The Growing Importance of Link Audits with Google Penguin 3.0 Since Google has rolled out the Penguin 3.0 update, SEO experts and webmasters are scurrying to understand whether or not their rankings have been affected. Since Google stated that the entire roll out may take a few weeks, if your website hasn’t experienced any drastic changes, you may notice it a little later. The important question everyone is asking is – how will this affect my website? To answer this question, you need to first understand what Penguin really is. What is Google Penguin? First launched in April 2012, this algorithm was first introduced to fight web based spam in search results. The focus on this particular update is to identify websites that use spamming or black hat methods to win the system, the most common target being paid links. Google penalizes all practices that violate the guidelines set by them. In the latest update, the search engine giant has added more signals to the algorithm. However, so far it seems it has affected only about 1% of all English queries. Who Will be Affected by this Update? It is important to know what to look out for to make sure that your website isn’t affected by this update. Here are some common practices that your website needs to stay away from –
Paid Links
Unnatural link removal services providers have gotten extremely business troubleshooting issues websites have brought upon themselves. Google has been against paid links ever since the beginning of time. By spending money to have others link back to your site, you are essentially risking getting removed from search results.
Blog Networks
The search engine has been rather harsh on blog networks and especially over the last few months they have taken down even some of the bigger ones. The practice of paying these platforms to leverage guest blogging opportunities is considered as wrong as paying for the links.
Over-Optimized Anchors
While there was a point in time when matching links to keywords was considered to be a good practice, it has slowly declined from becoming a less significant one to a practice that is frowned upon. In simple words, many incidences of the same anchor text on your website is perceived to be spam like.
Low Quality Backlinks
If you have been procrastinating about your link audit, now is the time to it. Just like a back link from a reputed website is considered to be an up vote, one from a low quality portal can work against you. If you are linked back from spam website, Google takes it as a signal that your website may be a spam portal as well. Penguin-Proofing your Website The primary goal of this search engine giant is to make sure that the search engine provides to its users the most relevant results possible. If Google delivered only spam websites, users would simply stop using it. The best way to make sure that such updates do not affect your portal in any way is to simply stay away from black hat practices. Focus on creating quality content that helps your audiences and your pages will be fine. Get more information on: Link Audit and Unnatural Link Removal Services