Save your backlinks in post-Penguin panic – actionable Anti-Penguin checklist!

With the recent Google Penguin algo update, as well since the giant batch of unnatural link warnings sent out to webmasters, the panic is all round the SEO world.

 

Surely, you cannot sit still, risking your hard-earned Google ranks and traffic. But there's no need for hasty and ill-considered decisions like removing the existing backlinks your've invested a great deal serious amounts of resources into, or starting out with a completely new domain.

There will be the alternative method to save your website together with its juicy backlinks, too as protect yourself from competitors' negative SEO. What you need is reliable SEO software to launch a thought-out anti-Penguin backlink audit!

Backlink Anchor Text – The 3 Types

Penguin does NOT tolerate a huge selection of backlinks with anchors exactly matching your target keywords (especially the commercial terms).

Yep, you've been struggling hard to acquire more backlinks with anchors exactly matching your money keywords. Now you have to struggle even harder to have your anchors diversified.

To quickly have a examine your existing backlink anchors, you've got your SEO PowerSuite at hand. Launch SEO SpyGlass, create a brand new project to your domain and allow the tool collect the data for you, including all of your anchors.



If you find your existing anchors quite uniform, here are the tree kinds of anchors to give attention to when building new links:

  • Hybrid branded anchors ("Brand name + keyword variations")
  • Universal anchors ("here's the link", "link", etc.)
  • Naked URLs ("www.site.com")

Backlink Domain Diversity – The 3 Basic Factors

Getting sitewide backlinks is not so great because it utilized to be. Be careful now when choosing the backlink domains also because the place your backlink's going being placed at. Don't forget about:

  • Domain diversity – basically, it's better to possess 2 links on 2 different domains, than 4 on 1
  • Domain IP diversity – check the IPs of the domains you think about as your backlink partners. If websites are hosted about the same server, it's very likely they'll have the same (or similar) IP address.
  • Domain age – a classic domain seems to be more credible for search engines, so make an effort to analyze this factor for your current backlinks – if all of your existing links result from newly registered domains – that's an alarming sign.

But how'd you realize how diverse your backlink domains currently are? Collecting these data manually will try taking a little SEOs weeks of hard and boring work. With SEO PowerSuite at hand, you can collect the backlink domain-related information in the couple of clicks – whatever you need is launch your SEO SpyGlass!



Now make sure the brand new links you build maximally diversify your existing backlink profile.

Other Relevant Backlink Data

All in all, when we speak about links, virtually everything matters. Take your time and energy to analyze:

  • The titles and descriptions of backlink pages
  • The quantity of outbound links a backlink page has
  • The overall backlink domain popularity (Page Rank, Alexa Rank, etc.)

And again, SEO PowerSuite can be your number 1 tool to obtain the most comprehensive data for your backlinks. Launch SEO SpyGlass:



All these factor will assist you to figure out, which of your links may look unnatural and make measured decisions:

  1. To remove a few of the backlinks, if needed
  2. To diversify some anchor texts (add more branded anchors, or "naked" URLs)
  3. To diversify some backlink sources

Okay, what else is it possible to do?

Backlinks are the largest a part of the Penguin update, such as the forget some other things that can destroy your website credibility and rankings:

  1. Eliminate kyword stuffing and duplicate content issues – use WebSite Auditorto find and connect any trouble spots on your site.
    • Eliminate keyword stuffing issues: calculate the ideal keyword density – the one employed by your currently top-ranking competitors. If that technique lets your competitors rank top, than this is the main element to creating what Google sees as relevant and non-spammy content!
    • Eliminate duplicate content: make sure all of your pages have unique titles and meta descriptions, and employ robots.txt file to hide from Google's eyes any types of duplicate pages.


  1. Keep track of how your and your competitors' rankings change - you can make use of Rank Tracker from SEO PowerSuite.
    • Keep the closest eye on your rankings to instantly react on any changes inside your positions.
    • Monitor your competitors rankings ups and downs to understand by their mistakes whenever the truth is their rankings drop.

Ok, now how about an in depth "SEO after Penguin" checklist to help you make your websites eligible to all Google criteria? If you follow these simple tips, your site is planning to be only gaining rankings in post-Penguin Google.

"SEO after Penguin" checklist

  1. Start with analyzing how your website's doing now – analyze your traffic and ranking stats.

    Tools to use: Rank Tracker and Google Analytics

  2. Eliminate on-page issues:

    • Create unique titles and descriptions
    • Take good care of keyword density in your landing pages (do not stuff pleased with keywords – they are being used naturally inside the context of your topic)
    • Fix broken links and server errors
    • Reevaluate internal links (the anchors of your internal links really shouldn't be stuffed with keywords)
    • Make sure your website contains all of the "classic" parts: a valid XML sitemap, a Robots.txt file, a Privacy Policy, a user-friendly 404 page
    • Optimize the size of the landing pages – if your pages take too much time to download, users are likely to return quickly to the search engine results page – not a good sign for Google

    Tools to use: WebSite Auditor, Google Webmaster Tools, Webpagetest.org

  3. Improve your backlink profile:

    • If you have an SEO doing a work for you, request a report on backlinks and used resources
    • Run a backlinks check with the SEO SpyGlass tool
    • Modify links from your own personal sites, e.g. blogs, updating the anchor texts
    • Try to eliminate backlinks from your pages with poor linking neighborhood
    • Create a diverse backlinks profile – get backlinks from various sources – blogs, press releases, forums, Q&A sites, video platforms (YouTube, Vimeo), podcast websites, social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)

    Tools to use: SEO SpyGlass