Google warned of the coming of the Penguin sequel but the time between the warning and the the attack (update 2.0) was not long enough for some to ready the SEO troops. As discussed in our previous article on the Penguin 2.0 Website Algorithmic Update, this was an update affecting the deeper pages on a site, and shady link building in particular. So, since the Penguin update is all about links, you probably have a huge assembly of inbound and outbound links on your home page, as well as inner pages, to audit.
If you were affected by Penguin 2.0, it probably means you need to reevaluate your strategy. In general, you must make sure that you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines to the T. Specifically, here is a list of five significant remedial strategies that can be applied to your link building, content strategy and social media marketing tactics in order to recoup any traffic losses from Penguin 2.0 or to become more immune to any upcoming Penguin or other algorithmic updates bound to be released by Google in the future.
1. Link Audit:
A link audit is simple and does not require hiring an SEO company. All you have to do is dig into your Google Webmaster Tools to check who is linking to you. Check whether these links are of the following types:
- Paid links (affiliate sites, for instance).
- Irrelevant links (content is not remotely related to your niche).
- Links to advertorials.
- Links from pages that have no content or spammy content.
- Broken links.
- Links from de-indexed pages.
- Mass links from low-quality directories.
- Links from microsites that have been created solely for link building (for instance, a Blogger page created by your SEO agent filled with low-quality content and linked to your site).
- Any link that looks suspicious.
- Reciprocal links (for instance, links from plugins where it says ‘Powered by’ or has site-wide footer links) NOTE: These links may have to be checked manually on each of the pages.
Inbound Link Sources Listed in Google Webmaster Tools
Download all the links on an excel sheet and archive them. Manually checking through them is the best way to pick out any suspicious or low-quality links. Contact the concerned webmasters to remove the link and also submit a disavow request for links that you do not want your site to be associated with. For deeper analysis, you can also use paid tools such as Majestic SEO.
2. Paid Links:
Although a subset of the link audit section, this particular link type deserves an individual mention because Matt Cutts specifically mentioned these links that give ‘floating PageRank’ to sites. What does floating PageRank mean? It means that if you have linked to another site and that site pays for it, you are sharing a part of your PageRank with them via your outbound link. This is not only going to affect that site but it will also affect your site unless you nofollow the link and declare to users in a disclaimer statement following the link that you are being paid for the link or that it is an affiliate link. You will need a link audit to discover any such links on your site.
Matt Cutts’ Comment on Paid Links
3. Anchor Text:
It is found that post-Penguin 2.0 there has been a reduction in the number of pages that appear from a particular domain for a branded keyword. For instance, if you type in a random keyword such as Zappos Couture, normally we would expect that all of the search results in the first as well as first few consecutive pages would belong to the domain/brand name Zappos. This is no longer the case. The search results show a variety of other sites on page two, thus reducing the clustering of root domains. This gives more room for smaller enterprises to rank for branded terms, for instance, if you are an e-commerce retailer and you sell a certain brand, there are higher chances for your site to be shown in search along with the actual brand’s site.
This emphasizes an important thing that Penguin 1.0 also stressed; anchor text diversity. You must not use anchor text of the same type (for instance, branded keywords) for more than 50 percent of your total anchor texts. Optimize your site for a variety of good keywords rather than only sticking to one particular type of keyword.
Page Two Google Search Results for the Keyword Zappos Couture
4. Content Marketing
Time and again Google has asked us to create quality content. Now Google asks us to create the kind of content that people will bookmark. It is the same thing re-iterated a different way. Shown below is an excerpt from the Matt Cutts blog citing his statement on Google’s quality content expectation.
Google Asks for Content that Attracts Bookmarking
So what kind of content will get users to bookmark your site?
- Videos are a great source of visual information. Quality videos with a lot of unique information can gain a lot of attention. Note: You must know about video SEO before you start investing time and money in creating videos.
- Articles are a great content resource but you must also know how to market them in order to increase their exposure among online readers. Read more about blogging for SEO.
- Images are another great source of content that grabs user attention well enough to gain bookmarks for your site. At webimx we receive a good amount of traffic to our blog from image search. Make sure the images are optimized for search engines.
Other useful and share-worthy content may include webinars, case studies, surveys, e-books, PowerPoint presentations and so on. Apart from these you could come up with out-of-the-box ideas that cater well to your industry.
5. Social Signals:
Yes, social signals do still matter. More so if they come from Google+. Although Google+ does not yet have the high number of users that Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have (which by the way are also a strong indicator of SEO social signals), as a business you must be active on it as a highly prospective social product of Google. It is more direct for Google to retrieve data on a particular brand from Google+ and this will quite possibly play a major role in your search engine ranking. According to a recent survey of 300,000 websites ranking in SERPs released by SearchMetrics, social signals and Google+ are definitely top priority when it comes to ranking high in search in 2013. Look at the screenshot below for visual proof.
Searchmetrics SEO Ranking Factors 2013
Verified online content is going to play a crucial role in the future and thus adopting Google authorship is a must for business owners. Owning your content via Google authorship has huge benefits in building your ‘unofficial’ author rank stats.
Social signals also encompass having your brand mentioned on online review sites, blogs, video sharing sites, forums, document sharing sites and local online communities. Like we mentioned already, you do not have to depend solely on search for your website traffic. Social media sites have an audience of their own and can generate a good amount of website traffic for your site if you establish authority over your niche and build lasting relationships with your peers. Keep social media marketing as top priority for your site’s promotion.
Although we have emphasized link building tactics, social signals and content marketing strategy as remedial strategies to recover from Penguin 2.0, you must also ensure that your on-page SEO elements are accurately in place. Optimize your site’s code and content (test your site with a webimx Website Review), optimize your site for the mobile audience, provide excellent usability and improve conversion rates by capturing the eyes of incoming web traffic with compelling content and conversion elements. Many online entrepreneurs seem to depend on Google’s organic search for their website traffic and go to extreme lengths to impress the search engines crawlers. While it is not wrong to depend on the world’s greatest search engine to acquire converting customers on your site, it is not good to solely depend on it to an extent that your business is affected by algorithmic updates such as these. Rather, build a faithful audience of followers who will play brand evangelists for you in the future, integrate your online and offline marketing, spend your time and money on the right marketing channels, focus on the user rather than anything else and lastly give incredible customer service so that your users return over and over
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