Link Building

Guest Blogging Leads To Unnatural Links Detected Message?!

3 Comments
March 24  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

While I haven’t seen many reports for guest blogging leading to an unnatural links penalty/warning from Google, this is an interesting topic to keep an eye on. I know this topic is going to freak you out a little but let’s take a look at this bloke’s case and feel out what might be the problem if it is even guest blog links. I’m a huge fan of guest blogging so I’d be pretty choked it this were an issue now, but I suspect a couple of other things in play here. I found this thread while doing my daily forum browsing;

I went from 1k Google visitors per day to 200. I then went back up to about 400 and now I’ve tanked again to 250ish.

I figured Google was punishing me for something so I submitted a reconsideration request.

I recently received an email from G stating that:

“We’ve reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.”

The thing is, I’ve never paid for a single backlink and 90% of my link building is by submitting guest posts to high quality blogs in my market. With each guest post I include an author resource box. Does Google recognize that this resource box is included with lots of my backlinks and see it as unnatural link building? How can I lift this penalty without individually contacting over 50 bloggers who host my content with a backlink? And if guest posting is no longer a viable link building strategy, then WHAT IS?

Veeerrrryyy interrreeesssting! Now we don’t know if that warrior was engaged in other link building practices, but usually most people are. If you’re buying services from affiliate marketing forums, they’re more than likely on the grey/black side of things and can lead to trouble…although everything seems to lead to trouble these days. So while the thread is young, I’ve piped in with my 2 cents and we’ll see what comes of it if anything.

What Am I Thinking?

Well lately there is a lot of guest blogging going on, and sadly I’m seeing a lot more low quality stuff taking place. Remember to take what I say with a grain of salt, I don’t claim to know all and I’m just here to get the discussion going. So if it were possible to get an unnatural links penalty for guest blogging what factors come to your mind first that might trip the filter? Think about this for a minute here and then continue reading on……

Anchor text manipulation come to mind? I imagine if you’re gaming nothing but the same anchor text over and over that’s still going to be considered trying to manipulate the SERPs. We here at Linkbuildr are a huge proponent of NOT bothering to give two shits about anchor text anymore, and more so go after site/brand anchors or whatever isn’t trying to manipulate your ranking for one or two keywords. Keeping your rankings in the long run is all about building trust folks.

Another factor to consider when attracting links…ok well not consider but actual friggin do is link diversity! Relying on the same type of links is not a smart move and really will make your profile stick out like a sore thumb. So that’s all I really have to say and if you’ve had a problem with guest blog links I’d love to hear about it in the comments so don’t be shy now.

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Private Blog Networks Getting Deindexed?

30 Comments
March 13  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

The word on the “digital streets” in February was that blog networks were getting heavily deindexed by Google. There have been a lot of these private blog networks popping up on the market and a lot of people got stung on the 7-9th and 18-21st of February. Within the last year, webmasters and SEO’s have been debating whether or not external links could hurt your rankings. Now, we can confirm it’s a sure thing as a lot of them are now getting notices in their WMT. For the most part, these warnings and penalties came for blatant and excessive link exchanges. There have always been, and will be private blog networks out there for SEO use, but the amount of paid “private” ones have flooded the market.

It’s no surprise, either, as the ranking rewards from a blast on a few of these networks was, and still is, netting people great results. The problem? Your SERPs are getting bombarded by thin affiliate sites that most likely should have no business ranking where they do. We all know by now that Google’s algorithm was built on links and that there is no shortage of places to buy obscene amounts of them.

The fact is that just about every big player in their niche is going to be buying links in some way or another. The difference amongst those players being whether they get caught or not. I’ve seen my fair share of extremely elaborate private blog networks in my time and I’ve recently seen nothing but endless low quality blog network services popping up. I’m not going to pretend I’m above having links from a private blog network, but the quality I’ve seen coming forth is atrocious. While participating in a private blog network for links is clearly a link scheme and against Google’s TOS, a lot of companies still don’t mind the risk.

I personally couldn’t sleep well at night if my company’s rankings relied on a flimsy blog network or three. With that being said, what happens when, either that blog network your relying on gets the boot, or your site gets dropped? The blog network’s users are more likely the most detrimental factor, not the owners. After their spun content goes up, you can be sure that a dosing of spammy links will be splattered all over these blogs. It’s a recipe for disaster, and by the looks of February, this caused a lot of problems.

A lot of companies are not aware of what they’re getting themselves into as well when buying a link blast on a private blog network. What’s even worse is when a business hires an SEO company and they get back a bunch of links that are really just going to be trouble in the long run. On the other end of the spectrum, big companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars on a well sorted private blog network. These sites are well thought out and don’t consist of spun content and thousands of scrapebox and Xrumer links. All I’m saying is be smart and careful, especially if you stumbled onto this post while making a decision for your business. This commercial, for example, is well produced and makes sense, but to the unsuspecting business owner who doesn’t know much about Google’s TOS conditions or what will eventually happen to these networks, it could spell disaster.


Many Google Algorithm Changes In February

By now I’m sure you’ve read this blog post from Google talking about 40 changes to their algorithm in February. The bit in that article about links has raised a lot of eyebrows within the community. We can only speculate on what that change was and how much of a real impact it has on your rankings. What does this have to do with private blog network links? Well, for one, blog networks are easy to detect and Google can sniff out a pattern in no time. Secondly, I think Google is just going after people who are too greedy in their anchor text distribution. It’s really very easy for Google to detect, seeing as we give them all our data (not that they really need help determining what constitutes as a quality link). This should really make you rethink your link building strategy if you’re relying on blog networks as a big part of the game plan.

We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

You’ll still see tons of spammy websites ranking across the board, and that hasn’t changed much. I do, however, think that if you’re using these techniques, your chances for longevity are now in the toilet and those methods are not going to work for a real business. This is why it pays to do things right and reap the benefits once you establish your business as a leader in its vertical. This is why, as a brand, you should be doing amazing things that stand out. This will attract links, social buzz and all the right signals that get you to that level of authority. If you’ve already decided you’re going to eventually dable in a blog network or two, then perhaps wait until you’ve reached that status….it does work better and since your brand is established, it seems you can get away with a lot more *hint hint*.

So Who Got Deindexed?

Well I don’t actually use private blog networks for our clients so I don’t have any hard data myself. I am, however, very active on most of the webmaster forums and definitely noticed the brewhaha in February. I’ve never seen so many unnatural link warning messages go out. I also saw more speculation threads about blog networks getting deindexed although, I didn’t happen to see anyone admitting it outright. We’ll go over actual threads I’ve been keeping my eye on and dig a little deeper into what’s going on in the world of black hattery!

Like I mentioned before, there are dozens of public “private” blog networks currently on the market. I’ve had my team try their hand at most of them with certain niche sites we own. We knew from the get go that just about every single one of them (BuildMyRank, ALN, LAN, DiamondLinks etc etc etc) would provide us low quality content on sites that had nothing to do with our vertical. Every single one of these networks was easy to spot and the content wrapped around yours was not my idea of a delicious sandwich. We don’t use services like these for our clients EVER, however, I see why there is such a raging market for them. It’s hard to build links and if you’re rocking a thin affiliate site, the chances of getting hundreds of natural links isn’t going to come easy. There’s too much money to be made out there and if people can exploit something easily, then it cannot be stopped. Just remember that if you’d like to have a thriving business that benefits from free organic Google traffic, take the slow and steady road.

While the public blog networks are easy to pick apart, so are a lot of amateur SEO’s private for-their-use-only networks. An example of how a Warrior Forum member Mark spoke out about how his private network was sniffed out by Google and completely deindexed.

Yesterday my network of 165 blogs was nearly completely de-indexed by Google. I’m not complaining about this as, hands up, I was posting spun content and selling links. The point of this post is rather to let others know how I think they uncovered my whole network.

I was posting spun (paragraphs spins to 60% uniqueness and 20 spun titles) articles to a random selection of 40-75 of the blogs in the network. That spun content was the only thing linking the blogs together.

None of them had Webmaster Tools, Adsense, etc. installed. None of them were linked to each other. Nearly all of them were hosted on different IP addresses. The only 2 sites not to get de-indexed were 2 that had been hacked a few days earlier and so the content on those couldn’t be found via a Google search.

Goes to show that, even though you may be hosting them on different IP’s, low quality networks are easily caught by Google and that you have to be smarter than your average bear these days if you want to play dirty. While we won’t usually see another private blog network owner come out and admit they got dropped, we can look at the mayhem PBN users saw in February. We’ll start by looking at BuildMyRank.com because they’re one of the biggest and most well known networks. They happened to close their doors on the 19th which, also happened to be a day of major ranking loss for thousands of websites across the IM world. I’m not, however, saying this was the reason they closed their doors; they clearly state they grew too fast and needed to grow some more. Regardless, they’re on Google’s radar for sure and will eventually get their users smacked down in the rankings.

Blog Network Woes


BuildMyRank(BMR) is perhaps the most well known and largest network that was open to the public. They offered thousand of low quality, high (artificially inflated) PR blogs for your link whoring and it came at a cheap enough price. While you cannot get an example of what a site looks like before you buy, they do offer this tidbit of information from their FAQ (sadly, it doesn’t mention that this service is against Google’s TOS):

To protect the integrity of our network, we do not release domain info to the public. However, once you begin using our network, you’ll find your links easily enough with tools such as Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, or Ahrefs.

So how much do you want to bet Google has an account on there? There were easily over 100 threads across the popular webmaster forums all speculating that a huge chunk of BMR sites took a dive and dropped off the map. A lot of users experienced a huge drop in rankings while some others did not. I’ve tried my best to put together the most discussed threads on the topic here:

There are tons of other public networks that I’ve mentioned here, but I’ll just mush together all the threads that had a good discussion and may interest you folks here. I’m also open to hearing what you have to say so don’t be shy and let us know what you think below. In the mean time, however, here is some reading that should keep your busy for the better half of your morning.

Lessons Learned and the Future

There will always be people gaming Google’s algorithm in the link department, so I don’t expect to see a drop in private blog networks. There will still be, and are currently, dozens of open-to-the-public networks to blast thousands of links on. While it does work well, Google is quickly learning how to spot these and, even quicker, how to devalue your link juice. If you’re a legit and serious business, stay as far away from blog networks as you can. If you must dabble, then prepare to eventually get stung in the long run and you’ll be right back to square one.

I know a lot of you are going to be thinking that anyone who got caught up in Google’s algorithm smacking in February must have been foolish and only relied on PBN’s for links. Either that or they got too greedy and didn’t diversify their links, whether it be the anchor text or a multitude of links to internal pages. In the end, it doesn’t really matter when you’re spamming for blog comments, forum/user profiles, wikis, article sites and the like.

Keep in mind that damn near every form of link building goes against Google’s TOS.

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Detected Unnatural Links Notice From Google

10 Comments
December 28  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

No we didn’t get a notice of detected unnatural links but more and more people are these days and I expect this to ramp up a lot more in 2012. As I’ve stated many times, I’ve got my ear to the ground and a lot of the webmaster/affiliate forums are bringing up threads with this message. Google’s war on link spam is like America’s “war” on drugs – it’s a big fat fail boat year after year. The biggest hole in their algorithm is the links although they don’t need to change that aspect entirely. The anchor text abuse is rampant and that’s what needs to be curbed or turned down a notch…something we’re actually seeing in our link analysis a lot over the past 8 months.

I’m writing about it today because I saw yet another thread started in Google’s Webmaster Help Central regarding a rather larger site getting this notice. It comes in your webmaster tools area and you definitely don’t want to be seeing it. There are still a lot of people who claim that links cannot hurt your rankings, there are also a lot of people who believe in all sorts of fairy tales. Google’s guidelines on link schemes clearly state that you can be kicked in the ass (loss of rankings) if you’re heavily gaming their algo.


Image Credit: http://searchnewscentral.com/20110629173/Latest/does-google-think-your-links-are-unnatural.html
 
This is what she looks like and for a lot of people I’ve spoken with, it doesn’t always follow with a decrease in rankings. I imagine your site is now under some serious watch from your big brother G so proceed with caution. From what I can tell, it takes a certain type of “link scheme” to trigger this message. The type I’m referring to is usually link exchanges as they’re really easy to spot and trigger an alert to Google. A lot of people these days are link spamming via article marketing, blog comments and forum profiles and I’ve only seen a couple cases where these links caused a problem. Those types of links are too easy to spam a competitor with, thus Google most likely won’t be causing a fuss from these links too much…I imagine they just eventually devalue them and move on.

Where I’d also be suspect is in a few other areas of your link profile. If your top anchor text are clearly gaming or a certain keyword then I’d be quite worried as a business owner. Half the time businesses hire some crack pot SEO firm and all they do is spam spam spam for certain anchor text links. A lot of companies have no idea what’s going on or if this were even a bad thing to have happen. Another area I always like to peep on is the distribution of links to pages besides the homepage. This is another area Google can easily calculate in their algorithm is something looks highly unnatural. If I were Google, I’d also take a look at the number of C classes that total the link profile, but that might just be a little too hard to determine by a machine if something’s awry.

Is Google passing value on the type of link? I’d put a lot of money on yes they are. If your link profile consists of only blog comments, how could they not determine something was going on. I’m a big fan of link diversity, but I’m also a bigger fan of creating something that encourages people to link to you…that’ll provide you with more than enough natural links.

Cases To Study

Via this Google search query:


 
That should give you folks a good idea of what they’ve been going after in the past year or two. Like I said above, I expect these messages to be ramped up in 2012 so make sure you’re really thinking about your current and future link marketing efforts and tactics. If you’ve seen this message and would like to tell your story, then feel free to do so in the comments below. If you’ve got this message and would like us to take a look at your website for free then get in touch via our contact form.

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Giving Away Gifts For Links With Rand

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December 23  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark
Wistia


 
It has been a while since I’ve posted a whiteboard friday from Rand over at SEOmoz so here’s the latest one right in time for the holidays. This one he gives away some awesome link building tips to show you how you can give away products and other items to get some juicy links. If you’re running an ecommerce site then definitely watch this because it’s the best way to get links imho.

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Google Sends Warning For Article Marketing

6 Comments
November 24  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

Are you link building via article marketing for your main source of links? You might not be as safe as you think. While I’m aware I’m spouting and promoting fear a little bit here, I do have my ear to the ground when it comes to this topic. Clearly the majority of companies out there are pumping out ultra low quality content. That’s not the only problem though, everyone is also gaming anchor text and that’s what Google hates…a lot.

I like the fact that Google would discourage this because too many sites are way too shitty to deserve a top ranking spot. Google’s guidelines when it comes to links makes it pretty clear that link schemes are going to cause you trouble, and most article marketing falls under their definition.

You might remember the violation emails Google sent out regarding unnatural links detected pointing to a site. While it’s a very rare occurrence, the possibility is a reality and something you’ll see pop up in Google’s webmaster help central. I just came back from a trip and while catching up on the latest posts on my trip, I discovered this instance that caught my eye.

Meanwhile I submitted a reconsideration request for my other sites that had the same -50 filter, some which had zero inorganic links. In the E-mail I received I was told that I needed to remove any “inorganic links” that I could and if I couldn’t remove them I needed to create a list of the links I couldn’t remove.

It’s important to keep in mind that this person is most likely running a bunch of thin affiliate sites and they were also doing user profile spam. A lot of people think that links can never have a negative effect on your rankings, but those people haven’t been around long enough. Even the link schemes definition from Google clearly states that “This is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results“. That alone should end the debate.

If the post is true, it’s still a rare case and, in my ninja opinion, pretty difficult to get in trouble with links. Pretty much every top niche is dominated by unethical link building practices and it has been that way for the last decade. We, of course, do a lot of high quality content marketing and I’m not claiming to be pure by any means, just be careful out there. That statement is also for those companies who are just blind hiring an SEO to get mass links.

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Only The Links Google Trusts Count x Matt Cutts

13 Comments
November 13  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

At Pubcon this week Matt Cutts said something pretty interesting about links and it’s a perfect topic for us to sit and think on here. A lot of people are doing different things when it comes to building links, and it is usually dependant on what they know or their industry. One thing’s for sure, a lot of folks are blasting thousands of links with spam tools because it’s TOO easy. One thing’s for sure, the way Google views links needs a shaking up and I’m a big believer that it’s a coming.

Q. Everyone says I need more links. How do links improve the quality of the site? I don’t want to play this game and I don’t want to do this.

A: What matters is bottom line. Links are a part of search – they represent online reputation. Although there are many tools that report links, none of the tools can tell you which links are trusted by Google (not even Google’s tools). While the link structure looks bad from the outside, the actual linkgraph that Google uses/trusts looks much better. When the New York Times complained about a site with 10,000 spammy links, Google investigated the site and not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter. Only the links Google trusts count.

Now a lot of webmasters and marketers are going to scratch their heads at that last thing mentioned by Mr Cutts. I certainly did because the SERPs do not reflect this statement at all and it doesn’t take long or much effort to disprove it either. I don’t know if toxic links + a sound website make a difference, but my first search query gave me the results I needed for this post.

A quick search for “bad credit loan quotes” from my end brought me the first ten results, and the first one’s link profile was just what I suspected. Not only that, but the page ranking has 0 unique content on it and it’s basically just a push into their affiliate program. While my query is looking for a “quote”, I’d still be more comfortable from a big brand or more reputable site.

The entire site has low quality content that’s only made for the search engines and it’s basically a thin affiliate site. I hate to use Alexa but since April the site has done nothing but grow, and with a site that should have been swept up in one of the Panda updates it should have been knocked down. So we of course have to suspect the links are artificially boosting this site for now? Ranking for all sorts of loan keywords is going to take a lot of links because it’s one of the most competitive niches online. As I suspected this is what their profile looks like;

No surprise there eh? The only way a low quality site can rank so well is anchor text abuse and this is Google’s biggest flaw in their algorithm. I should mention that this will most likely not keep them ranking high forever, but it’ll be long enough for them to make some serious bank. In some of the niches we work for clients in, we have seen these types of links holding up for years now so I’m not sure what to expect any more.

So what type of links are driving the great results for this site? Well, as suspected again, they’re a mix of junk directories, site-wide paid links, blog comment and forum profile spam. But I thought we’re supposed to build great content and the links and rankings will follow? For the most part, that’s been nothing but bullhooey and I see low quality links outdoing great sites at every turn.

You’d think Google would be better at filtering out links aimed at gaming their algorithm. The offending sites top links all come from sites with junk like this;

That’s all I really have to say. To see for yourself just do any semi competitive search query and you’ll find the top 10 results riddled with this problem.

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Google Link Penalties, SEO Sabotage And The Great Link Conspiracy

19 Comments
October 3  |  Link Building  |   Ryan Clark

Can you get penalized for external links? The debate gets covered on just about every marketing and SEO forum on the planet; so, what’s the verdict? In some cases, yes, but most of the time, no? Confused much? I sometimes feel as such so I’ve been slowly collecting links of interesting threads, discussions and informational tid-bits on the subject over the past 6 months. I thought it would make a good post and allow people to add to it via the comments. I’ll add the good stuff into this post as time goes on.

Our team has been getting more and more interesting emails from people suspecting that links were causing them issues. While it’s easy to think that right away, we do have to consider other factors that can come into play. There are hundreds of Google algorithm tweaks a year, your competitor’s own efforts, brand clout, user engagement, social media influence and who know what else. There is, however, a great deal of “cases” that have come up online that might suggest links are a potential threat.

The first obvious read? Our post on 10 big brands that Google has penalized for links in the past. These were all paid link penalties, I might add, and being high profile, they simply could not resist the PR stunt at their fingertips. In the end, all companies have come back out on top without a care in the world. There is also a large number of threads with people getting noticed in Webmaster tools right down to the “epic/mythic? -50 over optimization penalty”. For those who didn’t read about it or get one in their Webmaster Tools, here is the message:

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.domain.com/,

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

This is something we’ve encountered a lot more as of late and it definitely has been a case of bad links 100% of the time. The usual suspects of mass forum and social 2.0 profile links, paid blog posts, link wheels and spammy article marketing efforts are almost always a factor. Heavy focus on a few anchor text phrases was also pretty typical, something a lot of people have speculated as a problem child. Regardless of what we think, let this serve as an educational reference for those pondering the same thing.


Public Cases Of GWT Unnatural Link Notices

We’ll start with this as it’s the most recent and public attempt at devaluing your link building efforts. What we’ve seen in cases where this notice pops up is that you’re most likely doing some really low quality link building. While a lot of people argue that you cannot be harmed by links, this is now a pretty good argument against that. The other argument made is that competitors could just knock you out of the SERPs with a Xrumer/Scrapebox/spam-tool-of-choice blast. We’ll take a look at that next, but for now we’ll pile on the public cases for this message.

Keep in mind I’m talking about the message for external link violations, not the one for selling links. The selling links message, however, does make the odd appearance on Google’s Webmaster Help Central, most notably this thread involving Forbes.com. The reason I don’t think we’re seeing too many public cases is because this doesn’t get served all that often. There must be certain factors at play that are determining that this website is in fact taking part in a scheme, and it’s not a competitor doing it. This is where having Majestic SEO in your tool shed comes in handy as you can see any correlation of link spikes to penalties. Ignore that piece of content that went viral and more so look for abusive link exchanges, paid footer/sidebar links and your 10,000 forum profile links.

Click on the above image to take you to that Google result for a more up-to-date look, but here are some of the most interesting cases I’ve read.

– Case involving an over link exchanged hotel http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7f9f90e1b2f54284&hl=en
– Case involving way too many blog network and directory links going after one lucrative keyword/anchor text http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=167e3f0bd50c5c49&hl=en
– Site owner claims she didn’t do the links but got the notice anyway http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=765df36e791ece35&hl=en
– affiliate site getting stomped on..my guess is someone from Warrior Forum (lol) http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1ee9981bddf6820a&hl=en
– 100% “pure whitehat” site gets the notice…problem is a lot of people have no idea the link spamming is against TOS http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6f6d791f9fcfaf58&hl=en
– Another one bites the dust with too many targeted link exchanges http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2c8812b664c37544&hl=en

If you use that search query or Google discussions, you’ll find a lot of other people in SEO/Webmaster forums posting about it. Some threads to specifically go through is this Warrior Forum one, this v7n post and why not throw in a Digital Point thread while I’m at it. These forums are ripe with link spammers promoting their lame affiliate sites that pollute the search results.


Can Competitors Knock You Down With Bad Links?

From time to time I’ll get an email or read a thread where someone claims that this is happening. I mean, if I were building junk links to my affiliate site and got caught, I’d claim it was a competitor as well. Since it’s out of your control, it is thought that it shouldn’t be a problem or something to worry about. For the most part, I’d agree with that statement. There are a few great threads out there on forums where people are having heating debates over the topic, but I got a couple of quotes that will refute anyone’s claim if it being impossible.

First up let’s see what Google employee John Mu has to say about this;

But in practice, we have a lot of safeguards that help our algorithms to evaluate sites in useful ways. Our algorithms are pretty complex, it takes more than a handful of bad links to sway their opinion of a website. Even if Webmaster Tools shows a million links, then that’s not going to change things if those links are all ignored for ranking purposes.

– quote from http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=199d578059c28ba3&hl=en

And from the wise and ever so handsome Matt Cutts;

piling links onto a competitor’s site to reduce its search rank isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. “We try to be mindful of when a technique can be abused and make our algorithm robust against it,” he says. “I won’t go out on a limb and say it’s impossible. But Google bowling is much more inviting as an idea than it is in practice.

– quote from http://www.forbes.com/2007/06/28/negative-search-google-tech-ebiz-cx_ag_0628seo.html

So it isn’t impossible after all! I, however, have never personally seen something like this actually happen to a website. Besides hearing rumors of services to knock down competitors, there are a lot of threads with people complaining about it happening. I personally think it’s just rogue outsourced SEO’s making them links they later discover to be absolute poison. We’ll just have what I found here on file for reference and personal education on the topic. Most of these topics will be from 2005 when this was a hot topic, so a lot of this is out of date.

– decent SEOmoz post with some good talk in the comments http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/help-ive-been-seo-sabotaged
– old WebProNews article on the problem of Google bowling http://www.webpronews.com/google-bowling-how-competitors-can-sabotage-you-what-google-should-do-about-it-2005-10
– spam links apparently cause this company to drop like a fly http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3964441.htm
– another WMW thread on the topic http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3677877.htm
– http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3677877.htm
– huge 10 page Warrior Forum argument turns into a link sabotage case study http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/440854-google-flawed-you-can-influence-other-sites-rankings-backlinks.html
– SEO Round Table discussion on link sabotage http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022654.html
– 500+ results of people complaining about SEO/Link sabotage on Google Webmaster Central http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+site:google.com+seo+link+sabotage
– 1400 or so inquires about the apparent mythic -50 link penalty via Google Webmaster Central
– a slightly different result set for link penalty complaints found on Google Webmaster Central http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/search.py?hl=en&forum=1&query=link+penalty+more%3Aforum
– 4800 posts about link penalties on Webmaster World http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=ubuntu&channel=fs&biw=1366&bih=649&q=+site:webmasterworld.com+-50+link+penalty
– preventing link based penalites with Rand via Whiteboard Friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday
– high traffic site nailed by a -50 for link activity http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3375264.htm
– Great post and video with Chris Cemper talking about how to cure this nasty penalty http://www.cemper.com/seo-knowhow/google-minus-50-penalty-cure
– all the Blackhat World threads on the -50 penalty

I’m a pretty big proponent that anchor text over-optimisation is one of the biggest causes of a -50. Keep in mind, a lot of the “bionic posters” on Google’s Webmaster Central deny that any link penalties exist at all. They say that the links are only being devalued, which I totally agree with as well. There are just too many people getting dropped back 50 spots or so, and to me that’s a penalty. Even the definition of that word fits the bill:

A disadvantage or unpleasant experience suffered as the result of an action or circumstance.

Since a drop of 50 places in the SERPS is usually accompanied by this apparent penalty, we’ll take a look at some of the causes as well as examples in the wild. We have a client that is still not able to move past the fifth page for his desired keyword for nearly 2 years. This came from buying a few hundred blog posts all gaming one anchor text. These were done before we started and we’ve been trying to remove as many as possible over the years.

To me, this is a filter put in place and we’ve seen it get lifted after a certain period of time or when those offending links were changed/removed.

– Old but good article on even internal links causing an over optimization penalty http://www.searchenginejournal.com/keyword-rich-internal-anchor-text-how-much-is-too-much/8036/
– Warrior forum post about an affiliate getting spanked pretty good http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/416353-google-over-optimisation-penalty.html
– great post via Onreact about this topic http://seo2.0.onreact.com/google-filters-exact-match-anchor-text-links-are-the-new-meta-keywords
– another WW thread with a some good talk about getting out of this filter http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4303740.htm
– http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4248479.htm chat on another person taking a hit
– a great 3 page discussion on WW http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3937683.htm
– bought links and trades cause keyword ranking filter http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3407625.htm
– another post from WW talking about getting out of the -50 filter http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3737327.htm
– great thread, again on WW, covering the problems with aggressive link building for a specific anchor text http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29269.htm


What Type Of Links Cause Penalties/Rapid Devaluation

So let’s assume either penalty or devaluing of links when I talk about some of the link building methods below. If you were building links and noticed a 5 page drop, I’d consider that a penalty of sorts and be sad. Let’s see what we can find on the web regarding certain types of link building activity that may harm you efforts. I always read in between the lines of what Google says in its blog posts, comments and forum activities. The first example I’d love to bring up was inspired by a blog post on the Google blog on how they treat comment spam.

A natural link profile looks void of schemes such as excessive link exchanges, 10 million anchor text blog comments, unrelated forum profiles, junk content marketing and all the other bad stuff. Your anchor text variation hopefully looks natural enough… I mean barely any site out there is 100% whitehat, so some manual link building is going to take place eventually. That’s why we don’t build that many targeted anchor text links and go for the more random linking approach. If your on-page SEO is sound, the links will do almost the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, there is still significant ranking power in those specific anchor text links.

Blog Comment Links – According to a Google Blog post you can can filtered/penalized for spammy, over-the-top comment abuse. I’ve never seen too much bad things happen, but if you’re only commenting with your desired anchor text and leaving a generic message, expect to take a dive one day. Affiliate marketer’s are the most notorious link abuser’s in the category thanks to software like SENuke, Scrapebox and XRumer. While I mentioned I liked to read between the lines of what Google says publicly, what do you get from this statement:

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you’ve cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

– SEOGadget post on how they got a page level penalty from spam comments left on his site http://seogadget.co.uk/google-page-penalty-for-comment-spam-rankings-and-traffic-drop/
– potential case of comment spam leading to keyword ranking filtering http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0658efd70f48d677&hl=en
– another potential case for blog comments causing a -50 http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0b754b012f15a162&hl=en
– discussion where a lot of blog comment spam links were targeted at a site in effort to take it down http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=78c716f27f683c7e&hl=en
– a post I commented on where the person had mostly spammed blog comment links that made up their link profile http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=4285d9646f96d16f&hl=en
– while seo101 again calls the -50 a myth, this person is there with tons of spam blog comments http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2bdcf2fa9ac3d7d4&hl=en
– another company in the insurance space got nailed http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6dcd2428eb4fc691&hl=en

Profile Links – one of the second most used spam tactic out there are profile links from social media sites/apps/networks/wikis and forum user accounts. While it’s still debated that links can’t hurt your site (lolz), let’s see what I can find in relation to over spamming links from certain types of profiles. This is extremely rampant and a toxic practice, and you’ll see it a lot of the affiliate space. Gotta make “dem monies”! I’m sure most of you remember the Acai berry diet crazy in the past couple of years. The ranking space for those keywords were a bloody battle ground and I found this as an example in one of the top ranking sites for “acai berry diet”:


This is why you don’t leave open Wiki’s on .edu’s!

One major important thing to keep in mind is that these profiles provide no value, so they most likely won’t stay indexed for very long. This and the fact Google can most likely tell when you’ve spiked thousands of profile links in few days could results in loss of rankings. It always tends to be banishment to the 5th page:

– Warrior Forum post which talks about the negative effect of profile links http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/428022-google-penalizes-bad-backlinks.html
– a small thread on someone only having profile links done and feeling negative effects from it http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=35ef9ec63b73b3a2&hl=en
– more blackhat talk on WF about profile links http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/334567-profile-backlinks-effective-search-engine-optimization.html
– Blackhat World thread on rapid devaluation of profile links http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/310245-google-penalizes-xrumer-warning-all-avoid-xrumer-blast-services.html
– http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=73d7c79b23ee3c1d&hl=en another one where I commented and get knocked on for saying he triggered a filter of sorts. They say that’s hogwash, I saw not because it is only effecting a couple keywords, and the rest stayed fine.
– this post is dismissed as thin affiliate, but the keyword it dropped for is his most linked anchor text…hrmmm http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2c47db8499bfbb3c&hl=en

Let’s Hear YOUR Experience

While I’m not claiming proof of anything here, I want to open the discussion from webmasters, SEO’s and rands on what they’ve experienced. If you’re one of those claiming that external links cannot hurt your site, let’s hear a good argument. I hear this a lot onGoogle’s Webmaster Central from their top mods, yet they all think that if someone steals your content you can lose rankings for that. That backwards thinking bugs me the most because their argument is that the links are out of your control. Well, so is someone stealing your content.

We’ve personally seen rankings come back after link profiles were cleaned up after a lot of hard work. I personally believe that dropping to page 5 or worse for only a certain search term is a penalty. We’ve seen many people come to use stuck around then, not able to move until the algorithm determined it had cleaned itself up. I am open to it being one of the other hundreds of algorithm factors, but I see too much of the same going on when bad links are involved.

So my stance? Links can cause issues, some call them penalties and others call it devaluation. In the end you’re losing out on business, and that’s not a positive thing!

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Distilled Conference Taste Test!

1 Comments
September 8  |  Link Building Videos  |   Ryan Clark

The crew over at Distilled is well known for not only their great content or their highly respected marketing services, but for their conferences as well. The most innovative minds in our industry speak at these conferences on the more advanced and cutting edge topics. They sell these now on their website, and I could not be more happy to recommend that you buy these without hesitation. You’ll see from this taster video what you’re in for and some of the brilliant minds who are sharing invaluable knowledge. I also recommend checking out their Youtube profile for a whole bunch of great videos that are really worth the watch!

 

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