While as of the date of this article the dust has not settled, Everything indicates that the “Penguin update” is here to make it more difficult to use the current link building techniques. Why the change now? Simply because those techniques WERE effective. While Google is still implementing the algorithm changes, I can assure you that correcting your link building profile and inventory is a good place to start and will address 70%-80% of the penalty. Here are some steps to take to ensure that you are on Google right side.
- Even if you don’t think you have been penalized, you should take these steps to make sure you link profile is compliant.
- Make sure that you keep your exact match anchors lower than 15% of your link inventory.
- Correct your link velocity so it is steady or increasing month after month.
- Include some no-follows in your link arsenal.
- Remove all instances of reciprocal links and try to remove junk links from your profile.
- Correct your internal linking so it looks as natural to visitors as possible and use longer tail keywords phrases.
- Kill excessive pages that add no value to the site.
- Increase naked URLs to decrease and dilute the ratio of exact match anchors.
- Seek links from few high authority sites by sending out few press releases and promote them online.
The idea is to dilute the high optimization ratios or even delete some of that content. Also if your business depends heavily on web traffic always try to create complimentary quality sites to generate additional traffic and implement different strategies to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.