link text and Penguin

[PhilipDunn]

That sounds like a safe strategy for links. I always diversify link text, and have felt uncomfortable about relying to much on one source for IBL's. Fortunately, I've never been a huge link builder, so I have 'so far' escaped Penguin relatively unharmed...

Thanks for all the replies here..

[deepsand]

Sam hit on one of the key factors in the Penguin update, Anchor text needs to be even more diverse. That factor was important in regard to the Penguin update along with several other (unnatural link placement in unrelated content another example).

That claim does need to be qualified, as no negative effects from 26K Sig. links from a given contextually unrelated forum are observed, to include mention of the number of sourcing Domains.

[deepsand]

First get rid of all unrelated links on your website.

Utter nonsense.

[kgun]

You would probably be safe in assuming the directories all lost their value, probably the link exchanges as well. What does that leave you with? What does WMT show you about the link profile?

Does that mean that Google zero out the links from all directories? That would be great news, since the submitting industry will then be almost dead.

But still their pagerank is stable as well as their reputation. I always believe getting links from good pagerank websites work well. If there's a website with pagerank 3 or more, try to get a link from it, this is what I do.

E.g. like these http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php

The best of my 10 sites got hit by Penguin. I checked all factors. I did buy cheap links for $10-20 around a year back.

I have always assumed that link selling is the risky side of the equation. If you sell links, you can loose the ability to pass pagerank. (Google is one of the biggest direct - AdWords or indirect - via AdSense - link sellers on the internet). The above strongest links directory indicates that big players like Business.com, Yahoo directory, Best of the web etc. etc. don't care a second about Google.

Isn't most of those sites American?

[Doc]

Isn't most of those sites American?

Now, THAT was just plain mean, kgun!

[janeth]

So with this new update...if we build links to our competition can we just get all them banned rather then waste time trying to build natural looking anchor text? lol

[janeth]

Most of my sites got a boost from Penguin, except for one. (I've never added more than 30 or 40 inbound links in a month to a site.)

When you added links to the site did you point them all to the home page?