Post Penguin Online Marketing Techniques

Another day, and another Google algorithm update sends SEO marketers into a tizzy. This time it’s the Penguin Update, and with it over sixty percent of webmasters report that they’ve been affected by Google’s “over-optimization” algorithm.

Now webmasters are scrambling trying to get back the SEO power they once had, from legitimate small businesses caught in the update to spammers trying to find a way to make money off of Google search results. If you’ve been caught up in the Penguin update, how can you get your site back at the top of the search page?

Move Your links

Penguin made the location of links even more important than ever. Get your links as far up the page as possible. Think of the “above the fold” method, and make the anchor text as diverse as possible. Writing and hyper linking the word “Concrete mixer Albuquerque” fifty times in the copy is not going to work.

Stay away from linking in the footer too much and going overboard with site wide linking. Google’s penalizing links that look too much like an afterthought.

Use Video

So far, Google hasn’t been that active on penalizing sites for having duplicate video content, but it’s possible that they will in a future update. If you focus on uploading lots of new and unique video content, not only will your site rank well on Google, you’ll also rank high on You Tube searches.

Link Out To Quality Sites

This is another piece of long standing advice that has added weight after Penguin If your site links out to anywhere and anybody, Penguin will notice it and your rankings will suffer. Review what a quality, relative link to your site is, link to it, and your rankings won’t suffer. If you’re not sure if a site you’re about to link to is a quality one, do a search on sites like SEMrush, and you can see how the site has ranked in Google in the past.

Find Some Offline Publicity

If you can, do a project with a local charity who will be willing to promote your project on their site. You could probably even get a local TV station to run a story on you and post it on their website. It establishes you as an expert, a good person, and gets you a link from legitimize media.

Break The Link Sell / Link Buy Habit

The type of artificial linking that came from buying and selling links on other sites is one of the quickest ways to be penalized by Penguin. So stop trying to find a shortcut and start building quality links.

Write Original, Quality Copy

“Content is king” is quickly turning into “Content is emperor.” Penguin set out to punish sites for publishing duplicate copy. If you aren’t pushing out original related content on your site, expect your ranking to plummet. If you’ve been the victim of stolen copy, try this trick: date all of your blog posts. Many sites don’t like readers knowing how old their copy is, but if Google sees that you published first, that establishes you as the originator of the copy.

Manually Enter Your links

This is an old hand coder trick. If you go with an automated linking service, it’s possible that you’ll over do it on even the high quality links, and Google will still penalize you. If you’re entering in links by hand, one at a time, it’s easier to know exactly how many links a particular page on your site will have.