Faquinamo

Beat The Penguin Checklist
Before You Begin
If you’ve been hit by Google’s dreaded Penguin update, or want to make sure you don’t get
penalized in the future, then this checklist will help you to safely optimize your website,
maximize your rankings, and gradually reclaim your traffic, sales and income.
Before you begin, there are two preliminary steps that are now critical to your onlinesuccess.

❑ Step 1: Analyze your link network
More than ever before it is important to understand where your backlinks are coming from and
what keywords are used in the anchor text of these links.
To help you with this analysis, we created a FREE tool that will help you to conduct a 5-minute
link network check-up.
Click here to access the FREE tool and analyze your link network now.

❑ Step2: Monitor your rankings
If you are not already doing so, you need to track your rankings in the search engines for the
main keywords you are targeting.
The reason this is so important is that if you’re going to make changes to your site, you need to
measure the impact of these changes. Always remember:

You can’t improve what you don’t measure
The best way to monitor your rankings is touse an automatic monitoring service such as the
Rank Tracker module in Market Samurai.
Once you understand your link network and you are carefully monitoring your rankings for your
main target keywords, you’ll be ready to apply the ideas contained in this checklist.

On Page Optimization Checklist
Google has described the Penguin update as a “web spam”
update. Therefore it is critical thatyour site follow Google’s
recommendation in regard to making sure your site avoids any of
the practices that Google may perceive as being used by search
engine spammers. This starts with making sure you have good,
relevant On-Page optimization.

❑ 1. Don’t Panic.
It’s important to understand that Google’s algorithm changes all the time. With every major
change, a lot of people give up andwalk away from their online business. It is the people who
stick around, analyze what happened, and take the appropriate action that eventually succeed.
So make the decision to stay calm, and take a data driven approach to improving your
rankings.

❑ 2. Don’t randomly delete content.
A lot of people have a knee-jerk reaction to Google algorithm changes and take a hatchet to
their website.For example, one of our users had a blog on their domain that included articles,
which they had syndicated. In response to the Penguin update, they immediately deleted the
blog. The problem with this is that this created a big hole in their site, with a lot of incoming links
pointing to – nothing.
These “dead links” might actually be a red flag to Google as they may make your site look like
anexpired domain that has been purchased for SEO purposes.
As a good standard practice, if you do delete content make sure you do a 301 redirect to
relevant content on your site.
You can read this article on SEOMoz about what 301 redirects are and how to apply them to
your website. If you’re using Wordpress, then you can install a plugin like the “Simple 301
Redirects” plugin to achieve asimilar effect.

❑ 3. Eliminate over optimization in all your page titles.
Search Engines punish sites that try to “keyword stuff” their titles with too many keywords.
Check the title of each page on your website for over optimization. Change the titles of your
pages to be optimized for human readers, rather than for search engines.
For example if your page is currently titled:
‘Graphic designservices, graphic design firm, Success By Design’
You should change the page title to something like:
‘ Success By Design, affordable graphic design’

You can read this article about best practices for writing title tags.

❑ 4. Create unique Title tags and Description tags for every page
One surprisingly common error that we see on a lot of sites is that people have copied code
from an...