Don’t fright! An SEO Wizard’s Guide To Safe Link Removal

Panda and Penguin, despite their adorable names, were the dread of many an experienced niche marketer. While marketers from the white-hat camp walked away with only a few scratches, black-hat SEO practices caused many websites to disappear from the searches like phantoms. This bomb that Google dropped lead many individuals to cut links to their websites left and right out of fear of penalization. The best tactic however is not to gut a perfectly working SEO campaign without first knowing what is dangerous to the campaign, and what will continue to be seen as quality linking in the eyes of the search engine.

Google basically changed the rules of SEO through these two updates, each playing its role and complementing the other. Google panda’s objective was to separate the weak from the strong, giving priority in search results to websites with more informative content and pushing those without down the list. Google’s penguin on the other hand helped panda out by lowering the ranking rates of those websites that violated the guidelines laid out by Google’s webmaster as well as those using €black hat€ SEO strategies like keyword stuffing, spinning and link schemes. These moves by Google saw over 10% of the websites lose their rankings almost overnight. The reason was that the websites and SEO firms initially focused on keywords to get higher rankings, overstuffing the information on websites with keywords.

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru“ He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.