Like many other SEOs and web developers we here spend a lot of time watching for Google’s next move. All the signs and signals are indicating that a major Penguin Algorithmn update is coming and its coming very soon.
When exactly is it coming?-Friday 05/23/14 (Please note, Panda 4.0 hit on 5/19/14, but the new Penguin update has not yet transpired as of this writing 5/29- its coming though)is our best educated guess, nothing like a major SERP shift freakout to smooth out your weekend. Mr Cutts has not as yet called me to give the exact dates, he’s probably pretty busy at this time.
On a more serious note, what is going to happen,who or what is Penguin, and what can you do to protect your website?

OK basics first- search engines (i.e.Google) use Inbound Links to websites as the primary means of determining who ranks where in their results. One may see much chatter online about how inbound links are not important anymore but that chatter is horsefeathers.
The way a search engine works is its robots crawl across the trillions of links that make up the skeletal structure of the internet and assign value to websites based on the quality, type, and number of links pointing to any given web address. Links are votes and the voting system is the fundamental center of the algorithmn.
Yes its true there are many other factors that influence ranking, but inbound links (backlinks) are by far the most influential and will continue to be.

For the last few years, Google has been making big strides in differentiating types of backlinks and assigning relevance, or irrelevance, based on different factors such as the linking domain address and what is known as Anchor Text. Anchor text is the name of a link in text form. So for example ‘click here
for latest news’ that links to your favorite online news source.
Said anchor text links would pass on link juice based partly on the actual text used- so if you wanted to rank a catfood website you could build links called ‘cat food’.
This practice became very common in the SEO World, and for quite some time helped a lot of folks’ SERP rankings. Then along came Penguin, which began the process of penalizing websites that used too much anchor text in too many links. To use the prior example if all your inbound links were called ‘cat food’
you were headed for trouble.Penguin targeted unnatural link profiles and its only natural to have differing text such as your brand name, your URL, and various generic text links such as ‘visit website’, ‘click here’ etc.

What is not natural is having all inbound links call ‘cat food’. The various Penguin releases targeted these unnatural link profiles and a lot of businesses saw their hard won rankings disappear overnight.
And this is about to happen again- Penguin 3.0 is steaming down the internet pipeline and this author thinks its going to be a big one. From a timing perspective its estimated to hit before the end of May 2014- May 23rd has been discussed as a very likely release date.

So what to do?- in a nutshell clean up your link profile. This is much easier said than done unfortunately.
Step 1 is to put together a document containing all of your website’s inbound links, or as many as you can detect. There are a variety of tools out there to assist you, with open site explorergoogle webmaster tools being a great start. In addition we recommend open site explorer, majestic seo and ahrefs.

Step 2 is to go through the document you’ve created and ascertain which links look unnatural. You may not have created these links yourself, maybe a prior SEO firm you had engaged with did, perhaps a business competitor did to harm your ranking, thus boosting their own.
Regardless of who, what, or why, its time to identify what looks problematic and address the issue.
Some flags to look for:
*Same anchor text repeated over and over
*Large numbers of links from one domain (eg blogroll links)
*Links from link wheels and pyramids
*Links that are clearly paid for

There are no hard and fast rules necessarily, use your best judgement. If you think some links are suspect, you are probably correct.

Step 3 is the hardest one- removing the dodgy links from your profile. One is told to contact the webmasters of the linking websites and politely ask them to remove specified links. Such an approach is likely to be problematic on a number of levels.
Finding webmasters’ contact details and getting a reply from them is likely to be an uphill struggle, especially if there are many offending websites/ links.
If you can make this strategy work for you, great- it is best in an ideal World. In the real world however a quicker solution will be usage of the google disavow tool, which allows you to upload as many link URLs as you wish in one text file through your google webmaster tools dashboard.
Once processed these links will no longer count towards your overall google ranking, so those that carry negative impact i.e. from Penguin 3.0 will no longer count either.
It is uncertain exactly how long this process takes of course, and there is always a sizable risk that ‘good links’ will be impacted, thus effectively negatively impacting your rankings- but of course the same scenario would be true of direct link removal.

Above all, if you do feel the wrath of Penguin, remember its nothing personal, you are not the only one, and there are ways back.