Link Building in a Penguin World

You may be wondering how to handle some of the recent updates such as Panda and Penguin and whatever other black-and-white animal updates (Is the Zebra algorithm, next?) Google decides to throw at us website owners.

Here’s the basic answer: LINKS STILL WORK. And they work well. If links did not work, Google would not be so concerned about the effectiveness of them. Also, if Google banned every single person they thought were buying links then you could just point a bunch of links to every competitor ahead of you, get them all banned and move to #1. It just doesn’t work that way.

Now, with that being said, Google is getting “smarter” about link profiling. For instance, let’s say you have a site about car insurance quotes. Before these recent updates, you could just create the anchor text for ‘car insurance quotes’ and point a bunch of links to that anchor text and your rankings would typically rise over time (obviously this is a little over-simplified because there are hundreds of factors in Google’s algorithm like content, the age of your domain, your title tags, etc. but you get the idea). What’s happening now is that Google is also comparing these anchors relative to other anchors that your site is linked to. So if you have 1000 links with the anchor text ‘car insurance quotes’ and no other anchors or just anchors with other similar terms like ‘car quotes’, that looks very unnatural and typically Google will no longer count all 1000 links. They may only count a few hundred of those links now instead of 1000. This is why rankings have dropped for some people not because the site got banned or penalized. It was simply over-optimized and Google is readjusting for that over-optimization by discounting links they think are out of whack.