The game has changed. SEO has always been a fast-moving industry that favors the nimble and flexible. But since Google’s latest round of updates, the rate of change has intensified. In fact, past updates put many Google-traffic-dependent site owners out of business.

You probably already know that SEO has changed. But there’s not much information out there to help give you the answers you’re looking for. In this guide, you’ll get an in-depth look at the SEO world we live in and some actionable strategies you can use to shield your site against Google’s relentless updates.

Visual Timeline of SEO

It’s impossible to understand link building without knowing where we are and how we got here.

  • 5 BG (Before Google): Yahoo and AltaVista ruled the web. Relevancy (based on keyword density and meta tags) were the most important ranking factors.
  • 1 AG (After Google): Google’s revolutionary PageRank-based algorithm, based on the number of links pointing to a site, led to significantly better results than the existing search engines. This eventually led to Google’s dominance in the search world. For the first time, pages were ranked based on quality and relevancy.
  • Venice Update (April 2009): This rarely-discussed update was Google’s first major change of how the algo perceived sitewide authority and branding. The Venice update put Google on the trajectory that it’s been on ever since: favoring trusted brands over their smaller competitors.
  • Google Panda (February 2011): Affected a massive 12 percent of searches. Targeted low quality “content farms” like EHow, EzineArticles.com and Suite101.com. One of the first Google updates that actively penalized site owners that broke their Webmaster Guidelines.
  • Google Penguin (April 2012): The “over-optimization” penalty that hit 3.1% of sites in Google’s index. This update specifically targeted sites that used black hat link building tactics, specifically over-optimized anchor text. Like Panda, this update is a filter that catches sites in its net every time they roll out a refresh (every 2-3 months or so).
  • EMD Update (September 2012): This update targeted sites that used the power of exact match domains to get an edge. This further cemented Google’s new hardline stance on site owners that gamed the system.

White is the New Black (Hat)

There was a three- to five-year span of time where black hatters ruled Google’s front page. Using spun content, massive blog networks and overusing anchor text, these sites were able to game the algorithm with ease. Most black hat SEOs (and even a number of white hats) woke up to see something like this when they checked their stats the day after Google Penguin.

While there’s still a few black hat “success” stories out there, most black hat link building tactics are short lived. Not to get too preachy, but if you want to do well with SEO over the long-term, it’s time to adopt a white hat approach to building links.

How to Proactively Avoid Penalties

The goal of SEO used to be gunning for a single keyword. Once you hit the front page, you were gold. Not anymore. An important part of today’s SEO is working to minimize the risk of penalties and Google updates. And while overzealous on-page SEO can definitely hurt you, links should be your focus if you want to avoid Google’s next update.

In fact, the head of Webspam at Google, Matt Cutts, confirmed that links are where webmasters should be looking to prevent future penalties:

Here’s how to audit your site’s link profile and reduce the risk of becoming Google’s next update victim.

Anchor Text Overuse

It’s well known that anchor text overuse is one of the most important webspam signals that trigger the Penguin filter. And it’s a fair bet that future updates will target sites with an unnatural link profile.

In fact, sites that overused “money terms” in their anchor text were significantly more likely to suffer from a penalty.

That’s why mixing up the anchor text you use to link to your site is extremely important.

Check Your Site’s Anchor Text Distribution

The first step to avoiding anchor text misuse is to know where you stand. The easiest way to find this out is to use the link analysis tool, Majestic SEO. You can see your anchor text distribution with a free trial.

Just head over the Majestic and enter your homepage URL. It will show you a nifty pie chart of your anchor text distribution on the “summary” page. To get more in-depth information, click on the “anchor text” tab.

Check Page-Level Anchor Text Distribution

While your site’s anchor text distribution is important, it can also hit specific pages that have been over-optimized. You can see page-level anchor text data for your most important pages by entering a page’s URL into an SEO tool.

Then you’ll see the anchor text distribution for links pointing to that specific page.

How to Add Diversity to Anchor Text

If you see a disproportionate amount of keyword-rich anchor text, it’s time to take action. Here are some simple ways to add natural diversity to your link’s anchor text.

Branded Terms

If you spend time looking at sites with a natural link profile you’ll notice that they tend to have a majority of their anchor text as their brand name. For example, 6 of the top 7 of Quick Sprout’s anchor texts are variations of the brand:

Generic Anchors

Generic anchor texts, like “here”, “this site” and “website” are a great way to make your anchor text distribution look more natural.

Naked URLs

Although most sites use anchor text when linking to other pages, some still use naked URLs, like https://www.quicksprout.com.

Titles

An underutilized form of anchor text is the title of the page you’re linking to. For example, a post we published a while back, “The Science of Instagram: How to Get More Followers and Likes”, boasts the title of the post as the most commonly used anchor text:

Web Directories

Directories aren’t as powerful as they used to be. But the official word from Google is that they still pass trust and authority onto your site. And they’re a golden opportunity to quickly add branded anchor text to your homepage links (although some directories do allow “deep” internal page submissions).

Press Releases

Press releases, while overused in the SEO world, do pass some juice to your site. However, most people spam their press releases with 4 or more anchor text hyperlinks:

That’s a shame as press releases are a golden opportunity to use generic anchors on your site’s homepage and internal pages.

Guest Posting

You already know that guest posting is an awesome way to get quality backlinks and targeted traffic. However, many people still succumb to anchor text abuse when publishing guest posts. Fortunately, you can easily throw in generic and branded anchors within your author bio area.

When sending over your guest post in Word, include the anchor text that you want to use (many site owners assume you always want to use branded or “brand.com” anchors and publish your links that way automatically).

Guest posts are also one the best ways to use generic anchors, like “click here” and “his latest post”:

And because most sites that accept guest posts allow multiple links, you can usually throw in one branded anchor text link to your homepage and a generic anchor text to one of your posts.

Sitewide Link Distribution

One of the most common mistakes link builders make is to point almost all of their links to their homepage. This looks extremely unnatural, especially for sites with a lot of content. Large sites presumably will have most of their links pointing to internal pages.

You can see a cool visual of your sitewide link distribution using Ahrefs.

You’ll see your site’s data on the overview page.

Scroll to the bottom and take a look at the sitewide distribution graph. This displays the distribution of links across your site. The more spread out the image is, the more links you have across your site.

And if you put a spammy site into Ahrefs you’ll notice a very different looking distribution pattern:

The Ahrefs.com graph is a quick way to get an idea of your site’s link distribution. But you can get significantly more precise information using a free MajesticSEO.com.

Now it’s time to find the percentage of links pointing to your internal pages vs. your homepage.

Simply divide your Internal Page Links by your Total Backlinks and multiply that number by 100.

If you have a lot of sitewide links (like blogrolls), the number of homepage links may be quite high. Although no one is sure how Google perceives sitewide backlinks, it’s understood that the number of referring domains is a more important metric than the total number of links. In other words, a few blogrolls may make your link distribution look artificially homepage-heavy.

You can easily check the number of sitewide links in your backlink profile using Ahrefs.

Link Relevancy

In a surprising moment of candor, former Google employee Andre Weyhner stated in an interview: “getting a link from a high PR page used to always be valuable, today it’s more the relevance of the site’s theme in regards to yours, relevance is the new PR.” And according to an industry study conducted by MicroSiteMasters.com, links coming from unrelated sites is a Penguin risk factor:

Getting the bulk of your backlinks from closely related sites is a powerful way to guard against Penguin. And considering that links from unrelated sites is a red flag for webspam, expect this to be part of any other Google algorithm update that is rolled out in the future. Simply put: most of your links should be from sites that are somewhat related to yours.

See What Your Site Looks Like in Google’s Eyes

Sure, you may think your site is about weight loss, but that doesn’t mean Google sees it that way. In order to properly figure out link relevancy, you have to know what Google thinks your site is about.

You can use Google Keyword Planner for this.

Only show ideas closely related to your search terms.

Then browse through keyword ideas to see what keywords come up. This will give you a feel for the topics Google feels your site tends to cover most often.

Another easy way to check relevancy from Google’s point of view is to put your domain name or brand name into Google. Then look for related searches.

Check Your Link Profile Relevancy

Use a tool like Ahrefs to look at all of the backlinks in your link profile.

Now the fun begins. It’s time to manually go one-by-one through your link profile to see whether or not the site is relevant to yours. Obviously, any link profile — even a natural one ­— will have a fair amount of unrelated links. The idea isn’t to calculate a percentage of relevant backlinks in your link profile. Instead, you should just eyeball your results to see if the majority of your links come from related sites.

For example, as we take a look at Quick Sprout’s link profile we see a lot of our links coming from sites like DIYThemes.com, SEOMoz.org, Aweber.com, Inc.com and BusinessInsider.com. These are all closely tied to what QuickSprout’s all about (namely, entrepreneurship, SEO, internet marketing, conversion optimization and social media). You should see something similar: a mix of very, very closely related sites, a few so-so related sites and some completely unrelated sites.

Page Level Relevancy

While Google focuses on an entire site’s theme, it does take into account the page that your link appears on as well. After all, it doesn’t make sense for a site about social media to link to Quick Sprout in an article about dog training.

You can check a page’s relevancy the same way you’d check a site’s relevancy.

From a quick glance, we feel pretty confident that the pages linking to our site generally fit the topic of Quick Sprout. But if you’re not sure about one or a few, you can always visit the page to dig deeper. Let’s say that you wasn’t sure whether or not a link that you received was relevant to your site. You would simply visit the page and look at a few things.

First, take a look at the page’s description tag. Sometimes description tags are actually more descriptive than the title tag. The easiest way to do that is to look at the page’s HTML.

If you want to get really hardcore about this you can also check the text near your link. That gives you a more precise idea on the relevancy of the link, as pages can cover several topics. In other words, Google tends to put relevancy emphasis on the text around your links.

Again, the point isn’t to go nuts and figure out the relevancy of every single link. It’s just another way of evaluating the relevancy of your link profile. If you have a link from an unrelated site — but it’s on a page closely tied to your site’s theme — you can toss that into the “relevant” category.

Link Diversity

In the tumultuous history of SEO, fortunes have been lost over a single tweak in the Google algorithm. First, sites that participated in link exchanges dropped out of the SERPs like a ton of bricks. A few years later, profile links were massively devalued. One popular blog network Build My Rank suffered from a massive de-indexing, bringing down thousands of niche sites along with it. The point of telling these stories is to emphasize the fact that you’re setting yourself up for disaster if you rely on one type of link. Even if the technique works like gangbusters now, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be the focus of Google’s next algorithm update.

For example, many people use infographics as the bread and butter of their link building. While infographics work great at the moment, they could get devalued overnight by a tweak in the algorithm. For that reason, infographics — like any link building strategy — should only form a small part of your link profile.

It’s time to take a look at where your links are coming from… and break them down into categories.

For most people conducting white hat SEO campaigns, taking a glance at where your links come from using Ahrefs or another link analysis program is enough. Go one-by-one through your links and see if there are a disproportional amount of links coming from homepages, blogrolls, press releases or web directories. The only way to know is to check each link individually and mentally store it into a category—like blog mentions and guest posts.