After the Google Penguin Update and lots of slapping of websites around, people are generally afraid of Google. And quite frankly, we believe that is what Google wants as well because they do not want people to try to outsmart them. Hence they’ve slammed their ban hammer at every website that is brave enough to try and fool Google to think that their website should rank high for no reason.
You can no longer spam for backlinks or use junk contents to try and trick Google into rewarding you with a good ranking. In fact, those who did so before got hit hard with Google’s algorithm change. It’s not news that Google does thing their way and makes dramatic changes while killing people’s business without any remorse. Therefore, every step you take for your business, you need to be very careful especially if you are dealing with the almighty G.
The good news is that it is still possible to rank high in Google using SEO tactics, but the bad news is that it is not going to be that easy anymore. Below we shall discuss some of the thing you can and cannot do after the Penguin update.
What is a risky link?
One question that most SEO marketers have come to as themselves are what links are actually risky when it comes to backlinks and Google. Obviously, Google do not take all backlinks as a good link anymore. In fact, if you will soon realize that most backlinks that people were spamming for a year ago are effectively dead now.
Here are some of the things that we think might look suspicious in Google’s watchful eyes.
Anchor text rules.
One rule that you need to be careful when it comes to backlinks is that if you are having too much anchored links, and if you anchor links looks suspicious. The word here is spam. You want to avoid that as much as possible.
Always mix up your anchored links and do not use more than 15% of the same anchor text. You need to be extra careful here because if you have too much of the same anchor text, not only will you alert Google you will look unnatural to the human eye as well Remember the main goal of Google is so that your site is at a quality where the human eye will love it as well.
A clever way to mix things up is to use some URLs without any HTML coding on it as all. This mean you do not hyperlink some of your links, and sometimes you might find it to be rewarding to actually mix in some misspelling mistakes in there as well. Just be sure to make it look natural and only mix in some of these elements once in a while.
Are your links related?
Gone were the days where you can just get backlinks from just about any sites or links. Nowadays, it’s all about links that comes from sites that are in your niche and that are closely related to what your website is about. We know that this is making it hard to get a lot of this kind of backlinks but remember this, after the Penguin update, the number of your links is no longer as important as the value of your links.
Hence, be sure to provide the best of values in every link you get but be sure to make them look natural as well A great way to get these related links from relevant sites in your niche is that you can try guest blogging. This is a great way to get back links out there and at the same time get some traffic from other websites as well. The mutual benefit that the site that publishes your article is that they will get more quality content with much lesser work. Besides Guest blogging you can try forum commenting and blog commenting as well. If done well you will surely be able to get some legit links back to your website and thus getting you in a good spot in Google’s ranking system.
Contextual links
Contextual links are basically links that you see in the context of a webpage at the side bar, footage or the header. These links are very hard to get, and that is why these links are highly regarded by Google to be very quality links. In the past, Clever SEO Artists will use blog networks (essentially their own networks of blogs created just to give their main site a contextual link) to get a lot of contextual links that will get them high in the search engines.
However, this has angered the scary Google a lot and thus this has caused Google to actually brutally kill all those blog networks. Therefore, the only way you should be getting contextual links these days are to get them legitimately. Remember, you can’t get too much of these contextual links and link them to your site because it will look unnatural because Google thinks these links are very hard to get, and if you’ve got a lot of them this will look suspicious to Google.
Too many links?
Think about it this way, if you are to build your links naturally, then you can’t have 100 backlinks a day. Google is smart enough to realize this now, and this means you need to slow down on your link building and ease the automation of link building softwares. Be very careful with these back link numbers because Google will not tolerate spam these days.
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Besides that, if you are able to get a lot of links per day, you need to question how quality are your links because the easier you are able to acquire the links usually means the lower the quality of the links that you are getting. Try getting higher-quality links instead because they will give your site more value than sites with a lot of junk and useless links.
