I read a lot of complaints from site owners on how their sites had taken a dive and lost their page rank on Google search result. It happen after Google releases its Penguin update. Does it mean those website got hit by Penguin update? Most likely, Yes.
Before taking crucial steps to recover from Penguin, we must understand first what is Penguin all about. Let see, Penguin was created by Google to suspend any website that it considered as web spam. How does Google determine whether a site is a web spam or not? By looking at links of that site that appears to be coming from low-quality networks. This kind of links is called unnatural link.
Unnatural Links
There are several links that are considered as unnatural links. They are:
1. Links from low-quality sites
Websites that have been flagged as malware and spammy are included in this group, also porn sites and sites with lots of pop-ups.
2. Paid text links
When a website want to achieve high page rank for a particular keyword, it needs to have numerous links for that keyword. Unfortunately, may sites are paying for that kind of links from other websites. Google considered this method as manipulative and doesn’t provide any value to visitors.
3. Links from article marketing sites
Why does Google value most of article marketing sites as low-quality sites? Because these websites only offer short articles that don’t have any value to users. These sites only focus on putting some links with certain anchor texts which Google considered again as manipulative.
4. Links from spammy comments
Blog commenting has been known as a good way of link building. But many site owners use it recklessly and spam on other sites with low-quality comments and usually have no correlation with the post. Even they use user name with specific keyword.
5. Links from guest posting
Guest posting on other websites doesn’t against any of Google guidelines, but Penguin will estimate the quality of those sites. Penguin can find out if a website focuses too much on placing anchor text than providing valuable content.
If your site has any type of links like I mentioned above, you’d better fix it immediately. Remove those links and any other black hat techniques. This final step may not guarantee you will regain Google page rank back. It still takes some times. Or hire professional SEO experts if you think it’s too much hard work.