A New Penguin Beating Formula: Article Marketing

As many of you may well be aware Google started deindexing many blog networks and link building schemes in March, although Articleranks, an Article Marketing service, was hit it was only affected around 20% this was mainly due to the lower level of footprint that ArticleRanks left. We believe after months of analysis the reason other networks were hit were because of

- They make reports easily available of published URLs, This list then gets reported to Google
- They are mainly private networks which are a lot smaller and if wiped out are a lot harder to restore.
- They post garbage to all sites, with no media.
- They are solely wordpress based sites which are easier to spot, we not only have wordpress but have always supported more platforms.
- They do not post to relevant sites or even relevant categories like we do
- They only use SEO Hosting, we believe Google work through marked C Classes to deindex sites and this is potentially a big risk factor.

So whats the new ArticleRanks?

As you may be aware we have not sent out any emails about the updates or any guidance because we wanted to analyse data and create a great platform moving forwards. Other networks have literally jumped in and made unnecessary changes that do not even fix any issues in fear of losing clients. We are more MUCH more than a blog network. ArticleRanks not only syndicates unique versions of your articles onto a vast pool of sites we have in the system, ranging from Wordpress , Atom to Joomla and more, but now we also syndicate your articles into web 2.0 properties such as Squidoo, Posterous, LiveJournal, Blogger and many more. Whereas where we always had platform and category diversity in the past, we are now moving into a new scene focussing on Web 2.0 platforms. So moving forward ArticleRanks now posts your Articles to the following platforms
- Wordpress (Self hosted Sites)
- Joomla
- Meta Weblog, Movable and Atom APIs
- Tumblr
- Squidoo
- Posterous
- LiveJournal
- Multiply
- Soup
- Xanga
- Blogger
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Linkagogo
So that is a whopping 14+ different platforms we now post too, and it does not end there in the next few months we will be adding many more social/web2.0 platforms to the mix.

Link Building after Penguin

The Article Marketing service says: Although we have made necessary changes on our end, if you continue blasting targeted anchor text to your site then you are going to eventually be hit by Googles penguin algothirm (This is totally different from the deindexing that has happened, Penguin hits your site when you have overcooked the anchor text), therefore link building moving forwards we highly recommend the following
- Diversity your anchor text, if you are trying to rank for "blue widgets" then use terms such as "blue widgets for sale" "great blue widgets" "buying blue widgets" "blue widgets examples" "blue or red widgets" and so on, try to get as much variation in their as possible.
- Get plain links in there domain.com, www.domain.com, href://domain.com
- Get totally irrelevant anchor text in there e.g click here, check this out, great site, view this etc etc
- If you are using spinning to link build, then obviously we all know spinning is not the highest quality form of link building, so look at also using spinning as Tier 2 links, as an example create a nice guest blog post and then point your spun article into that post. The more variation you have in your anchors and backlink portfolio the less likely you are to be hit with a penalty EVER! The reason so many people got hit by the penguin update is because they were using mass link building tools and just slamming the anchors they wanted to rank for. Seriously how long did we think a footprint like anchor text over optimisation would last? Google cracked down on onpage keyword stuffing, cracked down on meta title stuffing and cracked down on anything that was repetitive. So was it really that hard for them to crack down on stuffing your anchor text?

Does Having a Link from a Deindexed Site Hurt?

In our opinion when Google manually deindexes a site, they may potentially pass a time length penalty across to users that already have links on there. But if after the site has been deindexed people add links to it still then they would probably still be devalued as our data shows Google still crawls deindexed sites regularly.

What happens if I already got hit by Penguin?

If you have already been hit by the penguin update then recovery is possible, if you follow the above examples and start diversifying your anchors to the point that you are totally diluting the anchors you already have in place then on future penguin refreshes the filter will be lifted from your site. We have already recovered a couple of sites like this. Obviously the more links you built to the site the longer it will take you to recover. A quicker solution would be to just 301 the old domain and start a fresh on a new site following the guidelines above. Although this would take longer if the terms you are going for are highly competitive.

Google says remove links, Does Removing the Links help?

From our analysis, absolutely not, it has not helped in the slightest we have not seen one success where removing the links restored rankings to their former positions, this is because of 2 reasons.
- Google manually deindexed some of the sites in networks so its more than likely those links they "know" about have already been devalued. Google are just making people try to remove links so they see how tedious it is and they never undertake link building again.
- The links they have not "not de valued" you are going to be removing, so you have not only lost power from the devalued links but you are removing the ones that are actually still passing some weight.
How would this in any way help your rankings? If your rankings have only ever been artificially inflated (Yes thats what any link building is! Whether its guest posting or creating info graphics you are still trying to manipulate the SERPs) then removing all your links will just put you back to the beginning. Google is an algothirm; they work things out on mathematic equations, so anything that sticks out like a sore thumb is easy to build a formula for.

Google said they May Release a Disavow Tool, Should I Use This, would it not be easier than removing links?

You have to think of things this way, Google only release certain products to get more data. Now imagine they released this disavow tool in to webmaster tools, then everyone would flock to their link profile and start hitting disavow on links that are passing power.

I think the problem with SEO these days is we have a new generation of SEOs being influenced by what Google say. Google do not want you to manipulate their rankings in any way so they will mis guide us in any way they can. The sooner people understand Google is not your friend the better, if you want your site to rank then listening to Google is not going to get you anywhere fast (We have seen people flocking like birds in a tornado to remove links from their backlink profile! Seriously it absoluteley astounds us that this is happening, an algothirm does not work like a human it does not say ohh dear you still have a link here and here therefore no rankings for you, it works on mathematical equations and Penguin is an algothirm not manual intervention, so by feeding the algothirm the correct numbers (Yes maths is a numbers game.. Suprise! :-)) you are going to slowly gain your rankings back. Its only when you have been silly enough to submit a reinclusion request Google will probably slap you with a manual penalty and then you better start cleaning up them links.

By users flocking to their new disavow tool, people are basically submitting spam reports to Google without actually doing so directly. Can you imagine how much more data they would be collecting?

The future of SEO is diversity, yes it may take longer to diversify your anchors but why leave that footprint when it can easily be removed!

P.S. We are rolling out some new services in the next few days/weeks so keep your eyes peeled for the email coming your way. These will be a mixture of higher end link building services, writing services and brand new social sharing services, and that is the best way to abide by Google Penguin's Rules, and to do an Article Marketing campaign the right way.