SEO After Penguin Update

By now you should have heard of Google’s Penguin update. The big question now is,

“How should I SEO my website after Penguin update?”

The best way to answer this question is by showing you some case studies.

Case Study 1 – Acne Treatment & Acne

Below is a search for Acne Treatment. Ranking #1 is a page from Facebook.com.

The same Facebook page also ranks #7 on the keyword “Acne”. Impressive isn’t it?

You must be thinking this Facebook page must have some great backlinks. Well, let’s see.

To analyze its backlinks, we use ahrefs.com. Below is a summary of its backlink profile.

This Facebook page has 2000+ backlinks. I went through more than 50 of them, trying to see how quality those backlinks are. But guess what, almost all of them are junk links!

Below is a typical webpage that links to this url. It is a standalone anchor text that appears out of nowhere.

Here’s another typical one. It is added to the footer of a non-English webpage.

Another standalone link that appears out of nowhere.

Most of the links are either using ‘acne’ or ‘acne treatment’ as the anchor text. Now you know why this page is ranking high in these terms.

Can the penguin smells junk backlinks? What do you think……

Case Study 2 – Roofing Toronto

Do a search for roofing Toronto and you will see the top result is from a website called Professional Roofers.

A search in href.com reveals that it only has 65 backlinks.

Are these high quality and relevant backlinks? Again, we’ll see.

Below is a “typical” backlink it has. It is a link from an article called The Delicious Kiss. Huh, what’s that?

Another link from a completely irrelevant article.

Here is the ultimate. Read the content. It will make you laugh.

You can do your own research. Most of its backlinks are junk links like these.

But there is one thing that makes all the difference. This site has a link from business.com directory, which has a PageRank of 3 (and business.com itself has a PageRank of 6).

Notice that the anchor text listed in business.com directory is Professional Roofers, not Roofers Toronto. The reason why this website can rank high in Roofers Toronto is because of the spam links it has built because the anchor text for those spam links are either Roofers Toronto or Roofers In Toronto.

So What Is SEO After Penguin Update?

Here’s what’s happening. Google Penguin is now putting more emphasis on site authority. With that authority, a site can now rank high in the keyword it wants with a slight boost in backlinks, eventhough those backlinks are pure junks, with  0 or unranked PageRank.

In the case of Acne and Acne Treatment, the Facebook page gets its authority from its root domain, Facebook.com. In the case of Roofing Toronto, professionalroofers.com gets its authority from Business.com.

Once you get some form of authority, all you need is some (or many, depending on how competitive the keywords are) anchor-text-focused backlinks and you can rank for the keywords you want.

33 thoughts to “SEO After Penguin Update”

  1. Google and other large search engines are constantly working on methods of what they hope will be a good experience for both their advertising base and their consumer base, the problem here is that Google has the cart before the horse.

    When you do that you send a message that the consumer is not as important as the advertiser that is not a good thing, over all I have noticed relevance and human interaction as something that Google has a huge issue with and so far they are not fixing the problem, just the other day I was looking up the world exhilaration, you know what Google showed me? Acceleration, So Im like dude, what is up inside that noggin, cause it taint no AI

  2. hey there and thanks on your info. I’ve certainly picked up something new from right here. I did on the other hand expertise some technical points the use of this site, as I experienced to reload the site lots of occasions previous to I may just get it to load correctly. I were pondering if your web hosting is OK? Not that I’m complaining, however slow loading instances occasions will often impact your placement in google and can harm your high-quality score if advertising and marketing with Adwords. Well I am adding this RSS to my e-mail and could look out for a lot more of your respective interesting content. Ensure that you update this again very soon..

  3. Ya off course Back links play very important role for high keywords ranking and go up in Search. This blog is give best examples about usefulness of backlinks. Thanks for giving the best information about Penguin and backlinks connections.

  4. Hi Kenneth,

    This post is very useful.

    Thanks for putting your thoughts into words.

    I will keep reading your blog updates.

    Regards.

  5. Hi,

    Thanks for sharing your findings. I have been trying to find as much information as possible about the penguin update and you have covered some points that I have not yet some across.

    Cheers

  6. Hello Kenneth:

    I really didn’t understand this Penguin Update of Google the god, (Panda before this). With your post I get some understanding of what I was trying to ignore. I can see that it’s very important not to ignore it and, on the contrary, making what’s neccesary to adapt our pages to these Google’s requirements. Thanks for the light.
    Regards

  7. I dont really agree with this article…..maybe MOST of them are “junk” links. but there could be a few high quality RELEVANT back links. I believe those are the ones that boost your rankings…not irrelevant high ranking backlink sites…It would also make more sense for an update…….

  8. Thank you so much for this great post! I have been wondering this myself. I have been doing work for my Toronto roofing company and I was feeling stuck. You have given me some great ideas and I think that they will really help me out. Thanks again!

  9. I think the best way to get loved by Google is first getting loved by the visitors/community. Make content that’s highly shareable (read: awesome content) and be as natural and as human as you can. The days where you could trick and manipulate search engines are over, plain and simple, and Google’s put an emphasis on that with both the big bad Panda and Penguin.

  10. The only way out is to build your content and increase backlinks(regardless of quality or quantity)naturally. There is no short cut to success. Time proved your effort.

    Even, until now, online marketer still confused about Alexa’s ranking.

    If so, read on. I received an appreciation from famous forum about this sharing :)

    Users love to ask questions like the following:
    1)What does Alexa rank means?
    2)Alexa ranking problems?
    3)How to increase Alexa ranking?
    4)Much more.

    Well…well…well…here it goes!

    Actually there is nothing you can do to improve your alexa ranking. It is determine by visitors using the alexa toolbar. Anyway Alexa ranking is only indicative and does not say much about your website. Try increasing your Google ranking, that would be a much more important exercise.

    As time went on and I gained more knowledge online I realized that Alexa means nothing when it comes to your success or failure of a website. Its simply a number that can be easily manipulated.

    I have a site that gets about 200 visits a day that only has an Alexa around the two million marks and another that has a 500k Alexa with literally less than 50 UV’s a day.

    Alexa is totally useless. The traffic stats are not accurate and there is not one SE that uses any of the Alexa stats.
    Alexa is owned by Amazon and is as unreliable as they come. Big waste of a webmasters time !

    Alexa does not help your site what so ever in the search engine results page and your PR.

    Alexa is not affiliated with Google, Yahoo or MSN. They are owned by Amazon. The major search engines do not use any of the Alexa stats. They have their own algo for that.

    Matter of fact if you read the Alexa Disclaimer it will tell you that their traffic stats are not accurate.

    If more people would concentrate on their SERP position for organic traffic, by applying the proper optimization for the search engines, then they will see an increase in organic traffic.

    Your customers do not find you through Alexa – they find you through the SERP’s for your keywords.

    Regards,
    http://www.Tubetoolboxreview.info
    Legally Increase YouTube views

  11. This is finally plain and clear article on Ranking websites for a certain keyword(s) after Penguin. It’s very simple and gave me the major point on how to proceed with my SEO. Thanks a lot!

  12. I think this is the best article about seo after penguin update. I was searching for understandable post about seo and leadsleap has provided it. Now I have almost learned how to do seo. And I want to ask one thing? Should I use different anchor text when commenting on blogs or posting on forums or just use one same anchor text that i want to rank for?

  13. It looks like the new Penguin is fixated more on optimisation than actual bad links, though bad backlinks is a factor Google released that the real issue was people spamming their anchor text around, as you’ve pointed out.

  14. I think this is the best article about seo after penguin update. I was searching for understandable post about seo and leadsleap has provided it. Now I have almost learned how to do seo. And I want to ask one thing? Should I use different anchor text when commenting on blogs or posting on forums or just use one same anchor text that i want to rank for?

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