Question on RyanKent's Identifying Link Penalties 2012 Article

[choiceenergy]

I have a question about this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

Specifically the Section Titled: Other Google Link Penalties

_"Google often manually penalizes sites and does not inform site owners of the penalty. Furthermore, Google makes many algorithm changes each year. Most people are aware of the major algorithm changes, but you should also know Google makes about 50 algorithmic changes each month which could lead to ranking changes or an "algorithmic penalty". With the Penguin update specifically, we are unsure if there will be further refinements and rollouts as has happened with Panda. On May 25th Google rolled out what Search Engine Land calls Penguin 1.1. _

What advice is available for a site owner who wants to know if they have received a link penalty or at risk in the future?

Check your anchor text distribution to see if it appears natural. You can perform a fast check in Open Site Explorer of your top 20 links as follows:

1. Go to http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
2. Enter in the URL of your site and press <enter>or the SEARCH button</enter>
3. Change your drop down box settings as follows: Show [followed + 301] links from [only external] pages to [pages on this root domain]…..then press the FILTER button. These settings will remove the “nofollow” and internal links which are not evaluated by Google as part of link penalties.
4. You will now see a list of all links to your site which may cause you to incur a penalty. For now, focus only on the Link Anchor Text column. If 50%+ of your top 10 links show the same or very similar anchor text, that is a warning sign of a very unnatural link profile. Of course, a deeper analysis is desirable but this method offers you some idea of the problem in just a few seconds.

Hopefully your anchor text distribution looks more natural than the below example. Notice how all the links show anchor text? A natural distribution would show a high percentage of links with simply the site URL. When anchor text is naturally used, it is often far less than ideal."

Anyway, with anchor text looking the same - would this have a negative impact if i was syndicating content to 10-15 blogs, or if i used onlyshare and did it to 50 or something. Would this impact me eventaully in a long term sense. I tend to write articles at least weekly for these sites so that i make sure i have fresh content, if me syndicating them/sharing the excerpt to my blog pages w/ anchor pages back to my main article is hurting me by having multiple pages linking back w/ the same exact anchor text, that would be a good thing to know. Any input on this would be much appreciated.

• Keep in mind i'm not creating 10k blogs and having one blog post on them.  They are actively posted to.

With my established site they seem to work great- but with a new site, would popping 10-15 links real quick like that set off any alarms?

thank you,

-Travis Gross

[choiceenergy]

Sorry i didn't reply sooner, but thank you for answering the question.  Your article made me identify a lot of concerns and thought maybe that the practice was in fact something that may end up problematic.

I appreciate it.

[RyanKent]

Hi Travis,

What it all boils down to is links which are valued by search engines are the ones offering an independent vote for your web page. Syndicates articles don't meet that criteria so they should generally not be offered any value from search engines.

Ask yourself why are you syndicating these articles? Are you actually receiving any substantial amount of direct traffic from them? In most cases the answer is no in which case I would recommend discontinuing the practice.

If you write a fantastic article, the best place for it is on your site. If you wish to publish it on another high quality site relevant to your niche, that is great too. By doing such you are exposing your content to others in a quality manner.

Anyway, with anchor text looking the same - would this have a negative impact if i was syndicating content to 10-15 blogs, or if i used onlyshare and did it to 50 or something. Would this impact me eventaully in a long term sense.

To answer your question directly, yes. A lot depends on what other legitimate links your site has earned but this practice of creating duplicate links on a network of sites can lead to a penalty, or make an existing penalty worse.