P-p-p-p-pick up your link building efforts after Penguin

By Amy @BubbleJobs

Following the infamous introduction of the Google Penguin update last month, you may be feeling slightly cautious about re-starting your link building campaign and you have every right to be.

According to anyone who’s anyone in the industry, link building as we knew it is now a thing of the past. From batch article marketing to link networks, former link building techniques that could propel you to the top of the ranking pre-Penguin will now only land you with a hefty Google penalty and more than a few sleepless nights!

So what’s the answer? Stop link-building altogether? Erm not quite! If you didn’t already know incoming links are seen by Google as votes of confidence to your website. The more you have, the more authoritative it becomes (hence why companies used to buy hundreds of cheap links in one go). If you don’t have any incoming links at all, you’ll struggle to get any attention from Google whatsoever.

The solution is to try the ‘white-hat’ approach to link building. Create content that people actually want to link to… for free! Yep, we may have forgotten all about free links in the age of pricey link acquisition but they are out there – you just have to spend time crafting well written articles that are; a. unique b. helpful and c. informative. If you spend time creating useful pieces of content that go far and above those that appear on your competitors’ sites, the free links will come in time.

Don’t like the idea of waiting for links? Well you’d better get promoting your content then hadn’t you? In the age of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, promoting your own content has never been quicker, easier and cheaper. In fact, social share signals are now more important than ever – they show Google your content’s being shared between multiple users which indicates it must be a useful piece. Ker-ching! Tweeting your latest blog is one sure-fire way to distribute your content to your followers – and you can even link your blog directly to your Twitter account so each new post gets tweeted automatically.

Social bookmarking is another way to get your content distributed. Linking your blog to useful social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg can help to promote your content to a wider audience as can introducing social bookmarking buttons on your blog which encourage readers to share a post – and let’s face it, a larger audience can never be a bad thing right?!

You can also help to boost your site’s link profile post-Penguin by taking a closer look at your site’s internal links. We all now that using internal links can help to get your pages cached quicker and can help to strengthen the site internally – the trick is to link relevant pages together. OK, so your home page might be uber-useful but is it really necessary to link back to it off every page? Instead try to link to only relevant pages – this will make it even easier for the Googlebots to crawl your site.

So there you have it; a few simple tips to consider when trying to rehash your link building campaign following the wrath of Google Penguin. The best bit? They’re all within the Webmaster Tools guidelines so you shouldn’t get hit by Penguin 2.0 whenever it may choose to raise its ugly head!

Tags: create a natural link profile, Google Penguin link penalty, Google Penguin update, link building advice, Penguin-friendly link building tips, White-hat link building tips

About the Author

Amy Edwards Amy Edwards is the SEO Manager for Bubble Jobs. With a strong background in online content and copywriting, Amy is responsible all the on-site and off-site SEO of Bubble Jobs and the Bubble Jobs blog. You can follow her on Twitter here or add her to your circles on Google+ here.