The internet is getting more complicated kids, and it’s “adapt or enjoy your page 31ranking”. The other day I talked about how to make yourself Google Penguin proof by talking about how to eliminate the mistakes and red flags which Penguin targets. Now today I’m going to talk about what actually works in terms of SEO in this post Penguin Google apocalypse we’re all trying to live in.

What SEO Works in Post Penguin

First, as I mentioned the other day, varying your anchor text is going to be much safer than over optimizing your anchor text. Penguin is all about making everything natural or at least giving the impression of natural, so using “dog food pellets” as the anchor text for EVERY link pointing to your page on dog food pellets is SEO suicide in the Penguin world.

Vary it up because remember, if someone else is linking to your site, they’re not going to use your keywords as anchor text, only you the webmaster or someone working for you would do that so doing so looks like you’re trying to game the system. Refer to this post on anchor text SEO for more information.

Secondly, remember that Penguin is also about relevancy because it looks more natural. For example, who is more likely to naturally link to your site about dog food, a site about puppy care is going to look a lot more likely to link to you and therefore natural than an auto themed blog.

Links from relevant sites are paramount to your success, so focus on commenting on blogs (without using your keywords) or forums related to your site. Additionally you should reach out to other bloggers in your niche and try to get some guest blogging work.

If you have low quality and irrelevant links which you may have created yourself before the update, you might think about trimming these now malignant links from your linking structure.

Lastly, Penguin is a reminder that private blog networks can work and thrive in these changes. Remember that Build My Rank and similar link building services WERE NOT private blog networks. They were blog networks which had little in common with one another and which were definitely not private and they were spammed to death even if you were convinced that they weren’t.

Develop your own private blog network, build great content on each site in the network, obviously don’t sell links on your network, and do everything you can to make your activity on that network look natural and make each of the sites look as unaffiliated with one another as possible.