{"id":1000,"date":"2013-10-07T15:35:38","date_gmt":"2013-10-07T15:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/?p=1000"},"modified":"2014-06-02T17:41:39","modified_gmt":"2014-06-02T17:41:39","slug":"penguin-proof-link-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/penguin-proof-link-building\/","title":{"rendered":"Penguin Proof Link Building"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Today I look at how to develop penguin proof links from related sites and build your website&#8217;s topical authority.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/elianc\/8287164886\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1637\" src=\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/penguin.jpg\" alt=\"penguin\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/penguin.jpg 640w, https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/penguin-300x188.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I was reading a good post this morning on Penguin proof links (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.seo-writer.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/04\/five-backlink-metrics-to-to-elude-the-dreaded-penguin\/\" target=\"_blank\">have a read here<\/a>). To summarise, the points raised to look out for when assessing whether a link from a site will be a good one to have were: &#8211;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\"><strong>Design of the site<\/strong> &#8211; if it looks like it was thrown together in a hurry, then it&#8217;s probably a good indicator that the webmaster isn&#8217;t really serious about what he is doing.<\/span><\/li>\n<li><strong>Toolbar Pagerank<\/strong> &#8211; it&#8217;s out of date etc, but I would be lying if I said I still didn&#8217;t take a look<\/li>\n<li><strong>Traffic<\/strong> &#8211; if the site is receiving good traffic (alexa isn&#8217;t that accurate, but at least it gives you an indication) then it is probably trusted by google<\/li>\n<li><strong>Backlinks<\/strong> &#8211; this seems a bit excessive, but if you are really worried about where your links are coming from then you can use <a href=\"http:\/\/opensiteexplorer.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">opensiteexplorer<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">ahrefs<\/a> to analyse the back link profile of the linking site<\/li>\n<li><strong>Social Signals<\/strong> &#8211; does the site have a presence on the main social networks? Is it active?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These are all pretty good indicators, although I would caveat the design one with the fact that not everyone is a graphic designer and if the site has great content and appears to have an engaged following (comments, readers etc) then you can probably ignore that blue and yellow clashing colour scheme.<\/p>\n<p>One thing missing from the list, which I wanted to look at today was the topic\/theming of the linking site.<\/p>\n<p>This is a bit of a contentious one and opinions vary, so let me explain&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>Topical Authority<\/h2>\n<p>This site is primarily about SEO &amp; internet marketing.<\/p>\n<p>It is generally accepted that google has some way of organising sites (certainly in a loose sense) based on theme\/topic and by the same token, it almost certainly has some sort of intelligence built into its algorithm to determine which theme\/topic best matches a given search query.<\/p>\n<p>Quite how far they go down the tree is up for debate, however, for me it is safe to assume that they will at least know the difference between a site about say fashion and a site about SEO.<\/p>\n<p>If you are forbes or The New York Times, your site is of course so powerful and trusted that you will be able to rank for queries on any topic, however, for the average Joe webmaster, the chances are you will show up primarily for queries related to your niche (which is what you would want after all!).<\/p>\n<h2>How Do You Gain Topical Authority?<\/h2>\n<p>Well, the first metric will obviously be your content\/site architecture.<\/p>\n<p>Developing a good hierarchy for your site is one of the fundamentals of SEO and you should think carefully about your top level categories and what they say about your site&#8217;s topic. For example my top levels are: &#8211;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 1.5;\">\u00a0SEO<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Marketing<\/li>\n<li>Blogging<\/li>\n<li>WordPress<\/li>\n<li>Web Design<\/li>\n<li>Affiliate Marketing<\/li>\n<li>Business<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As these pages are linked from every other page on the site, they will be seen as important and help to tie my theme down to SEO\/marketing etc.<\/p>\n<p>Next, the content of your site should back this up. My posts for example will naturally contain lots of words closely associated with my niche in both their titles and the content.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s ok to go off topic sometimes (and I know I do&#8230;), but 80\/90% of your content should be based around your main theme.<\/p>\n<p>So, that&#8217;s the on site stuff, but just as important in developing authority in a niche is what is happening off site.<\/p>\n<h2>Theme Of Linking Sites<\/h2>\n<p>If 80\/90% of your content is based around your main topic, I believe that to develop strong authority in a niche, keep google happy and ensure your incoming links will be Penguin safe, the topical distribution of linking sites should be similar, i.e:-<\/p>\n<p>For every 10 new links your site gains 8\/9 of them should be from sites related to your niche.<\/p>\n<p>It is logical that if your site is about fishing, then sites related to fishing would be the ones who wanted to link (cite) your site.<\/p>\n<p>If the majority of your links come from general article directories or unrelated sites, then it is unlikely that these will be considered citations (which are the really powerful links). Why would a site about hairdressing link to a fishing site?<\/p>\n<p>It doesn&#8217;t look right and too many links coming from unrelated sites runs the risk of triggering Penguin.<\/p>\n<h2>There Are Of Course Exceptions&#8230;<\/h2>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been talking above about the topic\/niche of sites themselves, however, as I mentioned above sometimes things can go off topic, so what about the following example: &#8211;<\/p>\n<p>That hypothetical hairdressing site that shouldn&#8217;t be linking to our fishing site&#8230; well how about they have put up a blog post which talks about how all the staff went on a team building fishing trip?<\/p>\n<p>Certainly a link to our fishing site would now be contextually relevant to the individual page. So I guess the question here is does google categorise purely on a site wide level, or do they categorise individual pages?<\/p>\n<p>Well google has technically always ranked pages as opposed to sites (although high ranking pages which attract links boost up other internal pages by definition), so my opinion is that this link would now be classed as on topic, Penguin safe and authority boosting.<\/p>\n<p>Although&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The danger would be that they might consider a topically irrelevant page on a site a bit of a red flag and perhaps something that has been sponsored\/paid for?<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t however think this would be enough to cause a penalty and the worst that would happen is that the link wouldn&#8217;t pass as much value as a link from a page on a theme matched site would.<\/p>\n<h2>Taking Things Further&#8230;<\/h2>\n<p>So, if the site is off topic, but the page is on topic and relevant (think about whether if a human read it, it would make sense to be there) we should be ok.<\/p>\n<p>But what about if our hairdressing site had a review of their year and they happened to mention a fishing trip in one of the paragraphs?<\/p>\n<p>Again, I would say that as long as the link makes sense to a human reading the article it will be ok as google should take into the account the words in the paragraph surrounding the link and use them when assessing relevancy.<\/p>\n<p>It will probably pass even less authority than a link from a topically themed page, but you shouldn&#8217;t have to worry about it causing anything negative.<\/p>\n<h2>More Exceptions&#8230;<\/h2>\n<p>I mentioned that some sites are so trusted that they will naturally rank for pretty much anything they put up. Well, the same goes for a link from one of these sites.<\/p>\n<p>If you get a link from the New York times it doesn&#8217;t really matter what the page is about &#8211; it&#8217;s going to help your rankings and authority. So, please don&#8217;t disavow that link from forbes based on this post!<\/p>\n<h2>Those Who Disagree<\/h2>\n<p>I mentioned at the start how this was contentious and there are certainly many SEOs who would disagree with what I am saying here.<\/p>\n<p>They will probably look more at the pagerank\/age etc of a linking site and determine if a link is worthwhile based on this, rather than the topic of the site.<\/p>\n<p>My opinion is that, while a few of these links might be ok in isolation, too many off topic links from high PR domains will seem unnatural and will eventually trigger a Penguin penalty.<\/p>\n<p>I believe they will also dilute the topical authority of your site and as have already said, I think that google do already use theming as a ranking factor and furthermore, I believe it will become more important over the coming year or so, particularly when tied to <a title=\"What Is Author Rank?\" href=\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/what-is-author-rank\/\">Author Rank<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2>So What Do You Think?<\/h2>\n<p>You may have noticed that I have used words\/phrases such as &#8216;probably&#8217; and &#8216;I believe&#8217; in this article, as it is not a black and white issue, however, I have based my opinion based on my years of experience, what I feel are best practices and of course a lot of research.<\/p>\n<p>But what do you think?<\/p>\n<p>Will a large percentage of links from topically unrelated site\/pages dilute your topical authority and potentially trigger a Penguin penalty? Or do you subscribe to the &#8216;a link is a link&#8217; mentality?<\/p>\n<p>Let me know by dropping a comment below!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How links from related sites will boost your sites topical authority and help to keep your link profile google penguin safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v18.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Penguin Safe Link Building And Topical Authority<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How links from related sites will boost your sites topical authority and help to keep your link profile google penguin safe.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/penguin-proof-link-building\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Penguin Safe Link Building And Topical Authority\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How links from related sites will boost your sites topical authority and help to keep your link profile google penguin safe.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/penguin-proof-link-building\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Top 5 SEO\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/top5seo\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-10-07T15:35:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-06-02T17:41:39+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/penguin.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"640\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"400\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"David McSweeney\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/top5seo.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"Top 5 SEO\",\"description\":\"White Hat SEO &amp; 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