Have you noticed a recent drop in your website’s traffic? This could be the result of Google’s latest update, Penguin 2.0. Chances are, if you were affected by Penguin 1.0, you were also hit by Penguin 2.0. This latest update targets websites that have employed “black hat” link building techniques.

There are a number of reasons for websites to be penalized by Penguin 2.0.

Here are a few of the key examples that we’ve seen so far:

• SEO “gurus” who have farmed out their clients’ link building work internationally
• Companies that built their link profile too quickly
• Overuse of certain keywords in the anchor text of links
• Websites that have a number of links from directories

Link Farms

Luckily, there is a cure. First, take a look at your existing link profile. Look for any domains that have a high number of outbound links. These websites are known as “link farms”. Link farms were a popular tool for webmasters who were looking to build links easily. They can sometimes have as many as thousands of links on a page. These sites are essentially considered spam. Unfortunately, whether you created the link to your website or not, you will be penalized.

This is where the disavow tool comes in handy. The disavow tool can be found in Google’s Webmaster Tools, and will remove the link from your profile. Be careful before removing any links, and confirm that they are spam first. Removing helpful links can permanently damage your domain authority.

Pace Yourself

Another way to recover from Penguin 2.0 is to pace yourself when building links. Recent evidence has suggested that Google can penalize a site if they see a spike in the number of links indexed. So, if you’re doing something like blog commenting, make sure you aren’t doing too much at once. Don’t copy and paste your link to a hundred websites in a day. Read a few blogs each day, and make interesting, and insightful comments when posting a link. Also, be sure to vary the keywords you use in your anchor text, in order to avoid overuse.

The most effective way to recover from Penguin 2.0?

So what’s the most effective way to recover from Penguin 2.0, and build more positive links? As Google always suggests, make sure you’re constantly creating good content. Including your link in blog comments can increase your link profile, but this pales in comparison to getting a link in the body text. The only way to accomplish this is to write enough helpful content that other websites will link to in their own content. This isn’t the quickest method, but it’s certainly the most effective, and ensures that you’ll never feel the wrath of Google Penguin again.