In late April, many SEO dreams were shattered – top rankings rolled out with the Google Penguin update. Overnight, sites disappeared from the results. Now, this has happened scores of times before with past Google updates – not much of a big deal, add a few hundred fresh links and there’s a good chance that you’re back in the game … but Penguin was different.
For the first time, this algorithm update permanently PENALIZED sites for poor quality links. In the past, your site could be deindexed but your link profile wasn’t held against you – just get Google’s attention with new links and you’re back in the game. Now, with Penguin, Google keeps track of your poor quality links and assigns you a negative pagerank… tough to recover from because it’s much harder to delete your quick-garnered links than to obtain them.
The Penguin update leaves the usual grey SEO methods useless – even harmful – article marketing, blog comments, forum posts, social bookmarking – basically, any method that a human hasn’t given your link a blessing, is going to do more harm than good.
Since April, many affiliates have been feeling the effects of the Penguin dagger – unable to regain their positions with good quality sites that have poor quality backlink structures. Well – there’s good news.
This week, Google introduced the Disavow Links tool in their Webmaster Tools Suite. This tool will allow you to submit backlinks to your site that you feel may be dragging down the rankings to be disregarded. In theory, you’ll be able to repair (and repent) your poor quality link profile. The process is said to take a few weeks, so there’s no “real life” data yet on how effective this tool is – but at least there’s hope.
Now – the downside to this tool is that Google will be collecting links and domains of sites that have been used for “quick and dirty” links in the past, expanding on their blacklist – so, if you did manage to squeak by Penguin, your number may come up soon.
So – what’s the most effective method for fast SEO now? Social media is the answer. It’s never been easier to have a link go viral with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tout, YouTube, etc. – build your social networks up, release viral content and distribute via your social media accounts. As your links are shared and redistributed, your rankings will benefit. Automation is not recommended – just too easy for Google to detect. Spend the time to legitimately build your social circles – fan pages are VERY powerful foundations.
To sum up; Google now penalizes your site for poor quality links, you can ask Google to negate these poor quality links via the new Disavow Tool, Google is building an awesome blacklist driven by the Disavow Tool, automation is more or less dead and Google loves human approved links via social media sites.
Get your ranks back, my friends!  As always, hit me any time for a more detailed discussion.
- John
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