How Penguin Affects Your Firm | eGenerationMarketing

Submitted by Deanna on Fri, 12/15/2017 - 11:22

Google is the biggest source of online traffic in the US. If you want more traffic to your firm’s website, you’ll need to follow Google’s best practices to ensure you’re not penalized and removed from search results. Google is always modifying its algorithm, and one of the biggest changes made in recent years was the Penguin update.

What Was Google Penguin?

Google Penguin was released in 2012. Penguin targeted websites that participated in “shady” search engine optimization (SEO) efforts via link building, buying links, participating in link exchanges, and working with link farms.

Why are back links so important? Each link to your firm’s domain is essentially a vote of confidence from another website. The more high-quality domains point to your website, the better you’ll perform in search results. This is why so many websites took to cheating the system back before 2012. Here’s how Penguin could directly affect your firm’s site:

Positive: Good Backlinks

The great news is that if your firm does have a few high-quality backlinks referring traffic to your site, you’ll likely perform better in search results than competing firms with no referring domains.

One way to receive backlinks are offering resource pages to related organizations that could use your legal expertise, such as anti drunk-driving websites and articles on drunk driving and PI claims. You can also receive backlinks naturally by simply publishing high-quality content and promoting it on your social media pages.

Negative: Bad Backlinks

On the other hand, if you have paid someone to link to your website in the past or have links pointing to your firm’s site from unsavory domains, you’ll see a hit via Penguin. You’ll also lose the value of a backlink from a domain in a link exchange, meaning you post a website’s link if it publishes yours.

If you do think a bad link led to a Penguin penalty, there are ways to rectify the bad situation! You’ll first need to reach out to the domain’s webmaster to remove the link, but if that fails you can use Google’s Disavow Tool to remove the “link juice” from your list of referring domains.

Internal Linking Structure

Because Penguin put an emphasis on links, you’ll want to ensure you’re linking to good resources on your own website as well. Google wants to see that all your relevant pages are connected to one another. Think of your site’s architecture as a pyramid. You can find 4-6 key resource pages from your home page, then relevant pages from those pillar pieces of content, and so on.

It’ll also be important to eliminate any orphan pages, which are articles that aren’t linked anywhere. This is bad for user experience because a potential claimant won’t be able to find a page you’ve published!

How Long Does Digital Marketing Take?

Penguin now runs in real time, which means that you should see positive (or negative) results as shortly after you get new backlinks. Unfortunately, search engine optimization is a slow process—you’ll often wait 6+ months before you find more claimants are reaching out for legal aid.