Link Building, SEO

The Coming Penguin Update: Should You Reevaluate Your Link Building Strategy?

A couple weeks back, Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts said that there will be a massive update to Penguin sometime this year, and that he expects it to be one of the most talked-about updates this year. So strap in and buckle up, if you haven’t been adjusting your strategy, there’s a good chance you’ll be in for a bumpy ride.

What Can We Expect From the Update?

I don’t want to play fortune teller here, so I’m not going to speculate too much about individual aspects of the coming update. Instead, I’ll remind you of the things that Penguin has targeted in the past:

•    Too many exact match anchor text links
•     Too much focus on anchor text in general
•     Anything that could be considered “black hat”
•     Links from “low quality” sources
•     Links that are “unnatural” (They were created manually or algorithmically, not editorially.)
•     Any participation in link schemes like link trading, buying, and so on
•     Links created using duplicate content
•     Links from web directories, article directories, and social bookmarking sites
•     Links designed to manipulate PageRank
•     Links from automated content, and content that doesn’t serve the end user

I have a hunch that if I just state these examples without any explanation, that a lot of you are going to get hung up on the details. So, to be clear, Penguin is designed to target manipulative links. It’s not so much a question of what type of link you’re acquiring as how you’re acquiring it.

There are three tiers of links, and, if the new Penguin update accomplishes what it’s supposed to, these are the results you can expect from them.

1.     Editorial links: links that you had little or no direct influence over, that were created simply because your content, tools, and community are worth talking about. These links are air-tight and will almost certainly never lose their value.
2.     Promotional links: links that you created manually through guest posts, collaboration, and outreach. These links are okay and can be great if they also help build exposure, referral traffic, and reputation for your brand. They are most useful as a way of building exposure that leads to secondary links. If the quality is questionable, they may lose value, but it is unlikely that they will actually count against you.
3.     Spam/manipulative links: links you have full control over and that exist strictly to boost search engine rankings. These links are high risk and are very likely to lose their value. In some circumstances they will actually count against you.

Source : http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-coming-penguin-update-should-you-reevaluate-your-link-building-strategy/62074/