Posted by Clayton Johnson | May 12, 2014
How To Penguin Proof Your Site
I have some important discoveries to share with you today, so let’s get right into it.
We’ve been monitoring a bunch of orders lately and we’re seeing a glaring mistake in people’s backlink profiles that’s holding them back, and I want to tell you exactly what it is and how to fix it… Easily.
I hope you’re not one of these cases, but if you are, this might save your site!
You’ll be one of the FEW out there that actually “get it”… and that will give you an edge on your competition. I’ll reveal my personal strategy that I use on every site a little bit later on in this post.
Let’s get right into it…
The Uber-Short History Behind It All
Back in 2012 Google came out with Penguin – And we all know that tons of SEOs got smacked for building too many exact match anchors to their sites. They turned up the dial so that if say, 30% of your profile was one anchor, your rankings would drop.
Then, in 2013 Google turned up the dial on that again and smacked a whole bunch of more sites, changing the % so you could only have 5-10% of your profile as exact match anchors… And MORE people got slapped… ouch.
Side note for the scientists – It’s hard to say exactly what anchor text percentage you should have because it varies by serp. We’ve looked into tons of sites and you can DEFINITELY see sites with higher anchor % still ranking… but it’s still something you have to look out for.
The thing is, Penguin runs on a constant basis – so just because you’re ranking today doesn’t mean you’ll be ranking 3 weeks for now.
None of this is new, but when we looked at the sites that some of our customers have, we’re still seeing tons of over-optimized profiles!
Some people are following some of our advice to build anchors like “click here” and naked URLS – that’s all great… But for a lot of sites, they are already over-optimized, and it’s not enough.
If you’re already over optimized… What’s going to happen when the NEXT Google update comes around and they dial up the % again?
That site is going to get smacked!
We don’t want that to happen to you, obviously, so we want to give you a heads up ahead of time of how to prevent it.
How To Fix It – Easily
The good news, there is a super EASY way to avoid this, and that is to just get a TON of non-optimized links. You want to really “pad” your site so that over-optimization isn’t even a question.
You see, real brands and real websites get these links naturally. Most people link in the wild with brand anchors like “Starbucks” or with naked URLs like http://www.starbucks.com – so these are the types of links you want to be creating. I’m talking like 90%+ of your profile. If you can achieve that, you’ll be in a really good place to avoid over-optimization!
Sounds easy enough right?
But where do you get these links from?
When you build these links you want to get them from really good sites where real companies would get links from, and one of the best places to get them is through social media profiles.
I’m not talking about a bunch of spammy blog comments or auto-generated crap-ola. We want to send REAL brand signals from good sites back to your money site.
You see, social profiles are the PERFECT solution. I’m talking about real sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Linkedin — super high authority domains that send real links and real BRAND signals & diversity back to your site… all with NON-optimized anchors. You can build about as many of these as you want!
Now, these sites aren’t going to RANK you, but they will protect you… And you DEFINITELY need that.
So these serve multiple purposes:
1) They diversify your link profile
2) They send brand / social signals to your website
3) You can use them to seed your content across the web so more people will see it
Sounds pretty great right?
You can obviously do this yourself, but it takes quite a bit of time to register 50+ social profiles.
So we created a service to do that for you if you don’t have the time… and we streamlined it so it’s super cheap ($1 or less per profile!).
HOTH Lock My Brand will go out and hand-register your brand on the top social sites in the world, fully fill out your profile, upload a picture and drop a non-optimized link on the page – right back to your site.
This will put your mind to ease about the whole Penguin / over-optimization issue.
Every new site I start, the first thing that I do is order a HOTH Lock My Brand package. That’s how important it is to a good link building strategy these days.
Stay safe out there, folks.
If you have any questions, just leave them in the comments!
Clayton Johnson is the CMO of The HOTH SEO company. He has over 8+ years experience in the SEO industry and has spoken at events like SEJ Summit. The HOTH has been featured in Inc 5000, Forbes, SMX, Pubcon, Content Marketing World, Affiliate Summit, Brighton and more.
I don’t have a few links to my website, but just putting a mention on FB or Pinterest helps my website? What are exact match anchors?
Yep – Basically, when you register your brand and get links from social media sites, it helps to even out your link profile.
An exact match anchor would be a link that is your exact keyword. For instance, the anchor text of the link would be something like “lawyer denver” if that was your main keyword.
and I suppose an LSI for “laywer denver” would be something like: Best Lawyer In The Denver Area. I just made this up, however, how do I know people are actually searching for “Best Lawyer In The Denver area?” or does that really matter as long as the main keywords are in the title?
Everything always depends on your competition for any keyword. Give a domain enough authority, you can add near any long-tail keyword post with title and capture a first or second page ranking, relevant to the site or not. Relevancy usually just determines whether that keyword is going straight to page one, or page two, and whether you have to give an exact match to the match to get it to page one.
There are lots of ways to diverse your link profile. This method is just one. If your link profile is blatantly keyword matched, I have done similar to what Hoth here use in their Boost product, spun up a whole bunch of Tier 2 content, usually short is best, added naturalised links to each and then bombed a domain with it. Randomising the URL’s and natural terms. Drip it to the site. Suddenly the percentage swings away from over-optimised to more random.
Whilst such things are not advised if you have a small link footprint, if you have a large one, you can easily get away with such tactics without issue… especially now Google no longer punish you for bad links, they just discard them from hurting or helping you, yet achieve the job for diversifying anchors if needed.
There are lots of tricks to fix such issues. You could just disavow your entire link profile and start all over again, if it was ever that messed up.
Will it be really helpful ? I mean social profile for my brands?
I know it could give a valuable link but first time i hear it will help to saving from penguin.
Thanks if it will works.
Getting these natural links helps diversify your profile, that’s what you want to avoid Penguin penalties.
People are humans, they want to setup a site, make money, etc and by default, human nature says hit that keyword hard, so when they see those 5 blank keyword slots, guess what they do? It is actually quite easy to diverify your link profile. Dont use exact match keywords, otherwise known as money keywords; Do use random anchors, naked urls, generic anchors, etc. I looked a link profile of a site the other day, I thought it was a bit spammy, however, his site never used the same anchor twice, other then naked urls, generics, and ranks in the top 5 searches for his topic search! Even though his link profile looks spammy, it looks natural too google. In this case, being greedy to rank for money keywords doesnt pay, more is not always better, if you want to succeed, then use less.
Sounds, pretty interesting, I will try this.
I would also recommend people stop linking only to the homepage of their websites. It’s just not natural! It’s hard to believe that some of these obvious footprints were right in our face and we never realized it until after sites were penalized.
Its about psychology! When I first started, I sent all links to my home page, I used the same anchors, I used spun content, then watched $2,000/mo disappear overnight. You should absolutely send links to your home page, as your home page should have the most authority, but you should also send backlinks to your inner pages, and this is how page authority is increased. I saw an article the other day that was written in 2013, I am not sure how I found it, but it was on page 5, and it did not appear to have a single backlink to the page, and they probably often wonder why they are not moving up the serps, so in two years, that post has probably been pretty worthless because the site apparently does not promote their own content. With all the competition out there today, if you do not promote your site/inner pages, then your site will just continue to site there, and pretty much do nothing.
This is one of the perfect strategies that I have also used for many newly launched websites and works great. A combination of complete social profiles with link to your site and right content will surely make your website to rank on top safely.
Thank you for letting us know about Lock My Brand.
I honestly do not get the relation. From what I can tell, social media is worthless, even to compliment your link profile. I have several social media accounts, I have posted my naked url a number of times, and I have yet to see any social links get picked up as a backlink, none, nada, zero. You are right that social media will not make you an authority,social media only brings random traffic, overall, if social does anything, it will increase your bounce rate with random traffic.
Ok, I get it now, you are talking about a link setup in the social profile, for whatever reason, I thought you were talking about getting backlinks through social media promotions. I am sorry for the confusion.
Keep in mind, a lot of social links won’t get picked up by link aggregators like majestic, moz, and ahrefs so don’t expect to see them on your backlink reports. Most of the time you will see them inside Google webmasters tools though.
Since a social media account is pretty much worthless if you are not constantly posting updated. Not to mention it is hurtful to see a social profile with zero social signals as it means no one is interested. How do you tackle to problem of posting to the 50-300 social profiles that this program creates?
Also I understand that this service is designed to save you time because of coarse registering to 50-300 social sites can take some. If you want to know what takes even more time (about ten fold) constantly updating your social media accounts with new posts. So please elaborate as I am certainly interested in the offer just don’t want to put myself in a situation I can’t handle.
You can post to them if you’d like, but whether you use them or not, I would still suggest claiming them for brand protection.
You have revealed a great idea of a brand building..Of course this is a good information to be implemented..I was not aware of the power of social media..This brand building idea is great…thanks for sharing the valuable information on THEHOTH platform..
What does empty social profiles do, you will never use them to post. 50 profiles in themselves look like spam
You should post to them.
Once I have the report from LMB with accounts and login info, do I post content to those accounts? Also, can I use those accounts with services such as Syndwire? (I have an account there…)
Yes to both!
Hi. Great post.
Anywhay is it true that links from social media profiles dont rank your money site?
Thanks
They aren’t bad, we explain how to use them in this article. You will most likely need more links though.
What are naked links?
Naked Links = the anchor is the URL itself
When you say “get links from social media sites”, is it just by creating a profile or having people like and share the posts?
Optimally both.
Thank you..
Excellent article, I just put it into practice with 50 profiles in LookMyBran for my business page design AsturWebs.
I guess this will also serve for the domain authority, right?
Greetings and thanks
Great Article. i just admire this point “They send brand / social signals to your website”.
Good article. Will try if it works.
I never actually knew social links are this “potent”, thanks for the great advice. Fortunately my website is still very new and I can now obviously do things right from the start. Bookmarking this page for sure!
Useful article
i Will try if it works
This happen to be the best seo website i know
Social Media Profile creation is a good way to save your site from the Google Penguin Update. And yeah, they also help to provide the social signals to our site and that’s where the dual benefits of the social profile creation prove handy.
Good stuff shared. Traffic comes many social platform like facebook, twitter, stumbleupon and others social networking sites in my web page. but many sites Link my web page then so this is perform negative impact for SEO ??
Social media links are very good idea to start linking website. Good article!
Amazing Tips on social media linking for SEO!!
Awesome, glad you liked the tips!
Great articles ! It helps me a lot . Thank you so much for sharing this articles . Keep it up good works.
Thanks, you’re welcome!
Is there a service that you can recommend that will allow us to auto-post to the profiles once they are built?
I see that one of the commenters just mentioned Syndwire.
Are there others?
We just bought the 300 pack, so this is important!
Thanks!
Hey! I know that Syndwire is pretty widely used, but probably not as widely as competitors Outbrain or Zemanta
Really though, I’d go by price and ease-of-use for your purposes!
Thanks!
Great Article. I didn’t realize that you get an advantage from social profiles (“They send brand / social signals to your website”.)
Yes, it helps to confirm that your site is a real entity to have those profiles set up.
This article references the penguin update which was quite a few years ago. Is this info still up to date?
Can I read further somewhere about the “naked links” and all? Is it more important to build links on your page to others, like writing blog posts about complimentary businesses? Or is it necessary to have the link back to you as well?
Thanks for your help!
Glad to know this, its help a lot!
Great, glad to hear it!
Thanks for this penguin proofing guide, I think the tips in here apply to me and will help save my website from getting penalized.
Glad it helped you out, Basit.
Very nice stuff, I’ve shared it. Traffic comes to my web site from many social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and other social networking sites. But if too many sites link to my web page will this negatively impact my SEO?
It’s actually great that traffic is coming to your website from the multiple sources that you mentioned. Most people don’t worry about too many sites linking to theirs if those links are natural. The problem is that many people try to manipulate SEO by pointing a bunch of low-quality links from spammy websites built for that purpose, with links that have over-optimized anchor text. This type of linking does often harm SEO and it’s important to avoid it.
Hi. Great post.
Anywhay is it true that links from social media profiles dont rank your money site?
Thanks
Links from social media profiles can help diversify your link profile and strengthen your site’s brand as an entity, but it would definitely be a stretch to say that those links can directly rank your site.