It finally happened, after years of waiting we finally received the latest Penguin update from Google. What does this latest Penguin update do?  I’ll attempt to cover it and provide an example using a drone page that I have built up over the years.

Source of Links

Gary Illyes says that it’s more the source of the link than anything else. Specifically, Penguin is looking at the page that the link is located on and asking “What is the purpose of this link?”

If the external link is in the footer, standing alone… then the purpose seems to be ‘passing juice’ which Penguin probably won’t like very much.

If the link is within an article, in the context of a recommendation, then it sounds as if it’s a good link.

Same goes with comments, if the link is in the name of a worpress comment, then it probably won’t pass juice. However, if the link is within the context of a big comment, then it probably will be valuable.

My big big takeaways is: Penguin will ignore links coming from pages with little-to-no text.

A Drone Example

So for instance, if I’m a drone enthusiast and I’m creating a page about drone reviews on Google, then in order for my quadcopter page to receive a valid link, I would want to have a few elements to convey that the link is relevant to content that is on the target page (Things such as mentioning DJI, Phantom, Hubsan and other drone companies).

Having a cool picture of a drone (notice I named it drone-review.jpg) as well would help provide additional relevance. So all in all, I have 3 elements: The headline, the words around the drone link and the picture.

This SHOULD give it enough relevance for Google to say: “ok, well this is in context and seems natural enough”

Thoughts?