Avoiding Outbound Link Penalty by Google

Poor backlink profile is most commonly considered as the main reason for getting a penalty slapped. But, you should know that Google also awards penalty on the basis of bad links in your content. As a matter of fact, the way we place links of other websites on our pages can also result in the penalty. This penalty is most commonly known as “unnatural outbound links” penalty, which is awarded in the same way as that of inbound link penalty.

Here’s a little elaboration using an example. We had to work on a client’s website. After conducting an audit, we found a website’s section having the presence of spammy links. Actually, it was the fault of content manager of the website. He didn’t enforce strict measures to tackle the guest bloggers who were posting content with the bulk of links to their websites. The content had abundant of links with highly optimized anchor texts.

After the analysis, we recommended for the removal of those links on utmost priority but our recommendations were not considered on serious note. Then there came the Penguin 4.0 with a real time action. Sooner, that website was flagged and manual action was suggested for slapping penalty.

Avoiding the penalty

As the best practice, avoiding is always better then fixing after destruction. For that reason, below are a few tips that would help you understand how you can avoid getting an outbound link penalty.

• Make sure that you are not placing any link from low quality and blacklisted websites.
• Allow links in user-generated content with ‘nofollow’ as a default attribute. If it isn’t possible, don’t allow the links at all.
• Make sure that you are not allowing any links in guest posts on your website by default. Get your Indianapolis SEO team to work on moderating the links if you want to have outbound links on your website.
• Just because a business if providing you compensation, don’t allow their links to be placed on your website. Make sure that they fit in the criteria of being good quality websites on the web. Then you can surely place their links for good.
• Training the content managers in order to give them some awareness about the links they are allowing on website is very essential. For this purpose, get help from Link Scheme resource page by Google. 

Things to do after getting penalized

After being penalized, there are a number of steps that you can do to make the process of revoking penalty smoother and quicker.

• Quickly identify the links on your website that point to other websites.
• Audit the links in order to find out which ones of them do not qualify according to Google’s guidelines.
• Remove those links or add ‘nofollow’ attribute to the ones that do not pass PageRank.
• Submit your website for reconsideration and outline the changes you made to tackle the issue which caused penalty.