In this article, we will address how to control your backlink profile. Understand what is going on with your backlinks is highly relevant if one wants to keep safe from penguin penalties. Google Penguin is all about anchor text distribution and low-quality backlinks and in this article I will tell you why.
Extracting Your Backlink Profile
The first thing to do when thinking about controlling your backlink profile This is a two step
Google Search Console. The good old google search console can be used to control your backlink profile.
Ahrefs. Ahrefs is another website that can be used to extract the backlink profile of a particular website.
Once you have these files you need to insert them in a google excel sheet and remove duplicates. Your backlink profile is created.
What to Look At?
As the small sentence introducing this article says, google penguin penalties are all about controlling the anchor text ratio when we are building links, on the one hand, and the inflow of bad links coming to one’s website and on the other.
Identifying Anchor Text Ratios. A core problem in triggering a google penalty are anchor texts that are highly optimised for a certain keyword. Imagine you want to sell
A way to avoid this is to develop a diversification strategy when you are building your backlinks. Remember exact match anchor texts are to be avoided 85-90% of the times. You should use instead
. brand anchor texts
. URL anchors
. general terms (ex. website, visit website to learn more, view publisher site, click here to visit the website, here, Watch the vídeo, vídeo, Click here to download, click here for details/for more info, Click here to view the source of the post, Article, Source, View source, Learn more, Read more, find out more, Detailed info here, more details, See survey results, Go to [URL]/ brand website, Details)
. Image links
. LSI keywords
. synonyms of the core keyword
Identifying Low Quality Links. You also need to understand what constitutes a bad link. Here is the full list of what you should be concerned about.
- Check for adult/gambling websites
- Look for spammy foreign links not related to your industry
- Identify links that are not indexed in google
- Sort links by page rank and domain authority – look for all the links that have irrelevant page rank or domain authority
- Look for backlinks with too many external links
- Look for links from spammy blog networks
Tool of Choice
But how can apply the procedure stressed above? Well, fortunately there are a number of tools out there that can do this for you. The one I would recommend is Monitor Backlinks.
Removing Bad Links
There are two alternatives when you want to eliminate bad links from your profile: either you contact the webmaster directly and ask him or her to remove the link or you need to select the links you feel are not of good quality and go to google search console and submit the file. Let’s look at these two cases.
Contact the Website. Google recommends using this option. What basically implies is that you identify a particular link you do not like, go to the website and extract the contact information and then send an e-mail asking the webmaster to remove the link.
As with so many other google recommendations, this one also belongs to a dream world. Google believes that links in the web should only be created naturally. In other words, it believes in a world where a piece of content is so attractive in and of itself that it will, somehow, become viral and be sharable.
In this world it would be easy to contact a particular owner of a website and ask him to remove your link. However this dream world is just that, a dream world.
The web is full of bad people creating bad and span links. This span exists and is real and needs to be controlled. That’s why most of the times it is just impossible to send e-mails and contact people to remove links. This will take you nowhere and will essentially be a waste of time.
That’s why google also create another option. And it’s funny that in this as in so many other instances, the dream world advocated by Matt Cutts is just that, a dream world.
Disavow Tool. This is a feature of google search console that allows you to submit the number of links you find problematic directly to google. Google will then look at that file and easily extract the links you do not like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA
Conclusion: The Ideal Backlink Profile
Penguin is a serious penalty that can be inflicted upon your website and this can drastically decrease your search engine performance. In order to avoid google penguin penalties you should ALWAYS have your backlink profile under check.
When building your links you should be concerned about your anchor text ratio – remember 85-90% of your anchor texts cannot be exact match. On the other hand you should always check for all those links that exist in your profile that are not productive.
In order to remove bad links you need to either contact the webmaster – recommended by google but clearly very difficult to do because these links are normally spammy – or you need to select all the links in your profile that you do not like and use the disavow tool in google search console.
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