Few days ago (on 25th of April) Google Penguin attacked. A lot of pages was affected by this new update of algorithm. Matt Cuts commented here , that it’s “another step to reward high-quality sites”. He also mentioned about unnatural linking, as a reason of some filtrs or bans.
But unfortunately it’s not true at all. There is a lot of brilliant websites, which were hurt by this algorithm change and complying with White Hat SEO. What’s more, for some queries, TOP 10 of Google’s SERPs is full of spammy websites or sites with very low quality.
So, what can we do, to avoid in the future drastic drop in traffic from organic search in Google and strenghten your website?
One of the most important things (except brilliant website of course) is having a lot of good quality links.
After some days of Google Penguin rule, and short investigation, we came to conclusion, that good quality links aren’t links only from pages with high Page Rank. It’s more complicated these days…
Your linking schema should looks natural and have a lot of types of links pointing to your site.
Below is a list of different types of links, grouped into 5 groups.
I) Follow/unfollow links
1. Follow (dofollow) links. Construction of the link cause, that some part of websites’ Page Rank is passed to your site
2. Unfollow links (Page Rank is not passed to linked pages)
If you only have dofollow links, it really looks unnatural. You should get some unfollow links to your site. They don’t pass Page Rank to your site, but they pass Trust Rank.
II) Links on different places on linking site
3. Links inside articles
4. Links below articles
5. Links in sidebar
6. Links in footer
7. Links in your bio below your article
8. Comments below post or article
9. Links in advertise/sponsor box
10. Links in conversation box/posts on forums
11. Links in menu (be careful with them – Google algorithm is watching them very rigorously)
12. 301 links from other sites (so called “redirect link”)
If all of your links are only from footer, it’s strange. Isn’t it?
III) Links from different types of websites or online tools and products
In Internet you can get links for your site from many different types of websites. Please make sure, that your linking schema isn’t dominated with only one of them…
13. Guest posts on blogs in your niche
14. Press releases
15. Posts on forums
16. Articles on articles directories
17. Articles on professional websites
18. Question-answers services (for example Yahoo answers)
19. Free accounts on blogging platforms like WordPress.com20. Your Affiliates who promote your products
21. Links inside ebooks
22. Links inside newsletters
23. Links inside emails
24. Blog carnivals sites
25. Social networks (like Facebook, LinkedIn)
26. Social promotion sites (Stumble upon, Reddit )
27. Sites with your favorites – Pinterest
28. Sites with shared photos and videos (Flickr, Youtube)
29. Discussion groups http://groups.google.com
30. Networks for bloggers blogs.com
31. Links inside tweets
32. Links in RSS feeds
33. Your other, private sites
IV) Links with different construction of the link (different anchors, different titles, etc.)
At these days Google pay high attention to anchors. It’s very important, to have links with various anchors pointing not only to main page, but also to pages deeper in your website. Following points are examples, what you can do with anchors on your links.
34. Your anchor is selected by you – “Passive income”
35. Your anchor is title of your website – “No passive income”
36. Your anchor is title of particular page – “Google Penguin attacked – 50 types of links to…”
37. Your main, very competitive anchor – for example, for this blog it may be “making money”
38. Words like: “here”, “link”, “click”, “push”, “see” are poor anchors from SEO perspective. But your site should have links with anchor like these!
39. Your anchor is address of your website (http://nopassiveincome.com)
40. Your anchor is address of particular page (http://nopassiveincome.com/google-penguin-attacked-50-types-of-links-to-strengthen-your-website )
41. Links with/without additional title (for selecting title for you link you may follow points 34-40)
42. Shortened links http://bit.ly/JHARA3 are also links, which you should have
43. And finally, graphical links. Maybe they are weaker than text links, but they also should appears in your “portfolio of links”
V) Offline links
If you have a lot of money or you are treating your business very seriously, you can place your links outside the Internet 🙂 Of course deep linking is almost impossible, but address of your domain also is a link.
Some of “offline links” ideas are below:
44. Links in newspapers and/or paper magazines
45. Links showed on TV
46. Links “spoken” in radio
47. Links in outdoor advertisements (for example on billboards)
48. Links on your business card
49. Links on leaflets
50. Links promoted during conferences, presentations, professional trainings
And what do you think about it? Do you prefer some type of links, or not? Or maybe you know another type of link, which may help to kill Google Penguin?
Photo used in this post:by katmeresin
GoodTrader says
June 1, 2012 at 3:20 pmThis is a very informative post. I did not think of some types of links you mention. For example, had not thought about google groups as a source of links.
Chris says
June 1, 2012 at 6:41 pmYes, having various types of links is very important these days for good positions in SERPs 🙂
BR, Chris
Aswani says
June 5, 2012 at 3:08 amHi Chris, this is really useful and informative post. I have been in dilemma with traffic drop on my blog. I think my blog has also been hit with this Penguin update. Better late than never, I have to be more careful now with link building and link placement activities. Your points really helps..thanks..!
Chris says
June 5, 2012 at 5:08 pmHi Aswani, thanks for your comment. A lot of blogs was hit by Penguin, but in some cases we don’t know why…
BR, Chris
John Ernest says
July 12, 2012 at 5:53 amTruthfully, it is a little disappointing that a lot of people are still using Google even though they have been given irrelevant and often low quality sites from SERPs. I personally think Bing has a lot more powerful search engine than Google. Google indexes and shows duplicate pages that are from the same site, this is a little annoying especially if all of the pages are form the same site and this is where Bing overtakes them.
Chris Madej says
July 12, 2012 at 6:32 pmHi Jonh, thanks for your comment. Unfortunately G. dominate in a lot of countries – for example in Poland it has more than 95% of market…
RCONNORIII says
September 4, 2012 at 11:55 amWow did not know there were so many different kinds of links. Thanks for the schooling Chris! Have a great day on purpose.
Chris Madej says
September 6, 2012 at 9:20 amYou are welcome RVONNORIII !
marilyn cada says
April 16, 2013 at 9:09 pmwow..what a lot of info. i have been looking for ways to increase Page rank but may i ask,, do you know any blogs who are using nofollow links on their commentluv? most blogs i know usually do follow but not nofollow..
thanks again for many tips you are providing 🙂