Building Links In a Post Penguin World from Austin SEO Meetup

/ Blogging, Content Marketing, SEO / Search Engine Optimization, Social Media / By

Today, I presented to the Austin SEO Meetup about the Google Penguin Update. It was a lively session with a lot of questions and feedback afterward.

For those of you who missed it, here is the overall agenda we covered:

  1. What is Google Penguin?
  2. What Websites Did Penguin Impact, and Why?
  3. How to Google Proof Your Website
  4. Building Links In the Wake of Penguin

We spent a great deal of time on the first three items, before jumping into a high level overview of acceptable ways to build links without introducing risk into the equation.

The crowd was a mix, but the majority were practitioners of web marketing with SEO as one of the many “hats” they have to wear on the job.

They had a decent understanding of what Penguin is overall, but I pushed to simplify it even more.

The presentation below outlines what Google was doing with Penguin.

It also boils the whole update down to the two most important variables you need to manage to stay in Google’s good graces.

As with most of my presentations, the underpinning theme is to practice white hat SEO, avoid scalable tactics and other cheats, and put in the grunt work to earn what you get.

There really is no other way to manage SEO ethically.

Heck, with whispers of an upcoming “Zebra” update that is purported to attack spammy social media, the options for black hat SEOs to jump ahead of the rest of us are waning rapidly.


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Tommy Landry

President at Return On Now
With over 25 years of experience in digital marketing and business strategy, I write and speak about how search and AI are changing the way companies build visibility and make decisions. My background spans SEO, Answer Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, and digital advertising, and my work now also covers AI Workflow Governance inside the business. Through that lens, I focus on how companies can bring more structure to AI use, strengthen how they show up across search and AI platforms, and avoid letting speed outrun judgment.

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