So very many Manchester SEO Companies, in the UK and the whole world have been affected in some way by last 2012’s “Year of the Penguin”. And that was just the starter. Investigating quite a few companies who have had link building conducted by an outsourced “Guaranteed Link Building” company, leads me to believe that there are highly likely going to be many more this year.

So what can you do to prepare for this penguin themed pretence for penalisation? The answer, is a lot.

I’ve reported on Interflora getting penalised and bouncing back quickly, so there is a way to be prepared for this. Here are some tips I believe will help:

> VET YOUR LINKS. Seriously. Right now you need to be very aware of what sites are linking to your website. Group them into Low risk, Medium risk and High risk. I’d even go so far as to use Google’s Disavow tool to make sure the High risk sites linking to your site aren’t counted against you. This way you’d pre-empt any penalisation. Medium risk links are also ones to segregate in preparation for if you need to disavow those too.

> Re-Evaluate your definition of a link: The phrase “A link is a link” has been bandied about for far too long. This is wildly inaccurate and has been for some time. It’s not just a race for the amount of links with [Keyword] in there. This is now actually bad for your site. If you have a lot of low quality links to your site with keyword stuffed text, that isn’t natural, Google will see this and Google will apply a penalty. Create differing anchor text keywords and expand the sources from which you’re getting these links. Use long tail keywords and keyword rich anchor text sporadically whilst mixing in generic “Click Here” links, branded links and quite simply your URL.

These tips should help you weather the Penguin Storm if it hits you.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey