I have been doing a lots of case studies specially after 4th October 2013 ( i was not much concerned after the hummingbird but penguin 2.1 took me off by surprise)  and now about 5 weeks after penguin 2.1, I can really advice on some points to you guys. As you can understand we cant reverse engineer the exact algorithm but its my take on the new update combined with hummingbird.

1.  Home Page and Internal URLs:

Google’s love for brand has become an obsession. And when I write this post, I dont write this post keeping in mind Nokia, Pespi or Apple, I write it  for the small businesses like  you and me. We cant keep on feeding Google with Adword money to make them trust that we are a Brand.

So What I observed , is You use your home page for Branding and use your Internal URLs for Link building more more. Lets say you are a SEO service provider company offering article submissions, contextual links, linkwheel etc etc..then I would advice you this:

Home Page=

5% links for anchor term related to article submissions, 40% for Naked URLs, 40% for Brand name , 5% for link wheel and so on…..

Internal Page:

You set some keyword for each of the Internal page and Build links with good diversity.

Important Note:

One important note in this, If you are an EMD, Lets say  FREE SEO SERVICES INDIA , then use something like FSSI as your brand and build links according to anchor.

2.  Disavow Data Base:

Google started giving options to disavow links in the past and today they have made a huge database of some sites ( they must have set of rules , like if a site receives 5k disavow requests , it would not pass any positive effect in serp).

Sure, I don’t have access to that data base, but according to my findings these are some of the sites which are highly divalued because of repetitive disavow:

• Some authority web 2.0 sites like typepad, hub pages , squidoo (Yes it hard to believe but the more knows sites have lost their values in terms of link building)
• Some famous article submissions sites like goarticle , article snatch etc.

So the point is , sites which are well knows and are easy to build links like available at senuke have lost their value. If you need links from web 2.0 , find out sites which are rarely available to everybody. in short, Change your Data base completely.

 3.  No of Backlinks:

You dont need thousands of back links to rank in serp. Yes, you heard me right. You dont have to have a huge no of back links to rank higher in serp. You can rank in top 10 with 60-120 links. so if you can get some quality links from hidden blog network or some rarely available sites, it can do wonders for you.

 4.  Social Signals:

Despite Mutt Cutts denying the direct relation between SERP and social signals, I have seen multiple examples where sites get ranking with social shares only. I would recommend you getting hands full of social shares without caring for any kind of over optimization penalty here.