Whether for good or bad, webmasters and SEO companies that were using questionable techniques that were accepted and effective for years have had to revise their strategies and come up with better solutions.
In a nutshell, Penguin has penalized sites that have link portfolios that are considered ‘suspicious’ of being ‘over-optimized for SEO’. Sites that have used too much of the same text in links (having 100 sites link back to you with the term ‘batman comics’) or creating too many links in a short period of time (100 links in one day), or having links present in obviously scammy, low-level sites (social bookmarks, link profiles, footer links) all were hit if they relied on these tactics.

Many have said that Penguin has ‘changed SEO forever’. For several SEO companies and service providers it has. For those who were doing it ‘right’ in the first place, not so much. Penalizing an industry for ‘over optimizing’, when their sole purpose is to optimize for keywords seems a bit silly to me. However, the SEO world has gotten very impatient and reckless over the past few years, and Penguin is forcing people to take it ‘nice n’ easy’, and that’s exactly what I think people should do.

Atleast for now, the days of building 1000s of low quality, directory links in order to rank a site seem to be behind us. Instead, the new online currency is ‘relevance’. Prove to Google that your site is relevant to a keyword, not solely on the quantity of links, but more on the quality of those links, and you’ll see your results react.

Good SEO Companies are essentially morphing into ‘Social PR firms’, connecting their clients with other relevant websites out there. Instead of having 100 links from random websites, have 5 good links from sites related to your industry. Have a website selling batman figurines? Get links from sites related to toys, games, comics, and anything else related to your product. Sell your product and site to other websites and encourage them to share. Those 5 links can be more powerful than 100 low level directory or social bookmark links.

Over the past month, we’ve been able to help clients in highly competitive industries jump several spots and even pages just by getting their site on relevant blogs. Reach out to news, blogs, and association websites in your industry via social media, emailing and meets up, and ask that they write about you.

Overtime, these relevant sites will serve as your proof that your site is relevant for your keywords. Rather than having 1000s of links with anchor text that says “Batman Comics”, have several blogs about comics write about your batman site. It may seem like a slow and ineffective process, but once you get past the misconception that 100 links are better than 5, you’ll see how effective it can really be. It’s really that simple. It’s never too late to start repairing your relationship with Google, so get started today!
Where you hit by Google Penguin? What are you doing to repair your rankings?

Obviously, not all links are created equal. While all links are good, some (such as high PR do-follow links) provide more ‘link juice’ than others. Finding high quality links can be tough, however finding the best kind out there, contextual links, is actually not as hard as you may think.

A contextual link is located within ‘content’, or inside an article, paragraph, or body of text. Google assumes that a link within a related piece of content is highly valuable because it means someone is specifically talking about you, rather than simply adding a link to their footer or advertising section. The more relevant the content is to your website, the more value it gives that link. For example, links that are located inside blogs or articles of high-PR websites related to your website are some of the most valuable links you can find.

Obviously, having contextual links isn’t as easy as simply requesting a link exchange or getting a friend/business partner to add your banner to their site. This is where relationship building plays a key role.

The first step is to research blog websites that are related to your industry. Usually, a blog will have a public author with contact information (you may need to dig in a bit deeper to find it). If you can’t find any on the website, see if the blog uses twitter or Facebook. Contact the blogger and introduce yourself and your website. At this point, you can either propose to do an ‘article exchange’ in where you provide a contextual link (via an article) on your blog in exchange for the same with them. You may also ask if you could write an article as a ‘guest blog’ on their website, however in order to do this you should be providing them with something interesting and unique for their user base. Thirdly, depending on your business, you may convince the blogger to simply write about you if you’re interesting enough.

The key component to being able to get contextual links is to build relationships. Don’t simply spam bloggers with a generic email asking for links, this will only get you a very high ignore rate. Instead, chat with the blogger, build a relationship via email or social media, and ask when the time is right. Remember, everyone is looking for connections and exposure, so consider any relationship a two-way street.

‘Links’ is a word thats thrown around a lot in web development and internet marketing. A ‘Link’ is a connection, or a ‘road’ connecting one web page (or website) to another web page (or website). So for example, when I say that Google is a Search Engine, the word ‘Search Engine’ is a ‘link’ to www.google.com (If you were to click on it, it would take you to Google, so it’s a link to that site). In many cases, a ‘link’ is formatted differently on a website, classically being blue text with an underline.

There are essentially three types of links. There are ‘External Outbound’ and ‘External Inbound’ links and ‘Internal Links’.

External links are links that direct to a webpage or website outside of the domain the link is present on. So for example, the “Search Engine” link to Google I posted above is considered an External OUTBOUND Link because it’s pointing outside of www.motoza.com. If Google were to have a link to www.motoza.com from their website, then that link would be considered an External INBOUND link.

An internal link is any connection between between web pages within your site. So if I said our Internet Marketing Blog is fantastic, that link is internal since the connection is still within the Motoza website.

Now that a link is defined, it’s important to see how it relates to search engine optimization. When Google visits a website, it uses these ‘links’ to determine the subject matter and trustworthiness of a website.  So for example, if you have a website dedicated to the side effects of Penicillin, Google will look at the source of any external inbound links to determine how trustworthy your information is. If they notice a prominent link coming from www.webmd.com, it holds a lot more weight than if it came from an unknown personal medical research blog. The more relevant, quality inbound links you have, the better chances of Google perceiving your site as relevant and trustworthy.

SEO works very similar to a popularity election. In general, websites that have more inbound links (votes) will usually be considered higher quality and more relevant. www.wedmd.com has over 14 million inbound links (people linking to them), if you compare that you a personal medical blog that might have…50 links, you can see why Google would prefer WebMD over the blog.

However, as I noted above, the quality of the source of those links plays a big part. Almost anytime you have an inbound link, you gain a bit more ‘power’. In the SEO industry this is referred to as ‘link juice’. The amount of ‘link juice’ you get from one source differs from another based on the quality of the site, the placement of your link and how many links that website is sending out. Link Juice gained from WebMD would be much greater than that from an unrelevant medical blog. However, if your link portfolio is made up of 20 WebMD-style links, and your competitor has over 500 lower-quality links, the ‘link juice’ might be around the same. It’s quantity versus quality.

In a proper SEO campaign, it’s important to find a good balance between many links, and a few great links. By concentrating on building good relationships with strong websites, and also using approved tactics to spread your name (and link) to as many relevant websites as possible, you will eventually achieve this goal.

Advanced link building analysis can get fairly complicated. However, to summarize, it all comes down to one thing: More Link Juice = Higher Search Engine Results.