Q: Which link building habits that worked until now will be penalized with this update?

According to Google, link directories are a thing of the past. They probably improved on the foot printing of link directories and now do not give out penalties, but completely ignore them. That means you are no longer able to use that type of links for any kind of Negative SEO or SEO in general because these links would be ignored immediately.

Read more about this here.

Q: Which personal advice can you give now for building links?
You should proceed building links and take it seriously. Make sure that the links you build have a good LRT Power*Trust and a Low DTOXRISK.
You can use the Link Opportunities Review Tool (LORT) to quickly review and evaluate potential links before building them. Based on the proven technology of Link Detox, LORT is very easy to use.
Your benefit: you can quickly decide which links are good for your website and avoid building risky links.

Q: Which new SEO strategies do you already see for Google Penguin 4.0?

  1. Blur link quality: this means, for example, you could add a few good links to a directory with lots of bad links to make the overall backlink profile look better.
  2. The PPP “Partial Penguin Penalty”: thanks to the granularity you can now take more risks and look for regularities step by step.
  3. Easier negative SEO: because of the faster responses of Penguin to links and on page content, pages full of keywords can lead to penalties more quickly. We recommend the use of Link Alerts.
  4. Reputation management gets harder: until now you could place cheap links on a highly authoritative domain to push your rankings. If Google now looks at those links separately and devalues them, the old reputation management techniques won’t work any longer.


Q: How much stock would you place in the fact, that a link is now penalized, rather than the receiving websites rankings being penalized by a bad link?
According to Google, they will completely ignore links they consider as spam. While they may ignore some links, it’s still good to use the Disavow tool, especially if you know that you have high-risk links. Gary Illyes also confirmed that webmasters should continue using the Disavow tool. Don’t rely on the fact that Google ignores the bad links.

Redirects

Q: Do we know anything new about 301, 302 and 307-redirects?

At the moment we assume, that 302-Redirects are the most stable, while the 301 lose power over time. This could be the reason, why so many migrations are performing so bad right now. When you consider the whole web, this could mean the total power of links will decrease with every redirect. We’re still testing how different types of redirects perform in different situations. Register here, to get our full SEO tests report.

Q: So do 301 redirects lose over time?
According to our recent tests, they do. We analyzed links from pages powered by ONLY a 301, 302 and 307. We measured „anchor text passing power“ of outgoing links. The Target page is on an authority domain. The results point out that you can lose rankings pretty soon if you choose to do 301 or 307 redirects. Site migrations via a 301 might “die slowly”, while the 302 redirects powered ranking is pretty consistent.