Google officially announced a rank algorithm update on April 24th, 2012 which is widely known as “Google Penguin Update”. Though any kind of official reference relating to the title “Penguin” could not be found but anyway, the title not sounds too bad. The algorithm change has impacted approx three percent of the English searched results as reported in their official blog post. However this is basically a smarter version of their previous update called Panda and the result of both these update has modified approx 15% of the overall results. Now that sounds a striking alteration.

The update mainly affected following 5 types of search engine optimization practices –

1.  Utilizing a list of exact targeted keywords to generate inbound links repeatedly over a long time.

2.  So many links from the same websites or same category websites.

3. Practice of creating low value or off-the-topic links primarily through the blog comments (includes keywords in the username spam), irrelevant forum signature etc. particularly to get a link for your website.

4. Building less relevant contextual links or content spam as confirmed in their official post.

5. Links from a website with least to no content uniqueness and particularly build for link developing or more distinctively three-way link building purposes.

We have received couple of common questions from our clients like –

Should we not utilize article distribution or press release syndication in future as it appears Google started to penalize primarily these content aggregators?

Should we not use the contextual link building anymore?

Should we eliminate all previous links that we have earned from all articles and blogs?

Well, to be honest, let me first specify that I have no plan to advertise any of our services via that post. I would be just happy to guide about the safe link building strategies after that update. The mantra is “Diversify, Diversify and Diversify”.

Domain Diversification – Lots of links coming from the similar categorized sites always appear suspicious to the search engines. That was applicable even before the affect of that update – the difference is that now Google is smart enough to detect them easily. One example is, if there are say 3000 links pointing to your websites and more than 50% links are coming from the article directory – that’s what Google not likes and your website likely to be penalized. Your website should have links from all possible resources like social media channels, blogs, business listing sites, directories, press release sites, article sites just to name few. You must not use or prioritise just one method and simply put aside all remaining ethical techniques.

Next thing is that diversification among the same category link building source. For example – are you submitting your articles to the same list of article directories over and over? Well, try to avoid that and instead use a list of top quality aggregators strategically over a period of time and vary that list on weekly or monthly basis.

Keyword Diversification –Exact targeted keywords as anchor text was useful to get on top about some months ago but now that can be the key reason of penalty. That always sounds unnatural and you know Google always loves natural links . So tweak your keywords using synonyms, prefixing or suffixing any other keywords, singular-plural forms, preposition/articles in between or by changing the keyword order. Also don’t forget to include some links using URL i.e. without any anchor text.

Content Diversification – Write content for users; create value etc. that what Google says. Well, what you really should do is that use quality unique articles to develop contextual links. Though it’s natural that the same article can be syndicated among several content aggregators but it is safer to use an article version once only. Article spinning can be great for save your time; however I must suggest checking each spun version thoroughly to ensure those are human readable.

Link Type Diversification – Consider building some non SEO friendly links for the sake of SEO! Yes, you can’t have all “dofollow” links, that’s unnatural and suspicious. The natural look link structure should have incoming links from the images, nofollow text links etc. from the relevant source.

URL Diversification – You must not build links particularly for the Homepage or only for some of the SEO targeted inside pages always. Consider to make some links for the non-SEO pages such as about us, contact us etc. There should be some balance in the inbound link flow so that it seems natural.

Go ahead, and make your link building strategy confidently by keeping the above points in mind.