How We Deal With Penguin 2.1

So, hands up who has been affected by Penguin 2.1. To be honest it was apparently only a minor update but there seems to be a variety of people that have been hit positively or negatively. Many people are reporting slight losses of between 2 and 10 spaces where others have been hit with an obvious penalty where they’ve dropped 100 places plus. However, what are Google targeting with this update?
Well this update was slightly different to your average Penguin update. First of all Penguin 2.1 was rolled out however, this update had an anti-spam patch that was added to the update. This is all part of Google updating there whole algorithm which was done a couple of weeks back with the Hummingbird update. Very little ranking shifts were seen with the Hummingbird roll out.
What Do We Mean By Anti-Spam Patch
The anti-spam patch is designed to target sites with masses of lower quality links. When we talk lower quality links we don’t just mean the content we also mean the location where the link has been gained from. Currently Google uses page rank (PR) as a measure of trust. So if you get lots / majority of links from PR 0 or N/A sites then this could be classed as spam links. This is quite easily countered. To do this simply make every link that points to your money site either PR 1 or above. This is the most effective way of protecting against the anti-spam patch.
The Penguin update is just a slightly updated version of Penguin to 2.0. This means that they are targeting over optimization of keywords. One thing to remember is that the Penguin is an algorithmic update. This means any penalty can be reversed without the need for Google manual intervention. However you do not want to go building masses of links overnight to your website with variations of keywords because this in itself will look unnatural and will probably force an unatural link warning.
Where many people go wrong is that they forget that SEnuke is only as good as the information that you plug into it. In this day and age to get consistent quality rankings you need to concentrate on the quality of the links and not just the quantity.

How To Counter The Effects Of Penguin 2.1

Put simply diversity, diversity and some more diversity!!!
There are so many possible penalties you can gain from Google that spending a little more time setting up a nuke is really worth it in the long run. We’ve said it before when Penguin 2.0 came out and will say again now you must get variation in anchor text, diversity in links and don’t rush you linking.
Ever since Penguin 2.0 there has been a need to up the amount of branded keywords you use for your linking. This is just one of the elements that Google considers to look natural.
We all know that the social networking module inside a SEnuke is probably the most powerful module however gaining all your links from one type of platform is not great. We still need to look at the diversity of links.
SEnuke has many extra great platforms such as wikis, PDFs and social bookmarks. It pays to get links to your site from all of these platforms but dont go crazy, stick with PR1+ to the money site and you can go all PR from tier 2 onwards. However don’t stop there and assume that SEnuke is an all in one solution. You should also look at some other linking platforms such as blog comments. But, I am not talking about spamming them, just a couple of high quality manual comments a week using branded anchor text and names rather than trying to get a keyword rich link from them.
If you have a lot of clients then hire someone on Odesk for a couple of hours a week to do some blog commenting for you. To get them accepted from the top blogs in the niche they will need to be useful quality comments though so make sure that you take this into account when posting comments. Things like “I really like this great post” simply don’t cut it.

Don’t Forget Social
In the Internet today it would look unnatural if the website didn’t have an associated social media profile. There are tools out there that can automate all this for you however I personally prefer to try and do as much manually as I can even if it involves hiring someone to do it for me.
While there are lots of conflicting reports about whether social actually affects your rankings or not it still has a major benefit to being part of your SEO strategy. There is proof that Google plus shares and +1′s do have a certain effect on rankings however, while they are owned by Google spamming these would be eventual ranking suicide.
With all this said even if you have been hit by a penalty the best thing you can do is to carry on linking. If you suddenly stop them that in itself looks unnatural. But, when you next set up in nuke think a little bit deeper about the kind of anchor text you will be using and where you can keep getting your links from.
We have been testing the Power Up Strategy for quite some time and all the sites we have used this method on have not been negatively affected by the Penguin 2.1 update. The principles of this on much the same as what I have mentioned in this post. Get high quality links from a diverse set of IP’s using the fightback network and then dilute the anchor text with a SEnuke.