Beat The Penguin Checklist Before You Begin If you’ve been hit by Google’s dreaded Penguin update, or want to make sure you don’t get penalized in the future, then this checklist will help you to safely optimize your website, maximize your rankings, and gradually reclaim your traffic, sales and income. Before you begin, there are two preliminary steps that are now critical to your online success.

❑ Step 1: Analyze your link network More than ever before it is important to understand where your backlinks are coming from and what keywords are used in the anchor text of these links. To help you with this analysis, we created a FREE tool that will help you to conduct a 5-minute link network check-up. Click here to access the FREE tool and analyze your link network now.

❑ Step 2: Monitor your rankings If you are not already doing so, you need to track your rankings in the search engines for the main keywords you are targeting. The reason this is so important is that if you’re going to make changes to your site, you need to measure the impact of these changes. Always remember:

You can’t improve what you don’t measure The best way to monitor your rankings is to use an automatic monitoring service such as the Rank Tracker module in Market Samurai. Once you understand your link network and you are carefully monitoring your rankings for your main target keywords, you’ll be ready to apply the ideas contained in this checklist.

On Page Optimization Checklist Google has described the Penguin update as a “web spam” update. Therefore it is critical that your site follow Google’s recommendation in regard to making sure your site avoids any of the practices that Google may perceive as being used by search engine spammers. This starts with making sure you have good, relevant On-Page optimization.

❑ 1. Don’t Panic. It’s important to understand that Google’s algorithm changes all the time. With every major change, a lot of people give up and walk away from their online business. It is the people who stick around, analyze what happened, and take the appropriate action that eventually succeed. So make the decision to stay calm, and take a data driven approach to improving your rankings.

❑ 2. Don’t randomly delete content. A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to Google algorithm changes and take a hatchet to their website. For example, one of our users had a blog on their domain that included articles, which they had syndicated. In response to the Penguin update, they immediately deleted the blog. The problem with this is that this created a big hole in their site, with a lot of incoming links pointing to – nothing. These “dead links” might actually be a red flag to Google as they may make your site look like an expired domain that has been purchased for SEO purposes. As a good standard practice, if you do delete content make sure you do a 301 redirect to relevant content on your site. You can read this article on SEOMoz about what 301 redirects are and how to apply them to your website. If you’re using Wordpress, then you can install a plugin like the “Simple 301 Redirects” plugin to achieve a similar effect.

❑ 3. Eliminate over optimization in all your page titles. Search Engines punish sites that try to “keyword stuff” their titles with too many keywords. Check the title of each page on your website for over optimization. Change the titles of your pages to be optimized for human readers, rather than for search engines. For example if your page is currently titled: ‘Graphic design services, graphic design firm, Success By Design’ You should change the page title to something like: ‘ Success By Design, affordable graphic design’

You can read this article about best practices for writing title tags.

❑ 4. Create unique Title tags and Description tags for every page One surprisingly common error that we see on a lot of sites is that people have copied code from an existing page to create a new page and end up with pages having duplicate titles or descriptions. This is a problem for a number of reasons. Firstly, it creates multiple pages on your website that are all trying to rank for the same keywords. Secondly, the Google Panda update penalizes sites that have a high degree of duplicate content, and duplicate titles and descriptions can sometimes trigger this penalty. Check that every page on your site has a unique title and description that clearly describes the content or purpose of the page.

❑ 5. Check Google Webmaster Tools for ways to fix your HTML Google Webmaster tools is a free service that Google makes available to webmasters to help them to diagnose any problems with your website that might affect Google’s ability to index and rank your site. It offers a lot of useful tools to analysis of your site and highlights simple things you should fix such as Google Bot crawling errors, missing pages, and duplicate title tags for example. Here’s an excellent video that Google has created that shows you how to use Webmaster Tools to improve your rankings on your website:

Watch the Video

❑ 6. Reevaluate your internal links. If you have created internal links to a specific page using target keywords in your anchor text, change the anchor text of these links to include brand and generic terms. As a rule of thumb aim for 40% brand links, 40% generic links and 20% target links. For example, for our product “market samurai” we would want to create links where: ●Around 40% of links contained brand related keywords such as “Market Samurai”, as well as Branded URLs, such as “http://www.marketsamurai.com”. ●Around 40% of links contained natural organic “generic” keywords such as “click here”, “check this out”, etc.

●And only around 20% of links actually contain keywords that you are trying to target to improve your rankings for, for example “keyword research software”, “keyword research tool”, etc. For a more detailed explanation of link ratios, watch this video.

❑ 7. Make sure your site contains the right elements There are a number of simple elements that Google looks for when evaluating your overall site. These include: ●A Site Map page that helps visitors understand where to find information on your website. ●An XML sitemap to help Google index your site effectively ●A Robots.txt file to specify which files or directories Google should ignore when crawling your site. ●A Privacy Policy ●A Contact Page that includes a real-world address

❑ 8. Create useful links between pages on your website One of the characteristics of ‘Content Farm’ sites is that there are usually very few links between pages. On the other hand, sites that contain deep, useful content often have links between pages to direct the user to additional related content. The safest way to create links between pages on your site is to do it manually with a focus on helping the reader discover other relevant content. A great example of this is Wikipedia.com which has a lot of relevant keywords in each entry linked to other definitions throughout it’s site.

❑ 9. Optimize your site’s download speed If your site takes too long to load, users will go elsewhere and Google will notice that visitors don’t spend much time on your site. This is a strong indicator that your site is poor quality and of poor relevance for the search terms that you’re trying to rank for. You should therefore test the performance of your site using a tool such as:

http://www.webpagetest.org This site will test your site and give you a breakdown of where download bottlenecks might be occurring. Some of the things you might consider include: ●Reducing the size of your image files ●Eliminating Flash animations ●Eliminating unnecessary java script files

❑ 10. Create a helpful 404 page When your server cannot find a page that your visitor is looking for you should handle this ‘404 Not Found’ error in an elegant and useful way. Instead of just displaying a message like “You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.” You should present them with a useful message and links to a relevant page. This could include your home page or your site map. Avoid redirecting all your 404 traffic to a single location such as your home page, as this is can be seen to be a search engine trick for which your site may be penalized. You can also check your “crawl errors” page from within Google Web Master tools for a list of any 404 errors. You can then create placeholder pages or 301 redirects to eliminate these ‘holes’ in your site.

❑ 11. Optimize your images for humans For each image on your site, you should include alternative text using the alt attribute. It is very important not to fill your alt tags with keywords. This is known as ‘keyword stuffing’ and can have a negative impact on your rankings. Instead of trying to stuff keywords in your alt tags, you should take the approach of creating a brief description of the image that would help a visually impaired person using a screen reader to understand what the image depicts and how it relates to your content. For example:



❑ 12. Add rel=”nofollow” to all comment links Be sure to configure your content publishing software to automatically add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all comment and message board links. This will prevent you from passing your reputation to other sites. More importantly, it prevents you from being penalized for linking to sites that Google considers to be low quality or spammy. Google can and will penalize your website if it perceives you are linking to “poor quality neighborhoods”. Adding the rel=”nofollow” attribute will prevent you from triggering these penalties from comment spam. * Note: WordPress versions 1.5 and above automatically assign the nofollow attribute to all user-submitted links (comment data, commenter URI, etc.)

❑ 13. Add a social dimension With social media becoming more and more important, make sure that you give your visitors the opportunity to share your content with their friends and followers via Facebook, Twitter and Google + Social signals such as traffic, and “Likes” and “Tweets” are all positive signals to the search engines that your site is of a high quality and deserves to rank highly for a keyword phrase. If you use Wordpress, you might want to check out the floating social bar Digg Digg or the range of social plugins from Shareaholic.com

❑ 14. Focus on keeping people on your site Log into your Google Analytics account and check your ‘bounce rate’ which is the percentage of users who enter your site and then leave without viewing any other pages. Pages with a high bounce rate are a signal to Google that your page is of a poor quality match for the keyword that they found your page for. Google uses this information as a factor in their search algorithm. Monitor this metric and do what you can to increase the amount of time visitors spend, and the number of pages they view on your site. Provide links to other relevant articles in the side panel and at the end of your pages. Give your visitors as many reasons to stay as possible. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes and imagine what they are looking for. Present them with as many high-quality, relevant options as possible to convince them to stay. Here are two useful Wordpress plugins for decreasing your bounce rate: 1.SimpleReach Slide 2.Related Posts Thumbnails That concludes the ‘On Page Optimization’ section of the Beat The Penguin checklist. On the following pages you’ll find a series of steps for improving your Off Page Optimization.

Off Page Optimization Checklist Perhaps the biggest steps you can take to recover from a Google Penguin penalty or to ensure that you avoid a future penalty is to address your site’s Off-Page optimization. For years Google has been telling Webmasters that your links can’t hurt your rankings. At best, poor quality or questionable links to your website would simply be ignored. This was to prevent your competition trying to “de-optimize” your site by building a whole lot of spammy links to your site. However, all that has changed with Penguin. For the first time in Google’s history you can be penalized by having an “over-optimized” link-network. While it’s true that a single link may not be able to harm your site - certainly the wrong mix or “pattern” of links to your site definitely can penalize or even knock your site out of the search engines. As off-page links are much more difficult to control than on-page links - this represents a real challenge to SEOs who are stuck with existing link networks that cross Penguin’s overoptimization threshold. To avoid these penalties, we highly recommend that you follow the items in the following “OffPage” SEO Optimization Checklist:

❑ 1. Update links from sites you own Check the links from sites you own that point to your money site. Look for links in your sidebars, headers, footers, and blogrolls that contain target keywords. Change the anchor text of these links to reflect the new recommended ratios: 40% brand links, 40% generic links, 20% target keyword links. For a more detailed explanation of link ratios, watch this video.

❑ 2. Update links on sites you don’t own where possible Check to see if you can update incoming links from other people’s sites such as your signature links in forums and guest posts or comments that you’ve posted on other blogs. Change the anchor text from these links to modify your link network ratios as required.

❑ 3. Eliminate links from de-indexed sites Examine your link profile for links from de-indexed sites. To check if a site has been de-indexed, put the site URL into Google and click ‘Search’

If nothing comes back then the site has probably be deindexed. If the site is a directory, remove your content if possible to eliminate links from deindexed web properties.

❑ 4. Eliminate links from low quality content syndication networks If you’ve built links using low quality content syndication networks (such as poor quality Blog Networks, or poor quality Article Directories), request that your articles be removed from these networks. Needless to say you should also stop submitting articles to low quality article networks. However, be careful about completely suspending your link-building activities. Going from building tens of thousands of links a months to building none or just a handful of links is a sure sign to Google that you’re trying to manipulate their results and may result in further search engine penalties. We recommend replacing low-quality link-building approaches with highquality syndication alternatives. If you are going to reduce your link-building activities, then do so gradually over the period of several months.

❑ 5. Use high quality link networks to balance your link ratios If you’ve built links using high quality article networks, consider submitting new articles with generic and brand anchor text to balance your link ratios as required. So, in the case of our main website “http://www.marketsamurai.com” that we’re trying to rank for the SEO target phrase “keyword research tool”. If our network had too large a proportion of links for “keyword research tool” (say over 40%) we would try to balance out the ratios by performing additional link-building for brand keywords (such as “market samurai” or “http://www.marketsamurai.com”), and generic terms such as “click here”. Make sure you keep checking your link ratios using the FREE Link Network Health Check tool to monitor your progress.

❑ 6. Manually clean up your link network While this is a painful process, you may need to go through your link network one domain at a time and identify the low quality or spammy sites that are linking to yours. You can then use WhoIs to identify the technical contact for the site and send them an email to request that they remove the links to your site. In extreme cases you may even consider offering people a reward (such as by offering people a cash payment or an amazon.com voucher) if they are particularly unresponsive to your requests.

❑ 7. Pay for someone else to clean up your link network If you’d prefer to pay someone else to clean up your link network you can try services such as Removeem.com which offer self service and full service options.

❑ 8. Create a diverse Link Network Make sure you are getting backlinks from a diverse range of sources. If you are just building links from one source then you are asking for trouble. Remember, the goal is to make sure that your link-network appears as “natural” as possible to the search engines. A diverse link network will include links from blogs, press releases, forums, Q&A sites, youtube, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

❑ 9. Use target anchor text selectively Dave Jenyns from Melbourne SEO Services recommends that when you create links from sites that are less than PageRank 1, you should use brand or generic anchor text (eg. “market samurai” or “click here”). You can then save your target anchor text (eg. “keyword research software”) for links from higher PageRank sites.

❑ 10. Check up on third-party SEO service companies If you are employing a third-party SEO company, make sure you know exactly what they are doing. You can’t assume they are doing the right thing anymore, because for the first time ever, their actions can actually damage your rankings. Often cheaper overseas outsourced link-building companies can be slow to update their SEO link-building strategies - so be warned. Ask for a list of links that they have built for you, and query them about what techniques they are using so you can determine if their strategies are going to be effective, or a hindrance with Penguin.

❑ 11. Submit a Reconsideration Request to Google If your site has been penalized, you can submit a “reconsideration request” to Google to have them manually re-evaluate your site and lift any penalties they may have imposed. However, don’t do this straight away! Instead, use this checklist to fix what you can and then wait 4-6 weeks to see if your changes make a difference algorithmically. If you still do not see any change in your rankings then you should prepare your case for resubmission. Instead of just complaining to Google, you should take the following approach: a.Document all the changes you have made to clean up your link network. (Be as specific as possible). b.Briefly describe why inclusion of your site will improve Google’s results and provide a better user experience for their users. You can submit your reconsideration request here