Guide to Penguin Friendly Off Page SEO

The purpose of the Penguin update was to demote sites that violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Off-Site SEO means Link Building. Link building easily took the biggest hit during the Penguin update. Since links are still one of the most important ranking factors for your page and your site as a whole, we have to pay close attention to the types of links that actually work, and the ones that can hurt us.

Things to stop working on Off Page Optimization:

• Free Directories.
• Low Quality Social Bookmarking Websites.
• Free Articles Directories.
• Link exchanges.
• Paid/Sponsored links.
• Links from Spun content.
• Unnatural links (links from irrelevant websites).
• Participating in link schemes.
• Links from duplicate content.
• Links from banned/penalized websites.
• Excessive use of exact match keywords as anchor text.
• Any or every manipulative link building practice.

Things to focus on:

• Niche:

Get links from sites that are relevant. The links don’t have to come from an extremely tight niche (in fact that’s often a sign of a low quality site), but the connection should make sense.

• Advanced:

Your link building techniques shouldn’t rely on something that anybody could do easily.

• Vary keywords as anchor text:

Tons of links with the exact same text is simply unnatural, even in your own marketing efforts. Focus on text that gets a click-through not that uses a particular keyword.

• Brand perspective:

Your promotional efforts should fit with your brand.

• Content marketing :

Obviously this got huge this year. You should focus on producing content that is naturally shared and linked. In other words, link earning in addition to link building.

• Getting citations:

You should make it clear to the search engines what your brand name is so that the search engines can recognize when it is mentioned without a link. Google is using statistical data and co-citation to rank sites using off-site factors that go beyond links, so focus on creating buzz and getting discussions about your brand going.

Search Engine Optimization is changing as the search engines become more advanced. Penguin will not be the last update to shake up the search results and we as marketers should be focusing on longevity and brand just as much as we should on rankings.