LINK BUILDING TIPS FOR DEALING WITH GOOGLE’S LATEST ALGORITHM CHANGE PANDA 3.3

1. Before you do anything else, focus on delivering superlative quality content to your visitor. If your site does not address Google’s mandate – delivering the highest quality, most relevant results to its users – you can’t reasonably expect them to deliver traffic to it. Even considering a link building strategy prior to addressing this issue is like putting “the cart before the horse.”

2. Be careful when you optimize your anchor text: Google is looking for “natural”, genuine links. Natural links do not often contain highly targeted keywords and phrases in the anchor text. Such optimization is a sure sign of an un-natural link, whose only purpose is to manipulate search rankings. So it is a good strategy to vary your anchor text to include your URL, generic words, like “click here”, less popular variations of your keyword and so on.

3. Obtain links from a wide variety of resources: “Normal” sites have normal link profiles; a couple of directory listings here and there, a few blog comment links, a Yahoo! Answer or two, a few bookmarks, a guest post or two, a handful of forum profile links and so on. A large number of links from a single resource is likely to be flagged by Google.

4. Obtain plenty of low quality links and plenty of “no follow” links: Again, these two strategies do little more than help complete your site’s “natural” profile. Most sites normally generate a lot of low quality links, and a link profile consisting of nothing but “do follow” links smells a bit “fishy.” And remember; just because a link is “no follow” does not mean Google does not know about it. It only means Google does not factor in the value of that link when determining its rankings.

5. Make sure your link building is compatible with your site traffic: If your site receives 25 visitors a day, yet receives 5,000 new links per month, how natural do you think that will appear to Google? The truth is that now more than ever, SEO is a long term venture. You will have to build links slowly and steadily as your site grows and matures.

6. Stay completely “white hat.” While it’s tempting to take short cuts, especially when it seems like everyone else is cashing in on the “ranking manipulation” strategy of the day, any attempt to “game” the system is going to have disastrous consequences in the long run. The folks who relied heavily on the many blog networks that have been de-indexed in the last month or so can attest to this fact. The simplest way to do this is to ask yourself this each and every time you create a new link, “would this link pass the smell test if it were manually reviewed by a Google editor?” (Or in other words, is this link a blatant attempt to manipulate the Google database, or is its prime mandate to provide value to surfers). If you answer “no”, then you probably should think twice about creating that link.