Penguin Update To Be Released – How To Prepare & Prevent A Penalty

According to Gary Ilyes, the Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, a new Google Penguin Algorithm update is due to be released by the end of 2015.
 

@Andrew_Isidoro yes

— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 28, 2015

 
Yes, a Google Penguin Algorithm update is happening again.
 

 
With the new update, there is good and bad news for webmasters.

These are some of the most important things to know about the new Google Penguin Algorithm update:

1. Those who have been penalized by Google Penguin in December 2014, now have a chance to recover, if the backlinks profile has been cleaned out correctly.
2. With the new algorithm update, Penguin will be updated in real-time. This means that when Google detects spammy links, sites will be impacted immediately. On the other side, when bad links are removed, websites can recover sooner. Until now, sites penalized by Google Penguin had to wait for another algorithm refresh to recover their rankings. In the most recent scenario, those penalized in December 2014, haven’t yet had a chance to recover, because no Penguin refresh has been released since then.
3. Website owners must pay even more attention to their backlinks profile. Bad links can be acquired naturally or by a negative SEO attack. Because the new Google Penguin algorithm will be updated in real-time, keeping track of all the new links becomes even more important.You could do this manually, but why would you do that when the Monitor Backlinks SEO Tool can do everything automatically?! The tool sends email alerts when your website earns or loses backlinks, so you can analyze each new link and decide if it’s worth keeping.

How to prevent a Google Penguin Penalty

If you haven’t yet analyzed your website’s backlinks profile, you can still do it now. Don’t be naive and think that a penalty will not happen to you. Spammy links are everywhere, and if your website is popular, it’s likely that you already have some bad links. Saying “I didn’t know about these links” will not help you recover from a Google penalty.

Google Penguin targets websites with unnatural backlinks. Here’s how to detect the backlinks that can trigger a Google Penguin penalty.

Analyze anchor text distribution

By now you should know that the majority of your backlinks should use your website’s name as the anchor text. Your external links should use your brand, URL, long tail keywords and non-exact match keywords.

While there’s no exact percentage distribution to have for your backlinks, try to keep it at a natural ratio.

The anchor text distribution is a very common way to tell if the backlinks of a website are over optimized for the search engines.
 

 

Analyze the quality of your backlinks

The Google Penguin update it’s not just about the anchor text distribution, but also about penalizing sites with lots of spammy backlinks.

 

 

Below you can find a video tutorial showing how to find your website’s bad links, with the help of Monitor Backlinks.

 

 
Once you’ve identified your website’s bad links, first try to delete them and then create a disavow report to submit to Google’s Search Console.

That’s it. While it may sound simple, it’s not always like that, if you are not using the right tools. No matter if you’ve ever dealt with a Google penalty or not, go ahead and analyze your backlinks before the Google Penguin attacks.
 

 
Want to learn more about Google Penguin recovery? Read my case study about how I recovered from a Penguin penalty. Also, here’s what 77 SEO experts have to say about the new penguin update.