Part 3 – Diagnosing Penguin 2.0 Problems for Small Biz Owners
When someone types a word into Google when looking for your product, that word is called a keyword. When that keyword is turned into a link (using HTML code), it becomes “anchor text”. Anchor text is a way of “telling” Google which searches you want your website to appear in. SEO companies have “overused” anchor text.
The most recent Penguin update detects “too much anchor text” where a large percentage of links to a page contain a keyword.
Problem #1:
You have lots of links on your site that use search terms (keywords) as anchor text.
Reversal: Easy, Fast
If you sell, say cosmetics, you may be linking to products via their brand name and description from lots of different pages on your site. Maybe, when someone buys eye shadow and blush, your website suggests a matching lipstick. This link is made up of text that says “Revlon Cocoa Wine Lipstick”. Google assumes you’re trying to trick it into ranking the destination page for the keyword Revlon Cocoa Wine Lipstick when in fact, you’re just being helpful to customers.
Solution:
Remove some of these “exact match anchor text links” and replace them with links using the text “click here” or related words like “matching lipstick” etc. Mixing up the anchor text in links will help. Do a handful first; if your Revlon page bounces back a little, then go ahead and de-optimise the whole site.
Problem #2:
You have lots of links on other sites that point back to your own site that use anchor text in the link.
Reversal: Long, slow and difficult
This is the most common issue with Penguin updates. Your web company (or even you) has gone to a lot of trouble to find a lot of places to link to your site. They’ve made the link up from your anchor text.
You now have a huge percentage of links that contain your anchor text compared to your URL, name or web white noise like “click here”.
Solution:
Ideally, first you’ll approach all of these webmasters and ask them to either remove the link (if it’s a spammy site) or change the anchor text to something more generic like your URL.
If they ignore your requests, you’ll need to use Webmaster Tools to “disavow” the links. This is tricky because some of these will be helping you to stay in the rank you’re at; even if it’s not a good rank, it’s better than the ranks below it!
You need to pursue the lowest quality ones first. You can use Open Site Explorer to assess the quality of the websites, but it’s a long, slow, painful process. You also don’t want to do too many at once because if you do delete a good one by mistake, you want to know how to get it back!
Anchor text is only one problem. The quality of the sites you’re getting links from is another big issue. So, it’s time to look at quality related issues that are impacted by Penguin updates in Part 4 of this article series.
Part 2 looked at Preparing to Fix SEO Problems Caused by Penguin 2.0 Yourself.
