How To Find Unnatural links & Recover from Google Penguin Attack?

What a bad phase it was for some websites in 2011 when Google introduced Penguin algorithm! It thrashed almost 3% websites with its effect (according to shoutmeloud.com). Around 12% of the websites were already facing bout of Panda attack. It’s the time when SEO was preparing for its makeover.  

How does a webmaster identify if it’s a penguin attack?

What did the affected sites do actually? (Did they commit any crime?) What happened to the affected sites? Did they pay penalty?

Let I give the answer of the third question first. Yes, the affected ones had to pay penalty. (Perhaps, a few are still paying it off by facing penalty!).

They had to give up their good ranking for long time. SERPs did not provide space in the topmost searches until they fixed them. Even, some high-quality sites disallowed them to enter through nofollow index. And the bad quality link providing sites were left with null link value.

What indicates that it’s penguin attack on a website?

Now, it’s worth noticing why the search engine penalized them. Be attentive to this question since its answer hides unprecedented signals to identify penguin attack.

Let’s walk through the causes of penguin penalty in the points below. These points will provide hints of grey areas which need corrections.

• Thin content
• Unnatural anchor text
• Bad/irrelevant backlinks
• Unnatural link pyramid
• Over optimization
• Black hat techniques (hidden links)
• Keywords stuffing
• Affiliate websites with crap/duplicate content

Indeed, the search engine has been calling fight against web-spam.  It restricted the way of the spammers who attempted to game with the search results.

What actually Penguin algorithm is? How it works?

As told in the beginning, 24th September, 2011 was the date when Penguin algorithm was announced. It acts as a link-filter. Link-building is the commonest SEO strategy. It arms webmasters with unparalleled online reputation. The more one has backlinks, the more it will be popular (so the reputation is surely to come).     

Some webmasters go out of the way to manipulate rankings of the high quality websites. Such infected web masters plunge to black hat seo. They buy links in bulk and paste it on the website which they want to rank high. They find it the shortcut to achieve ranking in searches.

Surely, they accomplish their dream shortly but it remains short-lived. Google keeps watch on such wrong web practices. And implement penguin algo. Sooner, its reputation becomes transient.

And if its effects are left undone, the website can be banned forever.

How one can cope with it?

• Introduce variations in anchor text distribution: It’s the primary function for a web geek to check anchor text. Sometime, a few experts do a silly mistake of repeating the same anchor text in various blogs or articles.

For sure promotion is his first concern. But the same act can be done by bringing variations in its formulation. Instead of using the phrase ‘Cheaper premium quality carpets’ repeatedly, he must long-tail keywords (like premium quality carpets at cheaper rates or high quality carpets at dirt cheap price). It will look natural and pull organic traffic.    

So, diversity is must to have in anchor text every time.

• Work on Quality Content: Thin content is no less than crap. So, stay away from duplicity of content. Avoid spun content since some websites (article Free Article Spinner) provide rephrased content which can have a lot of flaws. Create genuine content with creative ideas. Keep it informative rather than boring text because it’s for users not for the search engines. Use optimally heading tags to enhance its readability. 

• Use Webmaster Tool for tapping bad backlinks: Webmaster or any other similar tool to catch analysis of the back links. Take an example. Famous web geek Neil Patel advises for using Fruition Google Penalty tool which is free as well as paid (good for multiple websites’ analysis). It filters back links and also the variations in anchor text.  This tool displays when the website got affected by the algo attack.

• Filter Good and Bad Links: The websites that have daily traffic in thousands unknowingly house bad backlinks with the good ones. This problem can be overcome manually or using webmaster tool. It carries profile of all backlinks. Filter the bad ones that are diluting the value of affecting website. For example, if the health-based website has incoming links from technology based website, it will be considered as the irrelevant one. Thus, it will be worth to face penalty.  

• Disavow bad backlinks: Make bad backlinks disavow. Don’t allow irrelevant ones to pitch in. Google will surely crawl to all pages. But the web geek can use benefit of nofollow indexing. It will let the engine enter but did not affect ranking.  
• Re-optimize keywords: Keyword stuffing comes under wrong web practice. Keep its density limited to 1.5% to 3%. Use keyword density checker tool, if necessary. Try to use one keyword in different ways.
• Try social networks for building natural links: Rather than buying irrelevant bad links, focus on building a vast social community. Since it has potential to make the content viral shortly, so share it on them. It will gift natural backlinks which will be absolutely free of cost.