SEO Tips: Link-Building Post Penguin

There’s been a lot of talk about link building post – Penguin, and many people have instantly blamed their SEOs for drops in rankings. 2 months in, lets take a look at the results of many evaluations and target problem areas.

Problems:

Believe it or not, many of the issues most websites have had are not from inbound links – they are from internal ones. Even major websites have suffered from internal linking habits. These websites for the most part are well put together and deserve good rankings, but Google flagged something about them that caused them to drop.

• Footer links have been found to be an issue in many cases. Excessive footer links that appear on every page of a large website can make the pages they link to seem inflated with the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of identical links coming to them from every other page on the site. Several sites we know of removed footer links and regained rankings within a few weeks.
• Category drop down links also were a problem for some sites that had a drop down on every single page. As with the footer links, the removal of these category drop downs from all except a few key pages resolved the issue.
• Excessive links from the blog can cause problems; in many cases, sites that tanked had blog posts with 10-15 or more links all pointing to pages on their site.
• Abuse of anchor text is something that can also cause issues. Having the exact same anchor text on hundreds of links pointing to the same place raises a red flag to Google that the links are not organic.

Bottom line – avoid artificiality, and cut down on masses of identical links both internally and externally. Vary your anchor text, get links from a wide range of platforms, and look for natural link-building strategies. SubmitEdge has excellent link-building packages that combine linking techniques with content creation and social bookmarking to give you a variety of links that will help your website – not hurt it!

When you are link-building, remember that using approved web 2.0 platforms like Squidoo and Hub Pages can help you. Contextual links – meaning links surrounded by relevant text – are becoming more and more valued. Use social sharing to bring in extra links, and blog responsibly. These tips will serve you well in the post Penguin world.

Don’t assume anything that goes wrong is the fault of your SEO. Some website owners saw their rankings go climbing amazingly well after depending on their SEO to build links for them, then did an about face when their rankings fell, saying that they paid money for nothing. In actuality, they paid money and received value – and saw their site respond – then when Penguin hit other factors about their website caused their rankings to dip. Look internally at first if your site has tanked in the rankings. Usually it’s not going to be about your SEo firm at all, but problems that have been around for a while and were just recently targeted by Penguin.