Loading...Has your website taken a hit with the latest Penguin update, and you’re relentlessly trying to negate its impact by building some quality links? Well, then relax and take a deep breath before you act any further; the fact that your website was hit by latest Penguin update goes to show that the quality of back-links that you’ve built over the past few months (or perhaps weeks) hasn’t been really impressive (at least in the eyes of Google).
Check Your Website’s Back-link History and Try to Clean It
So, it’s essential to stop building any more backlinks and analyse the root cause of the problem that led a Penguin penalty at the first place. The chances are high that you might have paid some money to an SEO company few months (or perhaps few years) ago for obtaining bulk links. And, with the latest Penguin update, your website came under Google’s radar, and got penalized.
But, you could be merely analysing only the backlinks that you had built over last 2-3months, though they may not be the root cause of the penalty. Therefore, it’s of utmost importance to check the complete link history of your website.
There are many SEO tools such as Majestic SEO, Ahref, SEOMoz and SEOBook, which allow you to analyse all your backlinks, and find out the ones that may be causing problem to your website. You need to make a comprehensive list of all such links and try to get rid of the low quality ones, even if they’re not causing any problem at the moment (because they’ll definitely haunt you over the next few months).
You Must Clean All Junk Links!
You may even have to waste time and money on cleaning up the junk links, and you can even make use of Google’s disvow tool, but DON’T even think of flagging links from a particular domain unless you’re extremely sure that you’d never build any more backlinks from that source. For instance, if you often submit articles to places like OnTopList.com and you happen to disvow a link, it’ll close the doors for future opportunities of submitting articles to that directory. So, be very careful in making use of the disvow tool, and refrain from using it unless you’re unable to get a junk link removed manually from a low quality website.
Stay Away from Blog Networks
You ought to have learned a lesson when BuildMyRank.com was slashed out by Google, and millions of blogs received penalty for generating backlinks from blog networks. But, if you didn’t learn from past mistakes, then it’s time to take a bow, and pledge that you’ll never make use of a blog network, be it for blog commenting, or guest posting.
However, you should try to obtain very high quality backlinks from a limited number of blogs, which are highly authoritative, and extremely relevant to your website’s niche.
Stop Using any Automated SEO Tools
If you had been using any automated SEO tools for article submissions, Feeds/Directory submissions or social bookmarking, you need to immediately stop usage of such stuff. Today, it’s not a wise idea to blast automated comments using tools like SEnuke, because such comments would be only approved on blogs which are not moderated. And, if you can manage to sneak in links so easily, you can imagine how many other webmasters would succeed to do so! And, no points for guessing that the value of backlinks coming from such web pages (where there are hundreds of outgoing links) would be very low. In most of the cases, such backlinks would do more harm than good, in the post Penguin era.
The Bottom-Line
Stop focussing on quantity, and start working upon obtaining high quality backlinks to your website to recover from Penguin penalty. And, with 30-60 days of efforts, you should definitely see good improvement in the organic traffic levels of your website.