Overcome your fear of Penguin with this step-by-step Link guide

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Overcome your fear of Penguin with this step-by-step guide Inbound links help determine PageRank and SEO on search engines. Small businesses publishing highquality content generate white-hat links each time other sites use original content as sources for their own articles. This process creates a web of votes, pushing credible sites further up in search results. However, website owners may engage in black hat link building tactics. This means they buy links from directories in an attempt to falsely increase their PageRank. Cheating websites that buy or sell links will now catch the attention of Penguin and plummet to the bottom of search results.

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Sites hit with Penguin will likely experience the following: • Lower rankings in search results for specific keyword phrases • Lower organic search traffic • Deindexing from Google search results To prevent Penguin from hitting your website, you must understand the type of practices the search engine deems spammy, and what efforts are worthwhile for your company’s web presence. This piece will answer the need-to-know questions about optimizing your site’s linking strategy for search.

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SPAMMYCONTENT CONTENT SPAMMY

Google introduced Penguin in April 2012, targeting websites engaging in webspam techniques to inorganically improve PageRank. The initial update affected sites that used keyword stuffing practices and shallow link schemes to make their pages seem more credible and valuable to readers online. The Penguin algorithm release reminded businesses to focus their attention on creating quality website content and improving their sites’ user experience to build online relationships that lead to organic links.

QUALITYCONTENT CONTENT QUALITY

A brief overview of Google’s Penguin algorithm

What’s a bad link and how do I know one is spammy? ContentLEAD has outlined some hallmark signs of spammy links:

Have you ever navigated through search results to a website full of random links? These sites might break down their volume of links by category, but they don’t provide the internet with any real value. Links generated through these online directories are often of low quality, and they inflate the SEO value of websites, which can dilute the integrity of online search. Just because a website has thousands of links pointing to it doesn’t mean these votes come from credible or worthwhile web presences.

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Non-English domains if your SMB is located in the U.S. .info domains Pages that are labeled “/links” or “/directory” Page authority and trust flow below 20 out of 100

These resources and tips will help you better understand what constitutes a spammy link and help you improve the overall SEO value of your site.

Identifying bad links may take some time, but finding the weak votes isn’t technically hard. Try any of these free tools: • SEOMoz Open Site Explorer • ahrefs Site Explorer • Majestic site Explorer

You can use these tools to identify your backlinks, but if you need help figuring out which add value to your site and which harm its future, consult a Content Marketing Specialist. 4

I have bad links; how do I remove them? Every small business owner should actively monitor his or her backlinks because even a few poor votes can prevent organic traffic from finding a company in search. Removing spammy links takes a bit of manual work, but the implications of rebounding from Penguin can have a serious affect on a company’s bottom line.

Set Up A Terms Of Use Section The section can include strict guidelines on linking protocol for third-party sources. When a website wants to reference your content or business in an article or on its profile, it will have to follow the rules in your Terms of Use section.

Talk To Third-Party Webmasters About Links Send emails to websites’ webmasters asking them to remove inbound links leading to your site within 24 hours. Use this line of communication to reference your new “Terms of Use” section.

ContentLEAD has created a step-by-step guide for SMBs to follow when removing spammy links from their profiles. Check out the process on the right:

Notify Google Of Your Actions Once you’ve reached out to these spammy websites, if they’ve neglected to clean up their link profiles, you must alert Google by submitting a Reconsideration Request. Click here to access that page.

The Disavow Tool If all else fails, disavow links leading back to your site. This tool can tell Google that you don’t want links coming from a specific website to influence your PageRank for better or worse. Use the tool here.

These steps will help you get started with cleaning up a spammy link profile. 5

How can I build high-quality inbound links? Focus on content. You might be wondering how anyone can build an extensive link profile full of high-quality votes when so many sites have spammy components. You’re not alone, but trust us, it’s possible to engage in white hat link building once a content marketing strategy is in place. Follow these steps below:

1. Include Content On The Front Page

4. Leverage Connections For Guest-Blogging Opportunities

Adding fresh website content and headlines to your homepage will keep search crawlers and readers coming back.

Work with your professional connections to develop guestblogging opportunities. You can partner with a company to publish relevant content on each other’s websites, and use keywords as anchor text to create healthy inbound links.

2. Build More Landing Pages To Highlight Products And Services Each core offering should have its own landing page. These organize your site and tell visitors where to go next, and give your site a solid place to link internally from blog content.

5. Promote Your Site Through Social Distribute your content through your social media profiles. Social inbound links and shares have slightly less weight than links from other authoritative sites, but still provide SEO juice. They help get your articles into the right hands and encourage people to link back to your site in the future.

3. Vary Internal Link Building Efforts When you publish a new article or landing page, don’t link to other pages on your site too often. For every two pages you link to in your post, try and link to three external resources. The offsite links can be the sources you used for your articles or other pertinent pages that expand on your main point.

6. Update Your News And Blog Section Your news and blog resources should contain unique insights that draw readers in. These posts will also educate like-minded businesses that might want to link back to your content within their own updates. This is the best possible way to go about white-hat link building practices. 6

How should I manage inbound links in the future? 3

Small to mid-sized business owners must evaluate their link profiles often to make sure their sites aren’t hit by Penguin. Just because all spammy backlinks are removed the first time doesn’t mean more won’t surface down the line. Here are four tips to keeping a clean and honest backlink profiles:

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Links should have a mix of exact and partial-match anchor text to ensure they’re editorially driven. This means don’t link to your ‘business model’ page every time your company’s name is mentioned in an article.

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Look at the domains linking to your website. Are too many coming from one site? A site with too many inbound links from one domain isn’t always a good thing!

Every link should come from a site with an appropriate trust flow. If any of your free link assessment tools say a domain has a trust factor lower than 20 (out of 100), remove it immediately! Focus on guest blogging to generate backlinks with a high trust flow.

When you keep an eye on your link profile, you won’t have to worry about Penguin. Google wants to clean up the internet, which benefits you and your visitors. Become part of the change by flagging domains that don’t pass quality PageRank, and increase website visibility by focusing on building quality relationships with like-minded peers. This will lead to organic link building opportunities, we promise.

Ensure that the websites linking to your domain come from relevant online businesses or organizations. If a pet shop in Oregon is linking to your local sports apparel shop in Worcester, MA, the link isn’t adding any value to your profile (or your readers).

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Sources http://www.brafton.com/glossary/google-penguin http://www.bruceclay.com/seo/advanced/xmlsitemap.html http://www.randagabriel.net/fm_link_guidelines.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/good-times-with-inbound-links.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

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