Google's next generation of spam fighting algorithm is here. It's Penguin 2.0, and many of us are wondering what in the world can we do to make sure that our websites aren't affected by this update? Well, the hope is that you're supposed to be doing ethical white hat link building, and if you haven't, then you're probably in trouble right now. But for the rest of us, how do we continue to do link building?
1. Recreate Offline Relationships Online
As a business in the Penguin 2.0 apocalyptic aftermath, you're basically going to want to recreate the type of real world business networking relationships you have in the online world because you have to remember that Google can only go by what it can crawl or what it sees online. So for example, if you're a member of the Chamber of Commerce in Austin or San Antonio, you're going to want to make sure you get a link from that so that Google sees that. Those are tremendously powerful websites that have a lot of weight in the online world in addition to the real world. So Google's going to want to see that connection between your business and that chamber of commerce, and that sends a really strong signal of trust to Google, and that's going to translate into rankings for you.
2. Be Mindful of Link Velocity
One of the things that Penguin 2.0 is really going to start looking at, and Google as a whole, is just how often are you building links? What is your link velocity (as it's called)? And that's just, essentially, how fast are you building links to your website? Now if there's a press release about you or if you're in the news, your product has been featured and people can't stop talking about you on Twitter, on social media, and posting to you, that makes sense. That's natural. But if for whatever reason you have 1,000 links overnight and they all link to you with the same money keyword, that's definitely going to flag Google and that's exactly what Penguin 2.0 is targeting. So you want to make sure you don't build links too quickly. It's going to have to look a lot more natural now, so gone are the days of just building a bunch of links and calling it a day. As an SEO, you're going to have to start thinking about how to naturally and progressively build more and more links slowly over time.
3. Be The Best Result Possible For Keywords
Our final tip in a post-Penguin-apocalyptic world is going to be, just be the best result possible for that keyword. Now, when I say best result possible, that doesn't mean get the most links, manipulate the most, do whatever you technically can to get up there. I'm talking about actually being of value to somebody who does a search, because we all know that Google, at the end of the day, wants to give the user the best result. So you look at yourself in the mirror and you ask yourself, is your business the best result for that keyword? If it's not, then you have a lot of work to do. That means you have to be adding some sort of value to that end user. So if you have a static website that's not dynamic, you're not constantly changing it or adding some type of value, then Google is going to see that and they're going to know that based off of users using your website. So don't try and game the system. Try and actually have a really good result. That could be something as simple as just engaging in dialogue with your customers. If you're an air conditioning company, answer technical questions and build yourself as an authority and say, hey, this is the problem you're having. This is how it can be fixed. And that means a lot and that shows a lot as far as your search results.
