They should have called Penguin something much more appropriate like Crap SEO or Circa 2005.
Over the course of the last year, SEO has changed. Actually one can say over the past few months there have been more dramatic changes than any other time. Most of our request for SEO services the past month has been for help with penguin recovery. After analyzing all these “OMG penguin killed my website” emails and their websites I realized it’s just bad SEO trends people were trying to get away with.
Anchor Text Over- Optimization
The percentage of branded Vs keyword has been all over the board but is mostly the single largest factor. I won’t say what the magic percentage of anchor text is but I have no idea. What I do know is if you want to avoid Penguin the majority of your anchor text needs to be branded. A general rule of thumb is to keep your branded anchors above the 50% mark. Some SEO’s are even choosing to be more cautious with this number.
The lowest percentage I have reviewed was 8% branded anchor text. It looks like this website in the past had avoided other filters by using a lot of variation in keyword anchors. They didn’t duplicate too many but when Penguin hit it caught up to them.
Poor Quality Links
Somewhere along the way lots of webmasters fell prey to the SEO trends. They paid for services that provided profile links, directory listings, comment spam and way too many Squidoo pages. I don’t have anything against Squidoo but if you are going to rely on those types of links for your sole purpose of ranking, you are in trouble.
I think directories can be a good source for link building but don’t overdo it. Pick 20 directories you like and plan out a strategy to submit to them over the course of a few months. Do yourself and the directory editors a favor and only submit the name of your website. Keyword spamming anchor text in directories will lead to a Penguin problem.
Duplicate Content
This one is one of the worse and I’ve even found companies that blatantly took shortcuts to add content to their website. Not made for AdSense type of websites but actual brick and mortar businesses. An example of this is a bookstore that had numerous pages on books they sold. Instead of writing a unique description for each they decided it was much more time to consume to just copy and paste from other peoples websites. Are you kidding me? You want to be taken seriously and you just copy others companies content word-for-word?
In this day and age if you really want to rank well in Google you need to do the work.
