The Google Penguin update now changes persistently in real-time. Make sure your SEO company does these things to stay in compliance.

How do you feel when you see Penguins these days?

They used to be these cute, cuddly, and lovable little creatures that were a little awkward on land and amazingly agile in water.

But it seems like Google does what it can to tarnish their reputation.

Enter Penguin Everflux.

Historically, Google has processed Penguin updates offline and then put the update online at a specific point in time. Then of course, you’d hear about the fallout from all the SEOs out there.

Now, with Everflux, Google says it’s going to continuously update the Penguin algorithm, optimizing it bit-by-bit and making those changes to their live ranking processes.

How Can You Protect Your Website from Getting Hit by Penguin?

Penguin 3.0 is really all about linking. And unless you’re a very ambitious business person, most of the responsibility for that falls on your SEO company.

Ask them which of these they do, and do not do, to make sure they’re doing the right thing for your website:

1. Have your backlinks analyzed. Too many low-quality (“spammy”) websites linking to you makes Google unhappy. Unfortunately, this can happen even if you have a great SEO company.

That’s because some low-quality websites focus only on linking back to others, or copying their content and reposting it. Not fair to you, but it does happen.

2. Audit your content. Websites choose to link (or not to link) to yours because of the quality of the content. To get those grade-A links, you must have the very best content of its kind available on the web. You’ll also want to monitor your website’s content for comment spam that could include bad links.
3. Only link to websites that Google trusts already. Google assumes that high-quality websites choose to link to other high-quality websites.

Makes sense, right? So, if you link to Forbes, Google’s going to trust you more because of who you choose to associate with.

You don’t have to link to big brand names only, but you should be very selective with who you link to. Many websites e-mail you asking you to link to their site, but the majority of those requests are not good news for your site.

4. No paid links. Your SEO company should never buy you links. Google’s been clear about this from the outset.

5. Don’t use blog networks. Websites like PostJoint, though well-intentioned, charge a fee (others don’t) to hook you up with guest posts with other blog owners. Google doesn’t want this at all.

6. Don’t use over-optimized anchor text. Links both on and off your website should include your primary keywords in their text less than 5% of the time at most. If you do any more than that, you are at high risk for a penalty.

It shouldn’t be your job to supervise your SEO company. But as you know by now, it’s something you do have to do.

Make sure they pass these simple checks. But remember to be fair and objective. You can get bad links to your website even with a SEO company with a high level of integrity.