What I've found so far about the PENGUIN update and how to fix it

As i was personally affected I did quite some reading and testing the last several days.
I'll share everything I've found so far, hopefully it will help someone and others might correct or extend it.

The biggest factor so far seems to be exact match/random anchors ratio.
If you do fast check of the top 10 sites for most keywords you will find that (even pre-penguin) for most of them the % of exact match anchors is single digit, often as low as 1-2%.
We've known that the anchor must be varied for a while now, but even then the most of us use mostly exact match, then some partial match and very little if any common anchors like "click here, read more, see more, find out more, domain.com, http://domain.com"
Fact is that when linking naturally people don't care about your money keyword, they link any way that's convenient for them and flows ok with the context.
So, even if you were doing like 30% exact match, and thinking i'm doing ok....well you were doing 15 times more than the average. It was working but isn't anymore. Google became super strict about that overnight....

If your onpage content is relevant to the query, even if you don't get many links with relevant anchors but you are link popular chances are you will rank ok.


Other important thing seems to be domain authority. Quality content, link building to all internal pages not just the homepage, even distribution of the links, logic internal linking bla bla...We all know that but it's not enough anymore. Important but not enough.
After you've got your quality content you have to become authority by getting really strong links.
Yeah easy to say, hard to do, especially when now we are limited about using exact match anchor and it sucks to put hard work into getting great link and make it "click here" anchor....

A way around that is to make regular links super links. Get 50-100 links from article syndication or whatever you do. Then generate lots of links to each of those links and if you have the resource (and nerves) make 3rd tier of links to the second tier. Because the 3rd big factor in my eyes is

DEAD END links
The web is inter connected and google knows that. Isn't it suspicious if 99% of the pages linking to your money sites have no links to them? Natural links from real pages all have links to them. Generated links are very often dead end links.
You can allow yourself to make good portion of those super links exact and partial match, and generate lots of other with common anchors, which you may or may not tier as well.
How much exactly? It's different for every niche and keyword, just calculate the average for top 10 results for your keyword as a raw direction. But even that won't be precise because each of your competitor's links carries different weight and respectively different anchor relevancy.

So to put it together the 3 big factors are

• exact match/common anchors ratio
• domain authority
• dead end links

the 3rd factor is the missing link for me, as there are many sites with good ratio and authority but still got down, if that's your case check if the most of your links aren't dead end


and when you go out to generate new links following that, remember BuildMyRank. If google deindexed 1 network, common sense predicts that many will follow. They are up to that game and as history shows it's only matter of time before they crack it down completely.
Even if a network is build so it doesn't have a footprint, they are open and public and every google employee can join it generate tons of links, collect the URLs and deindex....
I don't think they are into this kind of approach but they definitely have the resource to do it if they fail with their automated means.

So either invent other method of building links, start your own network or look for small under the radar private ones. Add some social marketing not only for more natural link profile but to diversify your traffic sources.
Completely whitehat and viral is great but tends not to work so well for the most commerce sites....nobody links on their own to a hair dryer because they like the color. Unless you have some conceptually new product chances are you will have to put a lot of effort in SEO.

I'll be glad to turn that into discussion and narrow it down even more or even disregard some of my theories.

p.s.
and here is another research confirming this if you feel like reading even more
http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog...ways-to-do-so/