Preparing for Penguin 2.0, 3 Must Dos

In Melbourne we actually have penguins. There is a small colony of them in a St Kilda a bayside suburb. They’re very cute, not like Matt Cutts’ Penguin.

That is going to be one mean, grumpy sucker. Right now it is the calm before the storm as all indications are that this update is going to be brutal if you have a spammy backlink profile or if you have a site that is selling links. Here are a few checks you can do to prepare.

1. Check the frequency of anchor text in your backlinks.

Using a backlink checking tool like majesticseo, you can sort your backlinks by anchor text. If you have a lot of backlinks that have the same anchor text you may have a bit of an issue. This is what happened last time with Penguin 1.0. Sites that were buying getting backlinks from paid articles guest blogs posts tended to have the same anchor text across hundreds of backlinks. Google then discounted a lot of these sorts of links and sites that were benefiting from them plummeted. The reason for this is very simple. Google is using the existence of a backlink as a vote for your page. It is unlikely that hundreds of webmasters would link the exact same phrase to your website, therefore the backlinks must be contrived and not a real citation for your content.

2. Check where you are getting backlinks from

If you have employed someone that is promising you X amount of backlinks a month, then you may have some issues. Chances are they are doing something like I show in today’s video. I have no doubt the sites getting backlinks from the .org.au site that is the subject of the video, would have benefited from them. Not anymore though. I have checked several of them and they were hit by the May 3 Update that ..ahem… we detected here first :). This is why it feels like a little bit of Penguin 2.0 has already been rolled out here. The content of the posts I show in today’s video are totally irrelevant to the rest of the site, so Google will now discount the value of these links.

3. Start getting good backlinks!

Create content and share it with people who you think might be interested in it. Write guest articles for other sites if you think it is good for traffic or attention but don’t do it for the backlink. In today’s video I expand on a couple of these ideas and share some simple ideas you may not have thought.

If you drop when Penguin 2.0 comes out, remember it is not a penalty! You can come back from it.