When the Penguin update came in to effect Google’s announcement did not leave enough time for a lot of people to prepare and change their SEO strategy. The update had most effect on deeper pages within your site and also on a bad links that you had built. To put it simply, the Penguin update was focused on links, this means that everyone had a massive portfolio of both inbound and outbound links that they needed to analyse. For those that took a hit by the update now need to go back to the drawing board and change up their strategy. When you are gong back over your portfolio you need to ensure that you follow Google’s guidelines as strictly as possible. Here are 5 things that you need to know about the Penguin update, they will help you to recover front the negative effects of Penguin. These strategies can be used for your content strategy, link building and social media strategy – they will help you get back your traffic and also be more prepared for any future Penguin updates that Google decide to throw at you.
Anchor Texts
One of the biggest things to note is that the number of pages from a domain that appear for a certain keyword has been reduced. So you need to ‘box clever’ when using keywords. You need to start diversifying your anchor texts, you need to do everything you can to not use the same keywords for your anchor text. If you have a number of good keywords you will reap the benefits, gone are the days of just relying on one type of keyword.
Audit your links
You can perform a link audit by yourself, there is no need to go out and hire an expert. You need to go in to your Google Webmaster Tools, doing this will allow you to see which sites link to you. You then need to categorise the links, here is an example of the types of links; Paid links, broken links, links for de-indexed pages, suspicious links, links from pages that have no content. This are just some of the types you need to look out for.
Paid links
You need to go through your portfolio and assess all of the sites that have paid for links on your sites. You need to check this portfolio so that your page rank is to affected in the search rankings.
Social media
Social media is important! You should be using Google +, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Google+ is important for your business and if your site has a lot of interaction you will rank highly on Google. Google will take data from Google+ which will in turn have a positive effect on your search engine ranking.
Manage your content
Quality content is always on the lips of Google, they want you to create quality content. Google expects you to create content that people will read and bookmark your site. Matt Cutts has stated that Google expects quality content. You should use videos, images and articles with great resources and information.