Food for thought: The Penguin Catch-22

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

I've been reading about and helping a lot of people who were hit by the Penguin update over the last couple of days, and the update seems to be accomplishing what Google intended it to accomplish... it's scaring people straight.

I've picked up two new clients this week who now only want to practice "Good SEO" and "Do it the right way." This is a good thing for me and for the quality of the net, don't get me wrong. It does make me a little nervous though that the SEO industry is going to be tarnished a bit. Google is making a pretty clear statement with Penguin, which I think boils down to "Don't do anything other than create good content, provide accurate descriptions, and establish good connections to SEO your site... or beware ." (other than technical stuff - 301/ canonical / crawler management / etc).

So riddle me this Batman...

As a proud Journeyman, how is the followed backlink on my SEOMoz profile page going to appear to Google? This is an SEO site with SEO content and SEO tools and SEO in the URL. The site listed below the first followed URL on my profile is an SEO site that's in development. So there's a link to my site and every bit of context around it screams SEO.

But... it is a very nice link indeed, I really do like it, and this is a white-hat kind of place. Do you think Google will start penalizing sites with inbound links from pages that are related to SEO, even if the page promotes respectable tactics?

If so, I'll be having nightmares about a very round Danny DeVito with a pointy nose and creepy hands chasing me through the sewers for weeks to come...

[CarlosFernandes]

I am not a Journeyman but I aspire to be one  One of things I am looking forward to is my juicy link. However, by the time I get there I fear they may changed the MozPoints rules.

I wish I could keep those goalposts from moving all the time.

Carlos

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Well thought out question. A lot of tech related (including SEO) sites seemed to be hit by Panda, but this may be because these types of sites tent to over-optimize.

I wouldn't be too worried about your SEOmoz profile link. The links that Matt Cutts talked about were off-topic links. So an SEO link from one SEO site to another is completely natural, and in fact should help you. (Now, if we could only get that link to be an in-body text link surrounded by lots of relevant text, instead of that damned sidebar link....

You earned that SEOmoz link. Enjoy it with pride!