How to Get Rid of Unwanted Backlinks

It used to be that sites linking to yours couldn’t harm you. Then along came Google’s Penguin Update.

Now for many websites (and a lot of business models that involve selling 50,000 links for $10) the sky is falling. Websites that have built an unnatural looking backlink profile using a strategy of aggressive exact match anchor text usage are setting off Google’s spam alarm.

So what now? Well, there’s really no way around a good old-fashioned backlink audit. You can pay somebody to sort through them and identify the worst offenders, or you can do it yourself.

If you decide to go it alone, the first challenge is answering what are bad links? On the upside, they usually aren’t too hard to find.

Now that Yahoo’s Site Explorer has gone the way of Google supplemental results, if you want really good backlink data there’s probably going to be a cost involved in even doing your own link excavation. A few tools offer some free info but require a payment for the really deep data.

If you've been hit by Google Penguin or an unnatural links penalty, you’re gonna want to drill, baby, drill. The more backlinks you can evaluate the better.

A few of my favorite backlink tools:

• SEOMoz Open Site Explorer
• ahrefs Site Explorer
• Majestic site Explorer

All three of these tools will give you a really detailed, clear look at your backlinks and even anchor text distribution. The issue is you may also get different data from all three. They each have their own indexes and may report different backlink numbers. So while only using one tool may let a few links fall between the cracks, right now, using one or more of these tools may be your best shot at finding the backlinks you need to get rid of.

Taking Out the Backlink Trash

Once you get past the exploratory phase of digging through your backlinks and identifying the ones you want to get rid of, how do you get them taken down?

The answer is simple: It’s not easy.

Now, I welcome anyone to weigh in on how they’ve managed to get backlinks removed, but in my experience, the only surefire way I know of to have backlinks taken down is to ask. Somebody put it up, so somebody needs to take it down, and that means reaching out and making the request.

Virginia Nussey on the Bruce Clay Blog offered some advice on how to send link removal requests:

Create a template email requesting link removal that you’ll send to the webmasters in charge of the links identified as low quality. The template should candidly explain that you are an SEO or site owner trying to recover from a Google penalty and would he or she please remove the following links. List the URLs where the links can be found, the URL on your site they point to, the anchor text ─ all the info needed to easily find the link you’re requesting removed.

She noted there are four possible outcomes. The website either removes the link and tells you, removes the link and doesn’t tell you, doesn’t reply or do anything, or responds by saying they will remove the link if you pay them.

During this process, Nussey suggested keeping detailed records of your efforts to remove links (she suggests compiling a spreadsheet with linking URL, contact name, contact email, date of link removal request, and response/action taken by the linking site), which you could then send to Google as part of a reconsideration request to show you’ve made the effort to remove every bad link aimed at your site.

And as though the idea of having to contact a bunch of people wasn’t bad enough, in a lot of cases figuring out who to contact may prove to be your biggest hurdle. But don’t worry, there are more than a few ways to skin this cat.

Go to the Source

Go back to the company or freelancer you hired in the first place. If it wasn’t you and it was your predecessor or a company you contracted with, then hunt down the original agreement. Follow the money backward if you have to.

If you purchased backlink services, whoever sold them to you should be your first contact. If you bought in bulk there’s a decent possibility the process was automated and hopefully whatever easy method put you on 1,000 websites overnight, can also take you off. If they don’t have an automated system, then they probably have a network of minions they can send the message to.

The point is, if you didn’t get these backlinks yourself, start by reaching out to the person who did. Best case scenario: they may be able to turn what could be a long, drawn-out burden into a conversation with a single point of contact. If you can make it this simple, count yourself lucky and think very carefully about whose help you enlist for link acquisition in the future.

Look for a Contact on the Site

If you can’t get them taken down as easily as they went up, then your next course of action may be to start trying to reach each site whose links you’d like to ditch. I know, it sounds awful and it probably will be.

The biggest challenge here, aside from the annoyance of having to send all of those link removal request emails, is to find people to receive them. You may have better luck finding contacts with some blogs, especially those selling paid reviews, or link space independently.

Although some people make it pretty easy for you to find them on the web, others make it more difficult.

For those who are intent on turning you into a cyber-Nancy Drew, there are a few tricks to hunting people down. However, in a lot of cases, there may not be an individual behind the blog or site your link is on because it’s part of a large blog network. In that case, where you can’t reach a real person for one site, you’re going to have to go to the top. Fortunately, there a few tools to help you figure out which way is up.

• Domaintools: If you want to find out who owns the site your link is on, visit domain tools or type “whois.sc” in front of a URL. Either way will get you to some very useful info. Now, this is another free-ish tool with the most useful and interesting info hiding behind a paid curtain. But without paying, you can often find names, email addresses and even companies associated with URLs. Provided they aren’t hidden behind a private registration. Even if you can’t get those details, you might find the name of the company that owns the domain as well as how many other domains they own and are associated with.
• C-Class Checker: If you have a list of all the links you want to get rid of, you can run them through a bulk C-class checker to see how many of them are on the same C-class. It matters because if you have multiple sites hosted on the same C-class it may cut down the number of individual sites you have to contact. There’s a good chance that websites on the same C-Class are connected through one main entity. So that means you only have to contact one person, or company, to try to get the links removed from that entire group of sites.
• SpyonWeb: If you only have 1 URL to work with, this tool lets you find out what other domains they are associated with. Just put in a website URL, IP address or even the Google analytics or AdSense code and you can find all of the websites that are connected to it. Not only may you find a major websites with a person you can contact, you can see if any of your other links come from this network. If one site is really bad, chances are you can afford to lose all the links from the network it is in.
• Social Media: Whether you’re trying to reach the company that bought your links, a major site in a network or a website that is linking to you, if they have social media profiles, you can use them. I’d strongly advise reaching out to people quietly, and politely as your initial approach. However, if after a few friendly emails you still can’t get results, go all social on them. Outcries on Facebook can get calls returned, and dissatisfied tweets can result in refunds.

Social attacks should be a last resort. In a lot of cases the kinds of sites where you find bad links, won’t have social available. If they didn’t take the time to write content with compete sentences, they probably didn’t bother to make a Facebook page. So you’d most likely have to be looking for the company behind the network to even find someone to complain to.

Getting your links taken down may be as easy as it was placing the order for them, or it might be a miserable battle that eats up months of your life. If you do manage to lose the links that have caused you problems, then consider it a major win either way.

Over Optimization put your site on flag list

Does Over Optimization put your site on flag list ?

According to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s search spam team.Google is working on a tweak to the algorithm that will punish sites that are too optimized for SEO.

“Basic Idea is to level the playing ground a little bit. So all of those people who have sort of been doing…over-optimization or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level. “

After news of the pending over optimization algorithm update hit the web the other week, a few of my clients wanted to know how this was going to affect their websites. Were their sites at risk of an over optimization penalty? I read a few more recaps of the panel discussion to get a better understanding of what exactly “over optimization” means to Google, and I told them that as long as their site has been practicing white hat SEO all along (which it definitely has since my company started managing it) then you are in no danger of being flagged for over optimization. Matt Cutts even admitted, “If you’re white hat or doing very little SEO, you’re not going to be affected by this change.”

This update is designed to help smaller, mom-and-pop websites that are producing great content and have user-friendly websites to perform better in the search engines, even if they don’t have the SEO budget to compete with the big brands. Personally, I think that’s great. There are plenty of smaller websites out there that do everything by the book when it comes to SEO, but they are blocked out of the SERPs because bigger brands can just dump money into their SEO campaigns. Giving these quality websites the opportunity to really make an impact in the search engines is long overdue.

Google Penguin Update: Don’t Forget About Duplicate Content

There has been a ton of speculation regarding Google’s Penguin update. Few know exactly what the update specifically does, and how it works with Google’s other signals exactly. Google always plays its hand close to its chest.

“While we can’t divulge specific signals because we don’t want to give people a way to game our search results and worsen the experience for users, our advice for webmasters is to focus on creating high quality sites that create a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics,” Google’s Matt Cutts said in the announcement of the update.

He also said, “The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines.”

“We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings,” he said. To me, that indicates that this is about all webspam techniques – not just keyword stuffing and link schemes, but also everything in between.

So it’s about quality guidelines. Cutts was pretty clear about that, and that’s why we’ve been discussing some of the various things Google mentions specifically in those guidelines. So far, we’ve talked about:

Cloaking
Links
Hidden text and links
Keyword stuffing

Another thing on the quality guidelines list is: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Of course, like the rest of the guidelines, this is nothing new, but in light of the Penguin update, it seems worth examining the guidelines again, if for no other reason than to provide reminders or educate those who are unfamiliar. Duplicate content seems like one of those that could get sites into trouble, even when they aren’t intentionally trying to spam Google. Even Google says in its help center article on the topic, “Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic,” Google says. “Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”

Google lists the following as steps you can take to address any duplicate content issues you may have:

• Use 301s: If you’ve restructured your site, use 301 redirects (“RedirectPermanent”) in your .htaccess file to smartly redirect users, Googlebot, and other spiders. (In Apache, you can do this with an .htaccess file; in IIS, you can do this through the administrative console.)
• Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don’t link to http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page and http://www.example.com/page/index.htm.
• Use top-level domains: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top-level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We’re more likely to know that http://www.example.de contains Germany-focused content, for instance, than http://www.example.com/de or http://de.example.com.
• Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.
• Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).
• Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details. In addition, you can use the Parameter Handling tool to specify how you would like Google to treat URL parameters.
• Avoid publishing stubs: Users don’t like seeing “empty” pages, so avoid placeholders where possible. For example, don’t publish pages for which you don’t yet have real content. If you do create placeholder pages, use the noindex meta tag to block these pages from being indexed.
• Understand your content management system: Make sure you’re familiar with how content is displayed on your web site. Blogs, forums, and related systems often show the same content in multiple formats. For example, a blog entry may appear on the home page of a blog, in an archive page, and in a page of other entries with the same label.
• Minimize similar content: If you have many pages that are similar, consider expanding each page or consolidating the pages into one. For instance, if you have a travel site with separate pages for two cities, but the same information on both pages, you could either merge the pages into one page about both cities or you could expand each page to contain unique content about each city.

Don’t block Google from duplicate content. Google advises against this, because it won’t be able to detect when URLs point to the same content, and will have to treat them as separate pages. Use the canonical link element (rel=”canonical”).

Penguin possibly solution

So much talks about this penguin update and lot of versions. but most of things is clear from start.

1. google provided examples what contextual links from un-related page is what that they fight right now. It mean what that kind of unrelated contextual links can lead to negative juice. Really it can be more - unrelated sidebar/footer links also can lead to negative juice.

that lot of spam in serps happen because lot of old sites used such tricks for long time and many have interlinked all their sites + link exchanges (often not in same niche).

Google now giving out penalty to sites with such unrelated links, but looks so little sites pass such 'quality test', it why many spam in serps and mostly broad search results now (it wikipedia, youtube and amazon).

I thinking what page category classifier system launched now for inbound/outbound links and if so much links not in same category (or in lsi or main site category as cancer->health) from/to your site - site get hit. Also avoid sites with mixed content (which hard to categorize).
Just check adwords - ad groups ideas, it show what them have some kind of classifier now.

2. according to matt cuts speech - them looking to give bonus for fresh sites without lot of links but with great content. So them right now analyzing user factors (time on site, bounce ratio) for lot of more sites.

This serps is still updating and why it changing all time at this days. Looks big moving will for long time (peoples will try fixed and new 'zebra' updates coming soon. User factors going to be one from most important ranking factor in future.

I really i not understanding why peoples not looking into things which bigG showing them before update and lot of strange theories at all forums. G not using any randomization, just this factors for now. Also backlink profiles/on-page seo not tell you full story, because this update about links categorization.

General sites can link niche sites, but opposite in some limited amount. Many unrelated links to sites in other niches causing red flag.

Really it good, because lot of competition vanished now, but hard to tell what them will do next (trouble is to small amount of sites passing quality mark).

So penguin solution ways :

1. remove all links from your pages to unrelated urls (which not in your niche). When health site link mortgage site (in context or not) it looks bad for penguin.

This is absolutely need to do now to recover your positions. Also remember about other google new penalization factors as ads at top of screen, only keywords in title/desc/keywords/h1/b. mix keywords with lsi and some additional text. I have found what many pages ranks not for optimized keyword but for something else. So try to use lsi but not exact keyword in your backlinks and use min 50% of full page url.

2. Inbound links, most hard part. But i think removal of outbound links will enough at this time. Few my sites show stable rising after removal of outbound unrelated links.

My site and Penguin update

I was on 1st page of Google on my main keyword and also in many keyword related to my niche.
After the update I went to now I'm on my main keyword.
I also had 100's of keywords related to my niche on first page of google.
with millions of competition. I got my site #1 only mostly using scrapbox only abit of on page SEO.

SO BELOW I'll explain what's happening NOW

when I started this site few years back the site had the keyword on the domain with extention (.com) the was wikipedia  was wikipedia site had the keyword on the domain with extention (.co.uk) so I got myself a domain with the keyword with extension (.org) I used wordpress to create the site
used some SEO plugin like all in one seo etc.. did some onpage SEO but not over, no more them 100 words so didn't take me long to get on  them started doing some manual link building and eventually got to position 2 passing even wikipedia but not the the site with the keyword + .com on the domain name. them I got scrapbox
the best software I ever got. this got me to position. I just used crap over spammed lists that I could get hold here and there. I'm too lazy to scrap myself :) I stayed in the top position for over 2 years I made xxxxx of $.
I survived the PANDA UPDATE with no changes to my Rank in Google.

The Google Panda Fiasco And The “Moronic” Google Penguin Update

The other day Google released yet another Google Panda update. Panda 3.3, 3.4 or maybe it was even panda 3.5? Soon after they released what they’re calling the “webspam algorithm update” which they later named the “Google Penguin Update”.

The specific names don’t really matter; what matters is how they affect you. (Quick Note: this post isn’t about panda/penguin specifics, it’s about Google, algorithm changes and the future of online marketing – a little more generic)

According to Google, the last public update was Panda 3.4 which they officially launched on March 23. But since then there’s been a dramatic change in the algorithm. A change that was supposedly designed to fight spam and improve the quality of search results. (The damn Penguin)

Unfortunately, the Penguin update has been the last nail in the coffin for thousands of people around the globe. A month or so ago I wrote a post about a previous Panda update that was said to affect just 1% of search queries.

At the time hundreds of thousands of webmasters around the world proved that statistic to be very wrong. The results were catastrophic.  And now… Matt Cutts has said this update will “only affect 3% of search queries”. To that I say what a load of BS.

If you log on to any online marketing related forum or even the Google Webmaster’s forum itself, you’ll find thousands upon thousands of webmasters complaining about this update. It was supposed to target sites that were keyword stuffing and using other dodgy black hat tactics. (It has and hasn’t)

When really all its done is brought terrible results to the top of Google and pushed great websites to the bottom. Ok – so it has done some good. Many great sites have risen, but countless others have lost their rankings. In my opinion collateral damage is not ok. 

Google has pushed all the BRANDS to the top. Brand sites are now dominating, more so than ever before. And the big thing that’s got so many marketers outraged is this: niche sites have been killed. 

Really, there are only three types of sites. (Minus article directories and web2.0’s)

• Brands
• Niche Sites
• Authority Sites

As you probably already know, a huge percentage of Internet Marketers make their money from niche sites. Niche sites are generally sites that are built to make money. So it seems Google is out to destroy our incomes and improve search results too?

All jokes aside… Niche sites are typically sites built around a single topic and most of the time they are between 10 and 300 pages.

The problem is a lot of niche sites are full of terrible content. Usually they are 5-10 page sites built for the sole purpose of ranking for 1-10 keywords and making a small profit. Internet Marketers have been building these sites for years because they are guaranteed earners.

Over the past few years however, marketers have gotten lazy and built terrible websites full of outsourced content they know nothing about. Most of those sites have been hit, which is fair enough. But what about the excellent niche sites? What about the sites with 10-300 pages of superb content that genuinely helps people?

Yep – those sites have also been crushed which makes me furious. The funny thing is, black hat SEO’s have been badly penalized. Which is fair enough to a degree. I believe that webmasters should be able to use whatever SEO they like to blast their sites to the top; just as long as they provide value and deserve to rank there.

It’s not just niche sites that have been hit, individual blogs and small businesses have also been destroyed.

The problem is it’s so damn random. Countless white hat SEO users have been hit. People who’ve followed Google’s rules to the T; they’ve been spanked. I was actually talking to a woman the other day who spent 4 years of her life building a health and beauty blog.

The blog had over 600 pages of excellent content. After this update she practically lost every single ranking and her traffic came to a halt… literally overnight. Not cool at all Google…

So niche sites have been penalized badly and thrown to the bottom of the pile. They are ranking in third place despite their individual quality or link profiles. Next authority sites. It’s kind of difficult to define authority sites as they are essentially big niche websites.

Authority sites are enormous sites that specialize in one broad topic. Sites that cover everything on a topic and generally have excellent content. There’s a fine line between authority sites and brand sites. Authority sites as of this last update, have been placed below brand sites.

I used to have a couple of authority sites in obscure niches, they each had 300+ blog posts and were incredible resources for their visitors. I used white hat SEO on them in terms of link building. Obviously white hat link building doesn’t technically exist. But it’s what I call white hat link building…

I built manual backlinks using the 1 article = 1 backlink principle.

I only did guest blogging, article marketing, web2.0’s and social bookmarking + social signals.  While those sites haven’t been sandboxed or thrown to the bottom, they’ve lost a crap load of traffic. All because of Google’s stupid algorithm changes, especially the damn penguin.

My point is, even though those sites followed the rules to the T; they’ve lost a load of traffic and rankings. Which to me is completely unfair. So niche sites have been killed off big time and so have authority sites. The majority of medium to large authority sites have lost a substantial percentage of their traffic if not all.

The problem is this; it never seems like Google targets certain websites. Small sites, big sites, sites using black hat SEO and sites using white hat SEO – they all get hit. Many awful sites seem to just slip through the cracks and even thrive while others get demolished.

Useful Info On the new Google Penguin Update

What niches were affected the most by this update?”
Gambling,Hosting,weight loss, insurance, make money online, pharma, Loan --> Guys those are the most competitive niche of the web and the 2 websites I managed which dropped are categorized in the 2 first niches I mentioned.

Why were these niches affected my by the penguin update?

1) More back links (broader, and more in quantity)
2) More Keywords oriented content
3) More Black hat Methods
4) Well at the end more spam, they were the models of a working BH SEO strategy (I believe those websites has served to build a spam selection models based on their signals, the crappy results we see at the moment on those peculiar niches and others tough ones tends to concur on that matter. It is as they have reset those niches)

Here are my questions based of the thousands of posts I’ve been reading the last couple of days, I've barely sleep the last couple of days in order to be able to work efficiently with this update in spite of most of the websites went fine here.

Are Link Pyramids still efficient?

What tends to prove my spun content theory above is that crappy spun Web 2.0 is ranking in the search engines. (That’s a straight WTF for me there)

Web 2.0 are usually heavily back linked and served a buffer websites purpose and they increased in ranking (hum interesting) So spunned spammed web 2.0 are still rankings.

That led me to conclude to 4 possibilities:
1) The link juice is now not passing for more than 1 tiers going from the lower.
2) Backlink have lost a ton of value (going to prove otherwise below) and the SEO juice of those web 2.0 properties come from the main domain of those web 2.0
3) If the OBL of the web 2.0 are targeting one or a very limited numbers of websites then no value (which is quite relevant a spam signals)
4) A combination of the above factors.

Is Blog Commenting and Xrumer Campaign Dead ?

This is a tough question here, and my answer will be so far a no.

I know someone who has been playing with SB massively for a month or 2 now (30k links indexed in that amount of time) and Keywords oriented content, and he has been through the update easily. It is a very disturbing example!

He used a load of anchors though and increased his link diversity with many kind of links, but most of them were targeted to his website.

I've also used SB and Xrumer straightly on my websites but only on highly selected list (edu / gov / high PR / AA / and very few high OBL ones) and they remain un-hit !

Did EMD gain in value ?

Yes, I believe they did! The URL gained in a value that's for sure. "python-hosting", "make-money-online.co.uk" are bluffing examples and so are the web 2.0 properties which has the keywords in URL.

The domain authority may have also gained in value as can show error 404 pages from yahoo.answer for exemple.

However, I always thought they will loose in relevancy as they tend to attract more spam websites, so i find this a little confusing to be honest.

What is left from all these to be responsible of our drops ?

1) Massive Link Pinging
2) Irrelevant Contextual backlinks
3) Link Pyramid Juice Lost
4) On site SEO
6) Anchors Diversity.
7) Recurring OBL on some Web 2.0 properties, or Bookmarking Accounts

Don't forget that for this update, not only spammed website got hit, and also white hat ones. So what kind of signals can be shared across the 2 methods beyond the spam ? (I’m actually asking the question to you guys !)

What can i do to fix my website ?

1) Add fresh and quality content (this will never hurt you and may rank for new keywords as fresh content may have been valued)
2) On site Optimization such as net linking, page speed, rich content, sitemap, content relevancy. However, pay attention to your inner links titles so far. Go as descriptive as you can and forget the keyword stuffing on this. I'm still reviewing the effect of such netlinking on my website which has been hurt and it is a possibility that it was targeted as i had this keyword which was ranking exclusively thanks to netlinking and it had dropped. I'll come with results.
3) Manual Backlinking, Manual web 2.0 properties, High PR site as usual as long as they are no return on the efficiency of SEO tools. This is what i would do actually, until I’m 100% positive that we can use them again and we will the question remains on the how.
4) For Penalized sites you can redirect your page to a new one with the same content and no backlinks. The penalty would more likely doesn't go through the 301. I'm testing that method on a dropped page and on a penalized one.

Additional Comment
"2) Backlinks have lost a ton of value (going to proove otherwise below) and the SEO juice of those web 2.0 propoties come from the main domain of those web 2.0"

after 3 days of analyzing my webs - i could not agree more on this point.

i have 1 web still ranking at first spot, and all that web had is 100-200 web 2.0 linking at it. No blast to those web20 were done at all. Just pure web 2.0 link, that's all

and i have bunch of webs totally dropped by 50-100 position, those webs had web 2.0 but and all those were blast with thousands shitty links.

So what happened?
web 2.0 stopped serving as a buffer
web 2.0 stopped passing though link juice to my money site and they have dropped

surely, i had some other Backlinking sources, unfortunately can't see any logical pattern on BMD, AMR,NHS or similar stuff

My sites have been hit pretty hard, but I have a couple of interesting observations at this point:

pages with keywords I had targeted in backlink anchor texts have dropped 50-70 places
pages which were not the target of those keywords are frequently ranking higher than pages which were targeted (so site is still ranking for interesting keywords, but on un-related pages)
some pages are ranking for keywords related to my niche, but which I never targeted (so if I targeted "coffee mugs" I am now ranking for "cups of java" - ok, terrible example, but you get the idea)

I've been spending a painful amount of time analyzing Penguin's effects, and talking with other bulldog SEO</acronym>'s to discover what factors were implemented in the latest algorithm update. One thing that we all instantly agreed on, was that the Penguin update has been unlike anything we've ever seen before. We expect to see a major revamp and tweaks to the algo soon.

Google Penguin Update: 5 Types of Link Issues Harming Some Affected Websites

Are you angry and looking for answers about why your rankings vanished after Google released its Penguin update? One common factor thus far appears to be the signals of links that are pointing to your website, early analysis indicates.

The main purpose of the Penguin update is to put a deep freeze on web spam in Google's search results. By extension, a big piece of that web spam appears to be links from low-quality networks.

Natural Links

Before we get into the new findings, first it’s important to understand a bit about Google and links.

Above all, Google considers links as editorial "votes". So, theoretically, the sites that receive the most votes should rank higher on Google because more people find them valuable.

Google analyzes the quantity, quality, and relevance of websites that link to yours. When Google looks at your link profile, they’re looking at such things as what types of websites link to yours, how quickly you acquired these links, and the anchor text (the clickable words) used by the linking website. When Google's algorithm detects such things as a large number of new links or an imbalance in the anchor text, it raises a big red flag.

As Google and many SEOs have preached for years, you’ll attract more links by creating unique, worthwhile content that others will want to link to naturally. If you want to learn more about Google, links, and link building, definitely read our posts “Why Links Matter”, "Filthy Linking Rich", and “Introduction to Google PageRank: Myths & Facts”.

Unnatural Links

For companies that have been hit by the Penguin update, one common theme appears to be a severe lack of natural links, according to a blog post by Glenn Gabe at G-Squared Interactive. He noted five common issues these sites are all facing:

1. Paid text links using exact match anchor text: For companies that want to rank for a certain term (such as “red widgets”) one way to accomplish this is by buying links from other websites with that exact matching anchor text. This is against Google’s guidelines, as Google would consider this a paid link that exists solely to manipulate PageRank, rather than to provide any value to visitors.
2. Comment spam: Two things proved problematic for websites trying to unnaturally rank for specific keywords: signatures in comments that contained exact match anchor text; and people who used a spammy user name (e.g., Best India SEO Company) as exact match text.
3. Guest posts on questionable sites: Although guest posts are a legitimate way to earn links to your site, sites dinged by the Penguin had links pointing to their website from sites filled with low-quality articles where the focus was on the anchor text rather than the content.
4. Article marketing sites: Thin content featuring links with exact match anchor text were another common factor among affected sites.
5. Links from dangerous sites: Do you have inbound links from sites that have been flagged for malware, numerous pop-ups, or other spammy issues? This was another factor that caused websites to lose their Google rankings, so links to and from web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” are a danger.

Ultimately, the Penguin update didn’t really change anything that Google has deemed unacceptable. Google has just evolved its algorithm to catch up to those who try to loophole their way to higher Google rankings (and, to be fair, some who simply don't know any better or fully understand SEO). If any (or all) of the above are your sole link building tactic(s), you probably aren't doing enough to rank prominently long-term on Google anymore.

For those unfamiliar, Google has a section devoted to link schemes and makes no secret that such practices “can negatively impact your site's ranking in search results.”

Penguin Recovery?

So, fix all these link issues, eliminate any instances of keyword stuffing, spun content, cloaking, and other spammy tactics and you're guaranteed a Penguin recovery, right? Not necessarily. There are never any magical guarantees for gaining or regaining top search rankings and Google is notoriously tight-lipped about the exact signals it uses to detect web spam.

Additionally, Google is constantly making tweaks to its search algorithm. So check your traffic in analytics and make sure your traffic indeed was impacted starting on or after April 24. If your traffic vanished before this date, another change might be to blame – there was also a parked domain classifier issue the week prior to Penguin's launch in addition to the latest Panda refresh on April 19.

Regardless, with the new tag team of Panda and Penguin, Google can put the smack down on websites that appear to be creating or supporting spam to increase their rankings in search engines. So even if you fix all these link signals, you still must make sure you have quality content.

But even beyond that, there are hundreds of other factors at play that Google's algorithm looks at. Among them:

• Does your site have too many ads?
• Does you site have fresh content.
• Is your business on Google+?

Life After Penguin

While it’s much easier to blame Google and sign a petition begging Google to kill its Penguin update, this isn't the time to give up. Now is the time to look at your website, do a proper, careful evaluation of your inbound link profile, clean up your website, and devise a smarter marketing and business strategy that doesn't rely on Google for the majority of your traffic and income so you can escape the endless loop of Google algorithm updates:

This isn’t to say Google or any search engine results are perfect – though now might be a good time to check out alternatives like Google's closest competitor, Bing, or upstarts Blekko and DuckDuckGo. Google has created a Penguin feedback form for those who feel websites have been hit unfairly, but this update is algorithmic as opposed to a manual penalty (i.e., reviewed by a human), so don’t expect to see whatever rankings you’ve lost miraculously restored over night.

If you’re a small business, there are ways to Google-proof your marketing. And don't forget to look for non-Google-based link opportunities.

But above all, sometimes when these algorithmic changes roll out, one of the wisest moves is to be patient and carefully analyze any changes before you react blindly to the latest penalty – because by the time you do that, Google will release the latest Panda or its next iteration of Penguin, and you'll be trapped again in the endless loop of relying solely on a third party (Google) for your livelihood.