I Think that Penguin is Causing People to Make Bad Decisions

I just got an email from someone who had a list of things to do in order to help adjust for the Penguin update. I couldn't believe it but he actually said that one of the steps to "deoptimize" your site you should rework your H1 tag so that it doesn't contain the targeted keyword!

While I can understand that people used to work their keyword into 5 or 6 various H2 tags and that this process needs to stop, I can't imagine that removing it from the H1 tag is a good idea. This is especially true since so many blogs are set up by default to have the title of the blog post framed as both the <Title> tag and the <h1> tag. This would mean that a huge majority of the blogs out there would be discounted simply because of their default framework.

The sites which I'm actively promoting have stuck to their positions through this. I always work the keyword into the Title, H1, and H2 tags. I do have my sites setup in most cases though so that they are all customized for each page and thus different. I include more than one image on the site and have one image will have the file name in the format of my-keyword-image.jpg as well as have the keyword worked into the alt tag and the title tag for the image (though the two are not identical). The other images are related but don't contain the keyword in either the file name or alt tag.

There are three major factors with my sites that seems to fall in line with what google likes to see post-penguin:

1) Natural Keyword Density - I have the Easy WP SEO plugin and was always a little frustrated that I could never get my keyword density up close to the 2.0% mark. In order to do so I would have to hack my writing style in such a way that the posts wouldn't flow properly, so I have always ended up with between 0.85% and 1.55% keyword density. I guess that's enough.

2) Keyword Variation - whenever I've ordered SEO link services, I've always done so with keyword diversity in mind. Not as much as I currently do, but I didn't build sites and point just one form of anchor text at them. This is done by default in #3 below because in scanning some places where I know I can get a blog comment I see that only real names are getting approved. I get the link with a name so that the link juice passes and can be "washed" with my internal link structure. A dofollow PR7 link with the anchor text of "Charlie" on a page with few outbounds is better than no link at all.

3) True High PR Blog Comments - I use tools like Scrapebox, SEO Spyglass, and DomainPeeker in concert using a systems I've developed over time in order to find places to score real High PR links. I have a "pocket list" of sites which I can run through scrapebox and find PR5 and PR6 pages all day now where I can get links...so it's easier than ever. If you have 15 or 20 High PR links with your targeted anchor text mixed in with 750 - 1200 article links or wikilinks pointed at your site with random related anchor text, then these "power links" seems to anchor your site into position.

These are my observations. They're working for me and I'm sticking with it.