What's coming What's coming: : It was really hard to predict Google would roll out the Penguin update in 2012. And it seems to be just the top of the huge iceberg coming out slowly in search engine results. Is Google going to tweak Penguin further and introduce new algo changes? Very likely.

This means that even more backlinks you've been "collecting" can be flagged as unnatural (after all, you can't control the pages linking to you), which in its turn will lead to more search engine results changes.

Get prepared Get prepared: The best thing to do is to review your backlink profile on a regular basis and analyze backlink pages. Pay attention to:

• Pages with highly irrelevant titles
• Pages with hundreds of external links and little content
• Pages with old cache dates
• Domains with little traffic

When you create a project in SEO PowerSuite's SEO SpyGlass tool, the tool finds your site's backlinks and automatically updates the backlink page and domain factors. Currently SEO SpyGlass delivers stats for over 40 SEO factors – the verified data you can rely on.

Power tip: Since link building turns into a very delicate and sophisticated process ("wrong" moves now cost more than ever), it's recommended to review your potential or existing backlink sites as far as their structure and coding are concerned:

• Broken links
• Duplicate content
• Site navigation
• Crawl availability and code validation

Use WebSite Auditor Page Structure Audit report to quickly identify websites that are/are not suitable as backlink sources:

What's coming What's coming: Google has clearly showed that stuffing anchor texts with keywords in order to game search engines is a risky activity. As of now, there's no 100% correct formula for the anchor text. The more natural it looks – the better. Backlinks with promotional anchor texts and commercial keywords can bring you on the radar for Google.

Get prepared Get prepared: To quickly have a look at your existing backlink anchors, you've got SEO SpyGlass at hand. Launch the tool, create a new project for your domain and let the tool collect the data for you, including all of your anchor texts. Just click the Statistics button in the top right corner:

Here you are!

If you find your existing anchors quite uniform, here are the tree types of anchors to focus on when building new links:

• Hybrid branded anchors ("Brand name + keyword variations")
• Universal anchors ("here's the link", "link", etc.)
• Naked URLs ("www.site.com")

Important: please do notice that exact match anchor text is NOT dead, you can (and should) have some links with your best key phrases. It's recommended, however, that not more than 10-20% of all backlinks have the exact match anchor text.

What's coming What's coming: It's not a secret that search engines are willing to deliver the most useful and interesting content to users. How are they going to measure what's more or less interesting? One of the very significant factors they may rely on even more in 2013 is the amount and strength of social signals – tweets and retweets, Facebook likes, shares, mentions, etc.

Now, going back to your backlink profile, can you say that most of the domains linking to your site are socially popular? And what about your competitors?

Get prepared Get prepared: Analyze social signals for your backlink domains — which ones get most social "love" from users? Highlight these websites and work more to get backlinks from there.

To quickly get the social data for all your backlink domains, create a project in SEO SpyGlass; then go to Preferences => Preferred Backlink Factors and select those social media factors that are most important for your niche.

Then press the Update button to get more data for your backlinks:

Additionally, you can find out, which of your existing backlinks come from Forums and Blogs by using the filter in the drop-down menu:

What's coming What's coming: Google has revolutionized link building practices, but some things remain the same – the competition analysis is going to be even more complicated and important in the post-Penguin era.

Get prepared Get prepared: Discover and analyze backlink profiles of your top competitors:

• What anchors and keywords the competing sites are using?
• Do they still acquire sitewide links?
• Are they leveraging social media to rank better than you?
• Do they have most backlinks from old or new domains?

Important: You shouldn't blindly follow the steps of competitors, define the tendencies and trends of their link building process and make use of it, for instance:

• Pay attention to the anchor text distribution, you may also need to have more anchor text with brand names and less with exact match keywords. You may also need to have more links pointing to internal pages of your site (as opposed to the home page)
• If your competitors are more active in social media, produce more viral content, start social media campaigns, launch contests – do virtually everything you can to grab more tweets and likes.
• Take a closer look at their backlink domains, spot the good ones (relevant content, old established domain with high Alexa traffic index) and target them to get links.

SEO SpyGlass lets you not only collect this data for each and every competitor of yours—it can also compare up to 5 sites simultaneously in one table. All you need is switch to the Project Comparison tab and specify the projects to compare:

What's coming What's coming: Search engines are likely to learn more about the user behavior on various domains. If most of your backlinks are not clicked on by real visitors, that's a red flag for your website, since it implies these backlinks seem to be irrelevant, not interesting and useless to users.

Get prepared Get prepared: First, find all backlinks that bring traffic, after that check how many visits each of these links brings.

This is how you can do it with SEO SpyGlass – simply choose Google Analytics as a backlink source and the tool will reveal the exact links that bring real visitors to your website

And show the exact number of Visits a specific backlink brings:

Too little traffic from your backlinks? Re-consider your link building strategy—remember that quality is the main SEO word for 2013.

So much can actually happen in 2013, but whatever the changes are…

If you want your link building to be a success in 2013, make sure you take grounded decisions based on a deepest niche research and remember these 4 link-building cornerstones:

Quantity + Quality + Diversity + Velocity

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