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Fighting Penguin: A True Story
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About the Author
Mike Nierengarten (5 Posts)
Mike has worked in the online marketing industry since 2005. Mike started Obility Consulting in 2011. Obility works with b2b companies looking to lower customer acquisition costs through improved performance in paid search and conversion optimization. Please visit obilityconsulting.com to learn more about Mike or Obility.
9 Comments
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I would recommend using tools like iBacklinkPRO or MajesticSEO to research your competitor’s backlinks they can help a lot with getting natural backlinks
From my experience in my niche almost all of my competitor’s links are not natural. Some are better at getting unnatural links than others. Also, this update still needs some work. I’ve seen some of the worse sites with the most obvious spam links rise to the top.
Great post.. Ive done the same thing with mciro sites & blogs! Its to tempting to not use exact keyword anchor text when you control the site… Im def guilty and took the pounding! The cool think is I can change it haha! Thanks again!
That sounds like a good strategy you’ve chosen to adopt. A lot of people have made the mistake of either not diversifying their anchor text enough or focussing on just commercial oriented terms.
I’ve personally seen people who’ve been hit by the Penguin actually use directory submissions to help skew the anchor text profile back in their favor and which has worked for some – e.g. getting links with the anchor text as “EZDIquote.com”, “EZDI Quote”, “EZDI Insurance”, etc + this has worked better when the official site name is also mentioned on the title of the homepage/other pages.
Right now the title of the homepage doesn’t have the brand name, perhaps it could be mentioned at the end of the title. That would make such links obtained look more natural and to be of more sense. Just my thought.
Good article! Google updates make me nervous.
Excellent article. Solid advice there in examining the new top of the SERPs for the new keyword density percentages. I’ll be using your article to help poorteds move up in the world.
I can’t help but wonder how many of your micro sites were linking to your homepage. It might not have been the consistent text you were using as much as it was that you had the same text all going to one single page of your client’s site. Just a thought.
Have you already seen any signs of recovery?
Thanks Mike for an honest post.
I’m so tired of reading blog articles that say “I’m proud to say none of my sites have been hit by Panda/Penguin and here’s why…” and then say what “old-tactic SEO’s” do and they would never do such a thing.
Honesty is what we need. Great post.