Penguin Friendly Backlinks?

Its certainly interesting to read what people have put here and some of it I agree with and some looks a bit sketchy.

Personally I am building and have been building my links by what I call the 'intelligence metric'. This works on the basis that you have to actually 'think' about what you are doing rather than try to find some magic formula. Hard for some I'm sure.

It seems to have worked through Panda and also Penguin... hopefully it will also work in the future... which is the whole point of this approach. You don't want to be lurching between each update trying to 'fix' your site only to get hammered in three months time again.

Look at your site and think about it... yep just think about it for a minute.

1. A brand new site selling 'blue widgets'. Hmmm.... day 1 it gets blasted 50,000 profile links or hooked up to 20 web 2.0's? Sure that looks natural! OK diversify the anchor text. Hmmm..... still looking a bit wrong to me.. and probably Google.

Think of it being like a school kid who is called to the front of the class to explain why he has not done his homework -

"OK blue widget site. You are 3 days old and now have 3,000 wiki links pointing to your site. Would you like to share with the front of the class how this came about?"

And of course you do need a huge range of diverse anchor text - single keyword, phrases, misspellings, raw links, sentences, links in different languages(!)... remember that most people who use the web can only barely use a computer...

2. However the idea that you need to build a steady flow of links is also IMHO not very natural. Now I am not advocating that you should blast hundreds of links on day one and then sit back a month and do the same again. You shouldn't really be doing that anyway. Just think random small batches of links that would emulate the interest from an advertising campaign, where interest peaks and falls off. If you believe in the way that Google handles press releases, that it can distinguish these from other links (a different debate) then you should get what I mean.

3. Diversity. Yes you need diversity of course but I think at some point penalties or 'devaluation' will come from what you have linking to. Think about it. Why would several thousand Wiki's be linking to your site? It makes no sense IMHO and therefore if not today, then maybe tomorrow, we will see a devaluation of these types of links for certain sites. This is just one example. But again 'think about it' - how many Wiki links do you think an authority site like a mobile phone company for example would have pointing to it? Now I don't know the answer but again, compare your site selling 'mobile widgets' which sits in the same niche with thousands of Wiki links. Would that look unnatural to you?

4. Should this apply to the sites that are linking to you? I don't see much on any forums about what to do with tier links. It seems a case of have a plan for your money site and then just blast the hell out of the tiered links. So does Google have a different algorithm for money sites and your tier entities? Well I don't think so, so you need to take the same approach to your tiers and the links you are building to your site. That also goes for providing unique content. True you can probably get away with spun content and would probably need to when doing link building in any sort of quantity. But this is just a numbers game so don't expect the 100 web 2.0s you just built all to stick, or stay indexed for very long.

So I'm not professing to be an 'expert' and have all the answers, am learning all the way and by no means did I not suffer fall out from the latest update. However the sites where I put the effort in and used the "intelligence metric" coupled with another term that I will call "Chaotic link building" (i.e. random, natural) have surged in the SERPS. The sites where I took 'short cuts' and carried out perceived 'SEO' got hit but are since showing signs of coming back up now I have started to put the same level of work into them. I don't expect it to happen overnight as there is months or in many cases years, of work to undo.

For me I don't want to rank until the 'next update', I want to rank long term, so I will be continuing to think about what I do and refining how I think Google will view my links over time.

SweTech said:

Spam your YT-profile. Nough said.

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Ehhh this was good last year when your YT channel had d0foll0w link capability, now its nof0ll0w.

What you would do before is drop comments on high PR yt vid pages, the juice would flow from that page to your channel/profile and then to your site.

But now the no follow on your channel/profile traps the PR.

Still a decent link but there are more efficient ways to get PR.

I only have a small sample size but based on the 5 or 6 "new" (Created couple of weeks before Penguin) sites I have, the same things as usual are working.

All I've sent at them is spun content distributed through various networks consisting of both low and high PR domains.

Bizmarkie40 said:

Yes it woudl help to know what was different about the web 2.0 that you say helped your site..

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The difference is I treat my tier 1 web 2.0 as assets and link them as I would my main money site. (something I started doing after panda hit me, but I didn't do it for all my sites)

This means unique content, high quality, correct keyword density, ranks on google, social signals, has tiered links pointing to it as my money site would, high quality comments and also regularly updated (I have this entire process semi automated, think "batch processing").

Sincerely sincerely, nothing have changed except quality of content and the use of blog networks. There's still some great blog networks but i am sure they will be found and Fu**ed one day.

blackhatchampion said:

I am doing these steps to get again rankings in Google.

1) high PR Web 2.0 with unique & qualities content
2) Bookmark with high PR websites
3) Top 15 Articles directories
4) top 5 Press Release
5) Create RSS for all & ping
6) Create brand with top Social Media websites.

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please update us in a week or two with how it is going for you. This sounds like a solid plan to me.

Seomachine said:

Whats I have observed from the various google updates is that its always the High Good quality links that matters. Links from authority sites are always valued by Google.

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I have seen this in one particular niche. Its clear from looking at the format and how they place their affiliate links that this particular IM person has a good strategy as many of his sites are raking for the important keywords in his niche. I do not want to go into a lot of detail because

A) its one person's style of sites in one niche, by no means does it prove anything
B) its a friend's niche, if I share what he has learned it will only potentially serve to undermine him - I like BHW and want to contribute where I can but not at the expense of hurting a business relationship
C) Penguin is still fleshing itself out, for all I know tommorrow this style of on page and backlinking might be penalized

With that said, i can share this. Anchor text does not seem to matter, having videos, great content and a really well built out website with a lot of authority type features does not seem to matter, in fact the sites I am referring to are pretty thin and borderline kind of crappy. Content and linking is not being updated regularly by any stretch of the imagination. And again we're not just alking about ranking for one or two KWs, he (or she for all we know) is ranking pretty well for a lot of keywords in this partciular niche.

What seems to matter is simple, you have a decent amount (not a few but not 50,000) high authority domain links (notice I did not say "High PR" although it is very likely they are also high PR) pointing to his sites, both the home page and inner pages.

That almost seems to simple. Again I am going to purposely not share the type of links they are but if you know how to look up domain and page authority (scale of 10 to 100) most if not all of the backlinks are like 70 or higher.

So perhaps a strategy where you simply locate lists of high authority domain sites that you can build links from to your home page, inner pages and maybe your web 2.0s would do wonders? Just a thought. It is relatively easy to do, can be outsourced with a service and does not require a lot of fancy on page seo, posting videos, fancy inter linking or long draawn out posts, tons of pages that Google would like us to believe we need to have to rank.

Also the affiliate links are not on the sites that are ranking. He has a linking streategy where he places the links and sometimes banners which point to a commpletely seperate domain (not subdomain) that is a sales type page (not squeeze page or anything like that) which in trun has the affiliate links. Interesting. I wonder if tehre is any connection to sites being penalized and those pages which simply have affiliate links on them.

I am no SEO expert, in fact I never have done SEO in my life. But wouldn't backlinks from google plus work?

Seomachine said:

Whats I have observed from the various google updates is that its always the High Good quality links that matters. Links from authority sites are always valued by Google.

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Could you elaborate more on this?

I won't go into a lot of detail because for all I know this is either an exception or possibly won't work in the not too distant future, but here is something a friend noticed when researching a competitor whose sites are consistently ranking well for most keywords in his particular niche:
- The sites are pretty thin. No videos, no fancy inter linking, no more than 5-6 pages/posts per site and not visually very appealing. Not even an opt in form for an auto responder
- The back linking is primarily being done with high authority domain and high authority pages pointing to his home page and inner pages.
- There are on page links that point to other sites he has which in turn have the affiliate links. There are NO affiliate links on the sites he is trying to rank.


Again, this is purposely left a little vague. My friend who discovered this is not going to be a friend much longer if I went into specific details. My point is to ask the obvious. Do we really need tons of content, videos, carefully worded posts that are easy to read etc. etc.. when perhaps all that is required is to have a decent amount (meaning more than a few but not 10,000) of links that only come from sites that have very high authority?
Again this is only one niche and for all we know, this person's sites will be de indexed before I am done writing this post but it is interesting he is ranking so well and apparently has not even updated a post or link in more than 4 months.

Google penguin is not about backlinks , is about ON-SIte optiomization ( h1 ,h2 ,h3 , etc) . i am 100% sure

I would focus more on content and less on aggressive backlinking. Google still values having all sorts of links to your site, but if it's clear that a lot of your links are coming from sites with terrible/spammy content, that will likely penalize you.

It boils down to providing more value to the user. Unfortunately, the best way to do well on Google search is to give Google exactly what they are looking for.