Avoiding penalties from Google is as simple as putting forth great content and having a completely natural link profile.

Ah not so simple eh?

I said that in one sentence but if anyone has tried ranking a site you’d know the difficulty behind it.

But first here’s a lowdown on Google’s manual action.

Google doles out penalties and sometimes manual actions depending on the kind of problems it encounters on your site:

Hacked Site

A hacked site is the most commonly seen problem on websites. Hackers might target low hanging vulnerable sites that haven’t been updated in a while. On the SERP results a hacked is promptly displayed as such.

Thin Content

Pages with little to no content get penalized. Such low-quality content is found on pages that are solely for driving affiliate sales, cookie-cutter sites, and so on.

Thin content will be deindexed.

Paid or Spammy Link Development

Spammy link development outsourced to third parties in developing countries always raises the red flag for the search engine.

Natural links take a long time to accrue and as such the difference is clear as day.

But what comprises of an unnatural link?

They share all or some of these characteristics

• Low Domain Rating or Url rating
• Low trust flow and highly inflated citation flow.
• Anchor texts that target money keywords and in the same style and nature everywhere
• Lack of indepth content.
• Links out to random sites and no more.
• Spun article assets used for linking out.

Ensure a Natural Link Landscape

A natural link profile will contain all sorts of links. One doesn’t need so much diversity as to include edu and gov links. But there will be no follows, image links and some low quality links from image scraping sites.

A link landscape grows over time and so should traffic.

Unsecure site

An unsecure site is one without https or one whose https certificate has long expired.

The first one still does drive traffic but for the second one Google issues a warning before letting anyone in.

This slices the traffic until you’re reduced to a slow drip of visitors.

Hence renew SSL certificates before they expire otherwise you’d be losing tons of visitors.

Thin content

Thin content refers to pages that are created just for namesake.

Affiliate content copied as it is from manufacturer sites.

Doorway pages.

Most local sites take to this as they copy paste entire content from competitors as there’s nothing much to write about plumbing or pool cleaning.

Spammy links

I’d advise no one to use GSA to build links to your sites.

The links follow a set template and can be easily caught by spam filters.

Hence avoid at all costs.

Other than that be wise if you’re purchasing links. Don’t buy guest posts from Fiverr. Earlier Brian Dean from Backlinko had advised about buying fiverr guest posts calling them cheap way to get a diversified link portfolio.

Later, he retracted the statement seeing that most sellers have vast link farms where from they create blog posts and link to other sites.

They do it as long as the site gets deindexed which happens more commonly than you think.

Then start over again.

Link penalties

Recovering from link penalties isn’t easy but entirely possible.

You will need a good suite of tools to gather backlinks.

Don’t rely on WMT alone. Check backlinks through Ahrefs, Semrush, MajesticSEO and other sources where you can find.

You will also know which links you built on your own.

Run through tools to find and eliminate toxic links and use a good disavow tool to generate files for submission.

SO what do you think of maintaining a natural link landscape?

Step up Organic Link acquisition efforts

Organic efforts to acquire links cost a lot.

In fact 37% of businesses with a strong online presence spend up to 50000 a month to acquire quality links. This isn’t money spent to purchase guest posts but in creating and promoting valuable content that can attract tons of links naturally.

To accrue links naturally start by trying to figure out what interests your target audience.

After penguin the source of your links is of utmost importance. You cannot simply try and get any kind of garbage as links and hope that all will be well.

But how to acquire relevant links? If people feel like linking out to you after seeing your work, you acquire a valuable, targeted link. It only comes from understanding what your audience wants and likes.

Let’s clear the air around value once and for all. Value means providing your target audience with what they were looking for when they made the search. It’s simply fulfilling search intent.

 

Spend more time crafting content

a. Content with data is trusted

If its full of facts, stats and data backed it’s valuable to your target audience and increases the likelihood that it will be linked to. This kind of blogging makes them want to cite your content when they write about something- something so good that it would be a shame not to mention it.

Here are examples of this kind of content:

• Guides
• How to posts
• List posts
• Data-backed posts
• Reference posts
• Survey-data backed posts.

And so on

b. Should be emotionally charged

Your target audience just like any other target audience consists of people. And people make more decisions backed by data than by anything else.

So your content should tap into emotions.

Here are some examples:

• Articles that entertain
• Industry polls about a topic they deeply care about
• Humor laced articles
• Interviews
• Scholarships
• Trending topics that are emotionally charged.

 

c. Solution intensive

If your content is one that provides an apt solution that people are able to genuinely find help from there’s no reason why it won’t get linked. I recently was helping a friend with Gmail recovery. But most posts just summed up the help article. There was just one with actual insight meaning he had gone through the motions before writing the post. That’s the kind of content we’re talking about. A much more distilled and potent form of these articles is downloadable content like calculators widgets and interactive content.

The kind of content we’re aiming for

Good content is what earns links but you also need to know what makes content good enough to get links?

In the following section I will discuss tips on what makes content helpful, popular and engaging and worthy to be linked.

• Authoritative content—Content that shares insights as got from research and surveys gets more links. Buzzsumo’s analysis of 1 million articles led to the findings that most articles don’t get shares (over 50% of the sample), or links. A lot of poor content exists. Posts that are shared well necessarily don’t acquire links in the same frequency or have a correlation. But one particular type(s) bucked the trend. Research backed content and opinion forming journalism gets both links and shares consistently. If you’re looking for a formula this is what you should be going for.
• Long—Content longer than thousand words gets more links than shorter content. It seems the longer the content the better it is. 3000 word content gets twice as many shares as 1000 word content.
• Unbiased—Promotional content destroys trust and readers feel suspicious about it being a paid insert. Unbiased content is what gets links.
• Well-designed—Content rich in multi-media or otherwise well designed gets more links. Include images, original photos and even videos.

• List posts—These posts across categories get the highest number of links.

 

Focus on building relationships

Have you ever seen two blogs in the same niche consistently linking out to each other and mentioning each other. It’s not a paid link exchange program but a sort of symbiotic relationship between the owners of the two sites. By mentioning each other they grow together.

They arrived at influencer marketing even before someone had coined the term. By making friends you’re encouraging quality link exchange that happens organically.

But don’t be a leech. Influencers can smell what you’re in for a mile away because they deal with leeches all day long.

Build a partner. Stay in touch with them and share your best content with them not every now and then but as the occasion demands when its beneficial for both parties.

How to?

Join Facebook and other groups where influencers and future partners hang out and converse with them to start a budding relationship.

Final thoughts

The age has given way to link earning from link building and put the entire focus on being able to score a backlink profile that looks as natural as possible.

Don’t get hung up on strategies and tips that used to work in another lifetime. Hang those boots out to dry.