The last Penguin 2.0 update has seen some sites lose traffic and have fallen in ranking, while some others have been de-indexed from Google search engine. The Penguin update has seen sites that used black hat SEO strategies lose ranking as a result of bad links to their sites. Google has reiterated that good backlinks should have the core principles of trust, relevance, and authority.
So for those who have been hit by the Penguin update recently, there is need for link auditing to determine and eliminate all the bad links that dragged your site down to the bottom of the SERP. So if you have noticed a steady decrease in traffic and keyword ranking positions since the 23rd of May, 2013 or any other major update period then your site may have been penalized due to low content quality, or huge backlinks from irrelevant sources. So how do you get back to the top of search engine again?
Link Audit/Review
The first thing to do will be to carry out a link audit of your entire website to determine the URLs linking to you, the pages linked to on your site, the anchor texts used for linking and the type of link it is (dofollow or nofollow). Reviewing the links will enable you eliminate the low-level links and disavow such links on Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools respectively so as to maintain positive standing with the search engines.
Re-Building with Quality Links
By now you must have known that Google and other search engines focuses more on the quality and varieties of backlinks to the number of backlinks. So to rebuild your trust with Google and other search engines, you must first rebuild your links from quality sources. Don’t worry about a million useless/worthless backlinks, it’s better you build a 100 quality backlinks instead. Your link building plan should include guest posting from high PR sites, comments from sites with Commentluv, article submissions from trusted article directories like Ezine articles, Hubpages, etc.
Content Quality and Relevancy
The quality of the contents on your site and its relevancy to the chosen keyword are very important factors to consider if you are climb the search engine ladder again. Remove all low quality or less relevant articles on your site, or rewrite them to improve on them. This may be a difficult task especially if you have thousands of articles, but you need patience and dedication to see yourself through this.
Ensure to only publish unique and quality articles on your site from now onwards to avoid being penalized again in the future. Always have your readers in mind while writing your posts, use call to actions to interact with your readers, ask for their views/opinions and reply to all their comments.
Increase your Social Media Activities
Google and other search engines consider social media activities as a ranking factor and as such if you have not been very active on the social media networks especially Google+, then start now! Please read “Why bloggers should choose Google Plus as their social network”. Join bloggers social media communities on Facebook, Google+ and especially LinkedIn to improve your social media activities. You can also use authority social bookmarking sites like reddit, Inbound.org, Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, Technorati, Pinterest etc for link building.
Ask People for Links
If you have trusted friends, colleagues, clients etc with quality blogs, websites or forum as them for links. Take advantage of it now to add quality backlinks to your site.
Host Contests/Giveaways:
Contests and giveaways can help your penalized site in a lot of ways, not only will it help you drive traffic to your blog, it will also give you the platform to build quality backlinks to your blog. Simply choose your participants and have them post about the contest on their quality blogs and link to each of the sponsors in the post.
Keep it all on Whitehat
All Blackhat SEO techniques will only bring you problems, avoid all such practices. Blackhat is easily known by promising better results in shorter time while whitehat SEO requires patience and consistency. Always follow ONLY Whitehat SEO strategies if you are to make it back to the first page of Google ever again.
If you follow this Post-Penguin Link Building Strategy after Penguin Update, you will gradually begin to get back to your position on Google’s first page. It may take some time but you will definitely get there if only you are determined to.
Have you been hit by Google Penguin update recently? How did it affect your site? Mind sharing your experience with me using the comment form, if you have any questions to ask, please don’t hesitate to ask, Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.
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Great Post and Awesome tips Nwosu.
A lot of people got hit in the last penguin update, Some of my friends also got hit. I believe this post will be helpful to those that got hit by penguin 2.0, so going to be sharing this post with my friends.
You don’t need to worry that your competitor has 1000 backlinks, you should think 100 links from high authority and quality websites. Google will again penalize your site if you start thinking about links by number.
Useful tips on how to recover our blog from Google Penguin.
We may have included some links pointing to low quality sites. It’s better to remove or adding nofollow attribute to them.
Yes, as you said, 100 links from quality content is better than 1 million links from low quality sites.
And one who follows black hat techniques will be caught one day by Google algorithms. So it is better to avoid following them.
Hosting giveaways will really helps in link building.
Social continues to play a big role in link building Nwosu.
Google loves social activity and for good reason; if done right you are creating value and helping other people succeed, promoting their content and leaving quality comments on posts.
Call it good karma, or the Golden Rule; either way, we all benefit by using social effectively, and Google rewards us for this good behavior ;)
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Thanks Joseph, i hope they recover quickly with the guides from this article.
Exactly the point, you don’t need to build links everywhere with little relevance and quality, few quality links these days have more SEO effect than a million worthless links. The days of number of backlinks are gone.
Any link building plan that involves blackhat methods will surely lead to doom. Thanks for your comment.
I engage myself in every way that will improve my social media activity on social networks and recently i am taking LinkedIn seriously. Thanks for your comment though.
Hi Nwosu,
Nice post indeed :)
I’m sure glad that my blog wasn’t affected by the latest update, in-fact it got a shade better, which made me more than happy! I guess I’m doing all the things you mentioned already, though I do still need to take care of my old posts and re-do them a little once again. Other than that, contests and giveaways is another area I need to venture into.
I think being social activity is vital nowadays, and that too, being on all the important social networking platforms. I guess taking out a little during the day for these things is needed too.
Thanks for sharing. Have a nice day ahead :)
Very useful tips here.
I am sure that all those who have been hit by the recent algo update will thank you from the bottom of their hearts for sharing these simple sounding but wonderful strategies with them.
my site was hit by this pengiun update but i believe that i will get everything to its normal stat withthis your tips.
thanks for sharing, its really helpful
Thanks Harleena for visiting Netmediablog and dropping an awesome comment, i hope you visit more. Thanks for visiting, do have an awesome day.
Thanks Ambika, some of my friends were hit by the update, i hope they can quickly recover from this with the guide shared in this article.
Am so sorry to hear this Donatus, please take time in implementing this guide and you will in no time recover.
very informative and exiting post to read after sometime. The “Link Audit/Review” you have mentioned is something I will consider more and take use of the points you have mentioned.
As you have mentioned Google+ is the most effective social media channel for all the bloggers. I’ve been using my Google+ blog page more and started to see some great results for the content I published recently. Withing a day or two the site started to rank on first page for key word phrases like “How Infograhics helps SEO”..
The advice on “Keep it all on Whitehat” is definitely a must as some of my friends had badly effected with those scamy link-building strategies.
I have noted one point and will definitely shoot a mail to you on that. Thanks for the great post.
Thanks Fernando i am glad you found the post interesting. Looking forward to hearing from you…
Hello Nwosu,
What a nice tip for people that have been affected by the ugly panda to get their feet back. I was not hit by the update so that means i am doing some things right. But i still love the way you put the post. I have not done giveaways and link exchange before but sometime in the near future i might do it. thanks
Hello Nwosu,
I wanted to ask you ho we could do a link audit for our site.
Regards,
Rafi
Am glad your blog was not hit by the penguin update which shows you have been obeying Google’s laws. Thanks for your comment and do have an awesome day.
To perform a link audit of your blog you need access to both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account, select your site and navigate to Traffic > Links to your site click on more to expand the links. Click on Download latest links and export it to .CSV or Google Docs.
Google webmaster tools may not be able to list all the links you recently acquired on your blog, so you may need to use a premium backlink checker like SEOmoz, Majestic SEO, Link Research Tools or Ahrefs to obtain a complete backlink profile of your blog.
But let me focus on the free Google Webmaster Tools for the sake of this post, after exporting the links use Google advanced operator Site:backlinkURL.com to check for links that appear on a domain that isn’t indexed in Google. Example is site:badsite.com a website that has been indexed by Google will return a result while the one that has not been will return no result saying “Your Search – site:badsite.com – did not match any documents.”
Other types of links to check for are those that appear on a website with malware or virus warning, links that appear on the same page as spammy, unrelated links mostly from porn, pills, casinos, loads sites etc. Links that appear on a page with Google Pagerank that is grey bar or zero, links coming from link networks, sitewide links – especially blogrolls and footer links, and paid links.
So if you are performing a post-penguin link audit, ensure to have a mix of the following types of links; Brand links, exact-match anchor text keyword links, partial-match keyword links, Generic links and page title links.
When you have discovered the bad links to your site durin the link audit, use Google disavow tools to disavow such links. You can also perform this exercise from time to time, you do not have to wait for Google hammer to hit you before you can perform a link audit on your blog.
I hope i have answered your question very well.
Hi Nwosu,
Great post you shared here and I’m sure that for those who want some information on how to do better from this day forward you’ve just given them a great formula to follow.
I have been hit in the past but not recently. I think I was caught in the crossfires since I haven’t ever done anything deceitful at all. I am also very cautious on who I allow to link from my site just for this reason.
There are so many variables to consider and at times it can become rather overwhelming to understand what we should be doing and make sure we’re doing that correctly.
I appreciate you sharing this post with us today and I hope everyone has so much better luck from this day forward with Google.
I’m sticking with social media myself and focusing on my referral traffic. They are just too awesome in my eyes.
Enjoy your weekend and thanks again.
~Adrienne
Thanks Adrienne for your awesome contribution. Am sorry to hear you have been hit in the past, so many people who have never done anything wrong have been caught on the crossfire as you mentioned, i hope Google keeps refining their algorithm to save us all from such troubles.
Social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are great platforms for massive referral traffic with an effective social media strategy. I appreciate you dropping by today to comment on this article. Thanks for visiting and i hope to read more from you in the coming days.
Do also have a great weekend.
If you are doing link building in seo its most imoprtant that you are making quality backlinks because only only quality backlinks can boost your website rankings and this is the most important thing in the international seo
Search engine optimization is one of the best tools that most Web business owners can utilize in order to be able to make the most out of their business online. Unfortunately, not a lot of website or Web business owners know enough about SEO and what it can do to help them and their business.
Yes as said Google de-index our blog from search engine but still i can find my blog in Search pages. Moreover I got links from PR 3 and PR4 Blogs by Guest posts :) Buy don’t know y google removed all my links :( :(
You simply need to carry out links audit and remove all bad links then re-submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
how to find the links. I didn’t maintain any data of links which i’ve built. :( Any way of recovering them ah ?
To perform a link audit of your blog you need access to both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account, select your site and navigate to Traffic > Links to your site click on more to expand the links. Click on Download latest links and export it to .CSV or Google Docs.
Google webmaster tools may not be able to list all the links you recently acquired on your blog, so you may need to use a premium backlink checker like SEOmoz, Majestic SEO, Link Research Tools or Ahrefs to obtain a complete backlink profile of your blog.
But let me focus on the free Google Webmaster Tools for the sake of this post, after exporting the links use Google advanced operator Site:backlinkURL.com to check for links that appear on a domain that isn’t indexed in Google. Example is site:badsite.com a website that has been indexed by Google will return a result while the one that has not been will return no result saying “Your Search – site:badsite.com – did not match any documents.”
Other types of links to check for are those that appear on a website with malware or virus warning, links that appear on the same page as spammy, unrelated links mostly from porn, pills, casinos, loads sites etc. Links that appear on a page with Google Pagerank that is grey bar or zero, links coming from link networks, sitewide links – especially blogrolls and footer links, and paid links.
So if you are performing a post-penguin link audit, ensure to have a mix of the following types of links; Brand links, exact-match anchor text keyword links, partial-match keyword links, Generic links and page title links.
When you have discovered the bad links to your site during the link audit, use Google disavow tools to disavow such links. You can also perform this exercise from time to time, you do not have to wait for Google hammer to hit you before you can perform a link audit on your blog.
I hope i have answered your question very well.
Hi Nwosu,
Google’s rapidly changing algorithms have always been a pain for the webmasters. Sometimes following even the best and most ethical seo techniques do not help you. Or even worse, you still fall down in rankings. What do you expect us to do in such a scenario?
Thanks.
You need to remain updated with the latest on what works thats why SEO is constantly being reviewed.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing the backlink building strategy. Yes building backlinks is very important and more to it, we need to build Quality backlinks and not look for quantity. Like this, once for my niche blog, I build lots of backlinks an finally got penalized for Unnatural LinkBuilding by Google. So it is always better to have good backlinks from high authority blogs.
Typically and ideally those are the perfect ingredients to create a shield against Google updates. But just do it in moderation.