
- The distribution of the type of link you use (such as comments on blogs, article repositories and directories).
- Distribution of page authority and domain authority.
You must then learn the sources of good links. Great sources include reputable pages, on which multiple sites link to. To build a high-value link, you need to build it on a page that has high-quality content that is sure to be of great value to the web user. Your link should also not be replicated again and again on that linking site. You may also not know this, but high value links are a domain’s link authority’s main drivers. With such knowledge, you can acquire links that will add your SEO value and improve your ranking even though you cannot control the operations of the major search engines.
You then have to define a crawl path and put the webpages that you consider most important high on the path so that they can receive maximum link authority. You must also take another look at your website’s structure, and understand each page type in order to determine those of low value. They have thin or duplicated content, and you need to ‘un-index’ them. When you have no knowledge of your website’s structure, it is impossible to figure out what’s wrong. Whatever changes you implement, it is always a wise idea to maintain your URL.
Bear in mind, though, that even as you set up your content and index it, you have to closely monitor the site in order to ensure all your SEO strategies are working. There are great tools for SEO monitoring, such as Google Analytics Debugger and robots.txt or Meta tags. Finally, implement inbound marketing in order to maximize your organic traffic. Move to action and do not allow yourself to be caught in a panic in future.
