Penguin 2.0 was launched on May 22. And for many, it’s time to correct poor internet marketing techniques or risk poor Google ranking.
Google Penguin, which went live on April 24, 2012, aims to decrease search engine rankings that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines with black-hat SEO techniques. This will cause the smaller businesses that relate to the search term to turn up instead.
While Penguin 1.0 focused mainly on homepage links, Penguin 2.0 goes deeper into websites. The new algorithm targets websites using exact match anchor text leading to multiple pages on their sites, not just on the homepage. Businesses that create spammy backlinks for deeper pages may have been saved before, but now they’re out of luck.
Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how blackhat your SEO tactics are—Penguin 2.0 has yet to target other webspam tactics and is still very link-based. But it’s important to note that this likely won’t be the case forever.
Although Penguin 2.0 is targeted to affect large businesses with a tangled web of expansive webspam, all businesses need to be more cautious when creating backlinks. Years of spammy or unnatural backlinks can come back to haunt you today—and diminish your site’s traffic overnight. According to The Internet Marketing Driver, Penguin 2.0-targeted sites almost always had substantial link profile issues. For some targeted websites, it will be a long and tedious process to clean up years of incorrect link practicing.
The after penguin clean-up will be brutal for some websites. And Google’s Disavow Tool might play a big part. It is advised to not disavow your links as a first option, instead contact the webmasters of sites you believe to contain spammy links and hope they will remove links for you. But as some sites boast thousands of backlinks this can be a daunting or nearly impossible task, the disavow tool may be the best option.
Advice for large, established websites: Remove as many spammy backlinks as you can manually and carefully disavow others
Advice for new, up-and-coming sites: Take a look at your backlink strategy and quickly revise anything that seems like spam and research how to achieve quality backlinks.
The best way to avoid Penguin 2.0’s wrath: Make sure you do it right today so you don’t have to fix it tomorrow. Or just find an internet marketing company with backlinking experience to do it for you.