The second animal of the Google Zoo dumbfounded the hobbyist SEOs and made less competition for the professionals. Almost every news source, even our favorites, mess this up how Penguin actually works. They see correlation and assume causation.
It’s a safe bet you have heard “over optimized anchor text penalizes your site” or “you need more generic anchor texts” or “you need some naked URLs pointing at your site”. Guess what? None of that is true. We tested and shot down every one of those theories. They were good theories, the sites that seemed to be ranking well after Penguin updates had qualities that appeared to be as such but it simply was not what caused them to rank.
Symptoms
- Page specific ranking drops around Penguin launch
- Pages without direct link building rank, but a little lower
- Homepage is the most affected page
- The ranking drops aren’t catastrophic – the pages are still in the top 50
- Backlinks are still live and powerful, at least compared to competition
Tests & Diagnosis
- Adding links with new anchor texts improve rankings
- On internal pages, a 301 may create a temporary bump to previous ranking
- On homepage, a 301 from or to www version will create a temporary bump
- Look at the link profile – do all of the powerful links have the same anchor text? If possible, change the incoming anchor text on half of them.
- View Google’s cache of penalized site. Switch to text-only mode. Try to navigate. Does it make sense? How does it compare to the competitors?
- Do a site: command followed by your keyword. Does the ranked order look appropriate? If not, check internal linking/tiering.
Common Misdiagnosis
- Manual penalty
- Over optimization
- On homepage, a 301 from or to www version will create a temporary bump
- Look at the link profile – do all of the powerful links have the same anchor text? If possible, change the incoming anchor text on half of them.
- Toxic links (negative PR)
- Too many money keywords
Complications
- Fixing an over-optimized link profile can take a long time. If you paid for the links, it’s actually a much faster process.
Solutions
If you have quick and easy access, just change anchors on the most powerful links for the quickest improvements. It does not have to be generic or a naked URL. It just has to be different. Sometimes different is a generic or naked URL. Take anything you can get. But don’t aim for any magic percentage anchor text, it doesn’t exist. LinkResearchTools likes to teach “blend in” to the top spots anchor text profiles. While they are a great tool source, their advice on “blending in” to look normal is absolutely wrong.
If you were hit after Penguin 2.1, you need to build more links from “relevant” sites. In other words, the page with your link has to be on topic with your niche. It’s as simple as that.
Tiering: You can tier your way out of Penguin penalties to an extent. It’s basically a way of salvaging juice and creating your own internal relevance to bypass relevance. This method can boost a subpage up quickly. In other words, you can still have all the random links pointed to the homepage that used to rank and get power from them. Except, make that homepage all about your keyword and related words, and link to your subpage with the exact anchor. This subpage will jump in rankings quickly, just make sure it has decent on-page optimization.
Tiering Explained
Bucket Theory
We don’t have a way to fully test and prove that Google treats anchor texts like this without breaking into the Googleplex, so it’s important to keep in mind this is a theory only. However, keeping this theory in the back of our mind keeps our link profiles safe from penalties. The bucket theory works as follows:
Link juice, after the Penguin filter, is limited to the amount of buckets that can carry it. Buckets come in one size and grow larger as you add more buckets.
Each anchor text is a bucket.
Penguin ignores all extra juice once a bucket is full. While many SEO gurus claimed that Penguin penalized the anchor texts for being too specific, it actually didn’t have any negative effect on juice. On paid link profiles, it is very easy to fix Penguin. Time to recovery is simply the time it takes to recrawl the links.
Best Anchor Text Practice
If your keyword is “buy blue widgets” – create anchors like:
- buy a blue widget
- blue widgets for sale
- widgets you can buy
- bought a blue widget
- blue widgets for sale online
- buy blue widgets online
- etc.
You can go down a rabbit hole with these anchor texts. The more diverse, the better and more realistic you will be. Considering you should be focusing on contextual links, just making it fit into a sentence will usually take care of itself.
Capitalization
We haven’t been able to prove it yet, but capitalization does seem to create “new buckets” just like new words entirely – even though Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t show it. It looks natural, too. It’s certainly a best practice just to be safe.
Naked URLs
- http://website.com
- http://website.com/
- website.com
- website.com/
- http://www.website.com
- http://www.website.com/
Generic Anchors
While our testing has shown it is not necessary to go crazy with generic anchors at this time, you might want to future-proof yourself as a best practice. It doesn’t hurt to add generic, it just doesn’t help on long-tails.
- and here
- as an example
- as example
- as explained here
- click
- click here
- example
- example here
- explained here
- find
- find here
- for more info
- found
- found here
- from here
- from source
- go here
- here
- home
- homepage
- homepage here
- info
- information
- is here
- located here
- look here
- more
- more info
- more information
- or here
- resource
- site
- site here
- source
- view
- view homepage
- view site
- view website
- visit
- visit here
- visit website
- website
- website here
For more specific deep links:
- article
- news
- page
- post
- story
Be sure to add in words like official, brand, etc. You can really go as diverse as you want on this front.
BaconRank Theory
Again, this is theory and impossible to prove until we have a mole at Google. Use this just like bucket theory to figure out where you need to place links. We developed this theory after thorough analysis and quick testing after Penguin 2.1’s release.
BaconRank is a measure of relevance. Lower is better. The closer the relevance, the more PageRank/TrustRank is passed which means higher rankings after the Penguin filter is applied. Remember, juice still flows even if the topics are irrelevant. However, BaconRank is applied to the SERPs, so you still feel the sharp drop on the main page if you have a bunch of irrelevant links pointing to it.
The Hummingbird engine allowed relevance to become a factor which was previously impossible.
Where did it all start? How did Google pull it off?
Some smart-ass Google engineers wanted to see how many connections from Kevin Bacon another star was. So if you Google “Justin Bieber Bacon Number” you will see he has a score of 2. Google launched this Bacon number in 2012 as they were experimenting how much they could determine the relevance between two topics. Much like Wikipediarace.com, Google tries to figure out how closely something is related (relevance) to each other. Google finally got it perfected and scaled to a mass operation to count link relevance as a factor.
Commercial Intent Theory
A few engineers have been using the phrase “commercial intent” when speaking of Penguin. We are reaching out to Christoph at Link Research Tools to find a way to determine commercial intent using their toolset for better analysis of this. So far, we haven’t seen evidence of this. But we know it’s coming and Google has the data to do so. Consider this future-proofing to protect your branded sites and long-term link building strategies:
- Brand (and variations including Inc. INC, etc.)
- URL (http://, www, trailing slash)
- Phrase-based keywords (almost a sentence)
- Actual keywords (still rotated as before)
- Generic (we already have a massive listed of generic keywords posted)
So if you build five links, rotate them out like this. When you start to build links 6-10 throw in your variations like the normal bucket theory. This will keep you safe from penalties in the future when Google decides to throw on that switch.