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With the recent ‘Penguin’ update from Google, there have been many webmasters pulling their hair out with frustration. There seems to have been a very large amount of websites affected by the changes and this has caused a lot of panic online. In a recent poll by Search Engine Roundtable, they found that over 65% of people that responded (over 1000 in total) we negatively affected by the recent update.

One of the main reasons that Google had toward punishing websites in the search engine rankings was the use of ‘spammy’ links. These can be links that are sent directed to the website in question from malicious websites, such as black-hat linking networks. Below are our top three tips toward building links that can help get you up the search engine listings and drive traffic to your website, whilst abiding by the tighter regulations that Google have put in place.

1. Check the validity of the linking website

When you are looking for potential linking partners, it is extremely important that you check to see what kind of website is linking to you. In order to do this, you can do a couple of quick checks. The first is to see if the website has been cached by Google. This can be done by searching within Google ‘cache:domain.co.uk’. The second check that you can carry out is by doing a search on Google for something that the website should rank well for; for example, if the website was ‘www.areallygoodwebsitethatwilllinktoyou.com’ then if you searched ‘a really good website that will link to you’, you should expect them to be in the top few listings. If not, then they have probably been blocked by Google or have little domain/page authority.

2. Make sure there aren’t too many outbound links on the webpage

If you single out some potential linking targets, it is worth having a look to sum up the quality of the target website. Even if a website ranks really well in the search engines and has good page/domain authority, if they have a large amount of outbound links on the page then your website is only going to get a small amount of the total link juice. The less outbound links the better.

 3. Is the content relevant?

There is a huge emphasis on making sure that when writing content for your blog, all of the blog posts must be relevant and have a consistent theme to them; however, the linking websites’ content is often overlooked. By having relevant content on the linking website, the link will be much more effective toward your SEO, so take a little look and see if the links that you are getting are relevant, and also bear this in mind when you are creating lists of potential linking partners.

By following these three quick steps, you can ensure that your link building is much more effective and will conform with all of the new ‘Penguin’ update regulations.