The Google Penguin update has been fully live for almost a week now, and if you’re an Internet marketer who suffered massive losses, it’s time to get over the initial shock and figure out how to clean up your website so you don’t get hit again. If your site was penalized, then you owe it to yourself to check out a few key factors before you submit the form that Google has provided for webmasters who suspect their sites lost rank unnecessarily.

There’s a great post researching the Penguin update by Glenn Gabe over at G-Squared Interactive that you should check out ASAP. Directly after the Penguin update hit, he conducted an experiment in which he examined a large number of websites affected by the change in a quest for commonalities. Based on his findings, he compiled a few key tips for webmasters. Read on to discover how to clean up your website and recover from the madness.

Thin Guest Posts on Bad Sites

Gabe notes that many of the sites that were affected had a number of guest posts pointing back to their sites. The problem wasn’t the fact that these guest posts existed specifically – the issue was with the quality of the posts, the way they were linked, and the sites on which they appeared.

The posts were thinly composed and they offered very little value for the reader. Additionally, the links back to the sites used highly optimized, awkward keywords that served as dead giveaways of their spamtastic agenda. Finally, the sites themselves were of an equally spammy nature, so it was not hard for Google’s algorithm to pick up the spam posts and punish the sites they pointed to accordingly.

Paid Links on High PageRank Sites

This was the big one, according to Gabe. He says that some of the jilted webmasters were busted for paying for links sporting chunks of optimized anchor text to appear on websites and blogs with high PageRank.

This practice gave the sites that purchased the links a little “link juice” to artificially boost their position in the SERPs. The reason that these sites were punished by Penguin in such great numbers was simply because the purchased links were so darn easy to detect.

Article Marketing Hurt Webmasters

Article marketing is a long-standing tool in the arsenal of most typical Internet marketers. If you’re one of them, then you probably posted a few yourself from time to time on article directories – complete with specific keywords and an optimized resource box pointing back to your site, of course.

This is now an iffy practice at best, and a strike against your site at worst. At this stage of the update, it may be in your best interest to remove these kinds of articles and see what it does for your rank. Learning how to clean up your website after Penguin is the single best thing you can do to protect yourself from updates that will inevitably roll out in the future.

Tags: Google Penguin, how to clean up your website, Panda update, Penguin update