The tactics used by Google with the “Panda update” will be reused in 2012 to find spam links. Here’s three main advanced link building tactics you can use so that your backlinking pages don’t get penalized by Google.
1. Rotating “partial match” anchor text
The anchor text is the text people click on to get to another page. Traditionally in SEO, people use exact match anchor text. So if you want to rank for “herbal shampoo” for example, you’ve to made a thousand links pointing to your site with the same keyword “herbal shampoo”. This is very easy to find, especially if all the links point to the homepage. Many sites have already been penalized because of this.
By using rotating “partial match” anchor text, you don’t use your exact match keywords instead you modify and combine them. If your keyword is “xyz”, you should use “x”, “y”, “xz”, “yx”, “yz” and so on. The links should sound and look “natural”. It wouldn’t hurt in fact to add natural signals such as “click here”, “this is the best site for”, those kinds of natural signals into your links as well. Also you can use a call to action, like for example, “go herbal!”, “get the best shampoo here”, etc.
Using these tactics will rank your site just as high as proven in experiments by SEOMoz. So don’t use the same phrase anymore than 20% or 30%. the general rule of thumb is you have to have 40% on the index page and 60% to the deep linking pages. using “partial match” anchor text that would be much more natural.
2. Link Spikes
Link spikes are very simple for Google to find. Say if you get 5-10 backlinks a day, and all of the sudden you get 2000 backlinks, Google monitors that up and down trend. Most of these links are devalued anyway. The big problem is that when Google see you have link spikes, you can get you penalized because that screams spam tactics. So how do you avoid getting penalized for links spikes? The answer is simple: don’t do it.
Instead of creating an instant up and down trend in your backlinks you should invest more on how to have a slow gradual build on your backlinks.
How many links should you build?
For example you have 10 pages, that should have 30 unique visits equivalent to 150 to 300 links maximum per month. Less than 1 year old sites should never exceed this formula. That way you have slow increment and you don’t all of a sudden have 5000 links a month that Google can tell no one is going to and everyone is clicking away from. They’re using machine-learning in their algorithms now so they’re looking for correlations and in this case correlation becomes causation because if they can see three or more links spikes from your site, that’s an immediate penalty.
3. Panda ‘spam” flag
They’re continuing the Panda algorithm this year to keep finding backlink pages that are spammy and they’ll remove them from your backlink profile. It’s already in effect as we’ve seen some sites getting their backlinking pages removed from the index.
What you should is avoid is “spam professional” text and duplicate content. We can avoid our backlinking pages being removed out of the index, by making sure that the text that’s on it is at least above 50 out of 100 in a grammar check. Check spelling and grammar at http://ed.grammarly.com. Also make sure that you check the final version at copyscape and make sure that it’s at least 50% or 60% unique.
Why would you want to do this? Because if you have 100 backlinks and 40 of them gets spam-flagged you can also by danger get a spam-flagged to your main site as well. You will notice that your Page Rank is getting “Unranked” after a toolbar update or you may not notice it right away.
There’s two other ways to test if your site has been penalized. The first is by searching for your URL in Google. A site should always rank number one for its URL. If it doesn’t you probably have some kind of a penalty. Also check your title of your index page and see if where you show up in Google. If your title tag is unique enough and and you’re in a competitive market, you should show up at least in the top 50 spots. If you don’t show up for your own unique title tag, the whole text even with quotations as well, then it’s more than likely that’s some kind of penalty is in place.
You need to avoid these penalties because it will be very difficult to get rid of that reputation. If you want to avoid your site being penalized, follow these best practices.
