It appears that as of August 2013, Google is now going to target websites that are indulging in mass guest posts – IF the posts and/or the sites being posted to are of low quality and are not adding much value to readers.
a detailed flowchart of the entire link clean up process… a detailed explanation of the process below, along with more flowcharts.
If your site got hit, you might want to look at the blueprint below to understand what lies ahead for you if you want to get your site back into the Google index. This is not going to be easy, but this is a good start.
Here’s an high level overview of the link clean up and removal process.
In this post I am going to define what Google sees as low quality links that are “toxic”… and how, if they are detected, in “excessive amounts” in your backlink profile – they can result in getting you the famous “unnatural links” penalty or warning in your Webmaster Tools area, such as the one shown in the image below.
This case study does not describe how to figure out which specific Algorithm Update and Penalty the site being analyzed has been hit by.
One of the key criteria that started to be discussed in the forums is the over use of the primary and secondary keywords (the money keywords) for which people wanted to rank. According to Google, they believe sites with over-optimized anchor link profile will be penalized for unnatural link signals.
What happened with the Anchor text penalty – is that Google does not want you to “game” them so easily by using your main “money keywords” (primary and secondary keywords you want to rank for) in the backlinks.
Today, I’m going to discuss various factors that you need to look at to ensure that you comply with the past, present and future Google Algorithm Updates – that seem to be getting rolled out with higher frequency.
Before the Penguin update Google would handle links it considered to be webspam to pass down zero link juice value to the pages they linked to.
Penguin 1.0 goes crazy leaving SEO forums in chaos.If you visited online marketing forums, right after Penguin 1.0 was released – you would have seen several threads that went into pages and pages of innocent people who got slapped by the crazy Penguin.
The Penguin 1 and 2 updates have hit sites that have used black hat or white hat tactics.Many quality sites that have been playing it safe and by the Google rules have been caught in the crossfire.
