Google just announced a big Penguin update (first one in two years) and that these penalties from spammy backlinks will now happen in real time.

More information here ...

What is Penguin?

Penguin is the name of Google's penalty for spammy backlinks.

If you have spammed, irrelevant links to your site then your pages can be penalized.

Why Should I Care? I Don't Spam Backlinks

Spammed backlinks are often created by blackhatters...

If you receive a "thin site" penalty from Google this means your website was reviewed and:

1. It is an affiliate site.

2. The reviewer did not see sufficient value.

This can be rough, as you may have spent a lot of time creating your content.

Keep this in mind: Google's internal website rater guidelines instruct that affiliate sites by default are to be considered spam, regardless of their content.

So what are we gonna do...

There is a little known trick to do what many webmasters thought was dead: boosting PageRank via internal links.

This is what happened if you are not familiar with this:

Internal pages of a website which link to other pages of the same website pass link juice.

Assume for the examples in this post Page A has "10 units" of PageRank or link juice.

Example: Page A links to Pages B and C, passing whatever PageRank it has to those two...

There is an affiliate program I have been a member of for years. I won't name names, but I have been their #1 affiliate 8 years in a row.

During this time I keep sending more and more traffic. But during the last year, despite sending significantly more traffic than the year before my commissions are suddenly off by about 50 percent.

Is it because the traffic suddenly got worse? No.

Is there new competition? Not in the last year, and I do not view that...

There are several methods to get free backlinks to your website.

Backlinks are important for SEO and all backlinks are not created equal. For example, a profile link on a forum is virtually worthless. A contextual link from a CNN story could be worth a mint.

When we are talking about "getting" backlinks that means taking them. We are not talking about posting some "quality" content on our blog and hoping and praying someone likes it enough to link...