Preparing for Penguin 3.0

October 27, 2014

The Google Penguin algorithm sniffs for “unnatural links” associated with site content. Google has recently tweaked it and set it loose in  the wild, and while its effects are so far limited to a small share of search traffic, SEO/SEM managers, business owners, and webmasters need to pay attention.

What is an Unnatural Link Profile?

Examining the Google Support document on Link Schemes is the best way to become familiar with the philosophy of Google’s anti-spam program and the exact behavior it proscribes. If you’re doing any of the following things, you are directly exposing yourself to Penguin’s wrath:

1. Buying or selling links that “pass” or carry Page Rank. These are often colloquially referred to as “hard links.” “This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links, exchanging goods or service for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link.” These kinds of links are by definition “non-editorial” and must be “earned” by being “voted for” by 3rd party sites for reasons of pure merit alone.

2. Participating in reciprocal link exchanges. Once very popular on the Web, reciprocal link exchanges have morphed into “private blog networks” in which an individual or group of individuals controls a large number of “independent” domains that are a sham for a single business entity. Participating in such networks is risky and several such networks were delisted or deranked in 2014.

3. Using large-scale rich anchor link campaigns. Overly verbose (and even “overly precise”) anchor links can prove to be a liability, especially when they appear in very large numbers. Such distributions look (and are) “unnatural” to search engines and can easily be flagged as spammy.

4. Using automated link-generation robots. You can easily find these tools by searching on “automated link generator.” Promising to “blast out” links at mega-scale, their patterns are easily detected by search engines.

What’s an SEM manager to do?

Get the facts. Check Google Webmaster Tools and examine your inbound links. Hopefully, you’ve got a fair share of “pure editorial” links mixed in with links from legitimate directories. B2B sites can usually determine the overall health of their link profiles in a few minutes. While larger sites will have more complex link profiles, you need full transparency into who’s linking to you, because this information reflects both “link juice equity” and “link juice liability” that might expose you to an anti-spam algorithm such as Penguin 3.0. Bing also has Webmaster Tools that can provide equivalent insights.

Reality-check your team. Is your SEO/SEM agency placing links for you? How about that well-meaning but unseasoned marketing person you just hired? Are the links they’re building actually “earned”? Make sure that you actually visit any URLs that you don’t recognize. Remember, the link “authority” conveyed by a non-editorial link can turn into a liability instantly. Incentive your team to reward getting bona fide, legitimate editorial links.

Disavow if necessary. If you’ve got bad links pointing to you, you’re going to have to bite the bullet and use the Disavow Tool. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Warning – using this tool is only recommended for advanced-level webmasters. Google recommends “that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.”

Rule out suspicious behavior. If you do come across suspect links, don’t rule out a sinister reason. It’s not unknown for competitors to deliberately hire disreputable link farms to point to their business rivals. If this is happening, you’ll want to escalate this to your Legal Department.

Making Penguin 3.0 your friend

Entrepreneurs and business owners need to think carefully about how their sites acquire natural organic links. As Google’s support document points out, “creating good content pays off: links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”

What’s implicit in this statement is the understanding that content is something created by human beings for other human beings.  Consequently, content isn’t “scalable” in the same way that other processes can be; each editorial article must be hand-crafted. This understanding may change someday, but until it does, marketers seeking additional eyes for their content must bid for attention in the commercial markets and disclose that such content has been paid for.

Which leads to another benefit of keeping very close tabs on your inbound links. Doing so gives you a high-level view of the link equity of your own content. This data can provide insight to your marketing team, your agency, or other group responsible for growing your organic content marketing strength. By analyzing what made your best-performing content gain links, you can better understand how the Internet has “voted” on your own content marketing efforts, so that you can improve its relevance/resonance in the future.

So go forth and check your link profile!

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