Penguin 2.1 Makes it VITAL that You Understand Natural Link Building

As we explained, Google has continued their quest to eliminate ANY link technique that they perceive has even a hint of commercial connotations or would appear to exist solely for algorithmic benefit. A recent example of this was seen in late July when Google quietly updated their Link Scheme Definitions to add press release links, anchor text-rich advertorials, and excessive guest posting as new examples of unnatural links that may trigger a manual action against sites.

This update to the guidelines was a prelude to the roll out of Penguin 2.1 that hit Friday, October 4th. There was an immediate outcry from sites and our SEN members alike questioning why they weren't affected by Penguin 2.0 but had been targeted by 2.1.

Research showed that most sites newly affected by Penguin had added unnatural links to their backlink profiles since the last Penguin update - making it easy to understand why were hit this time and not last time. Because of this we feel that it's absolutely vital that you understand what constitutes Natural Link Building so that you aren't caught unaware in the future.

If you were affected by this update then remember, this is all about your backlink profile, which means that adding new content or doing other positive additions to your site will not fix this. You need to clean up the links pointing to your site and then shift to Natural Link Building. You CAN recover some traffic/rankings during updates by building in new and better links, but any large recoveries won't happen until Google reruns the algorithm against your site. So taking action fast, before the next update or refresh, ...