With the current penalties Google is using for manipulative link , it is essential for website owners to rethink the strategies they are using. The first step in doing this is through identification of these links.
- Diagnosing the penalties associated with links: – Typically, this is done by Google informing you that your website has been penalized. You would have to log into your account as a webmaster to see if you have received this message. Although it may sound terrible receiving this message, you would be better off in the know rather than second guessing yourself.
- Algorithmic penalties: – This will typically happen if you have been affected by Penguin. If the rankings of your website started dropping around Penguin’s birthday, which is on the 24th of April, chances are this would be the cause of your penalties. Webmasters need to note that rather than improving search quality, the changes brought about by penguin are targeted at penalizing spam.
- Other link penalties associated with Google: In some instances you may find that Google has penalized websites without informing the owners of the reasons why. In addition to this, Google tends to make algorithm changes every year. Most website owners will be aware of major changes in algorithm but there are a significant number that also go by unnoticed. It is yet to be seen if Penguin will have a number of refinements such as Panda did and if these refinements will affect webmasters with penalties to their sites.
So, what advice can be given to a webmaster who would like to know whether or not they have received a penalty or if they are likely to do so in future? One would need to check whether or not their anchor text distributions appear normal. This can be done on Open Site explorer through a number of links or use SEO Rank Smart tools for check the quality and links availability of links at one go.
In conclusion, there have also been some reports from webmasters who claim to have been penalized after 301 having redirected a website that has been penalized previously to their own website.
However, there has not been any sufficient data collection to form solid conclusions on what could be causing this or to verify how true it is.
In addition to that, some of these webmasters have also reported that after being penalized by Google, they also experienced the same treatment with Bing. However, once the penalty was lifted by Google, it was much simpler to have it removed by Bing.