Has Google Made Unnatural Link Building Easier?
-
I see lots of competitors and crappy sites ranking well for highly competitive keywords in the web hosting niche.
After analysing their backlinks, I noticed that most of them had only 1 or 2 backlinks to the page they wanted to rank. The anchor text is usually a slight variation of the targeted keyword.
Now suppose you are able to rank well for a handful of highly lucrative keywords using very few spammy links. That would mean that even if you got a Penguin penalty, cleaning up your link profile would take an hour at most.
I really have no intentions of using this strategy but it's frustrating to see spammy competitors outranking you with crappy sites and a handful of backlinks.
Your thoughts?
-
I don't think they buy google ads for most of them (the spammers)
-
I see this all the time within my niche and almost every niche. Google has become a useless engine, unless you are looking for news or information, but in that moment you decide to buy something, BAM, pure crap.... maybe because those sites are the ones that buy google ads?
-
I also happen to see new websites coming in and out of the top 10 on a weekly basis for some competitive keywords. Lots of them are about 6 months old.
-
There's a guy I see he just buys a sh*tload of spammy links and ranks high for about 1 or 2 months. When his website gets hits, he just buy another domain, puts back the exact same content (doesn't even care to change the website name in the image), spams the hell out of it and now he's back at the top with a domain he bought on August 25!!!
That's right! He ranked a brand new domain only 3 days after buying it! The website already got over 15k backlinks.
-
It seems that everyone is talking about this at the moment.
Google would appear to have got super addicted to providing fresh content, that it is ranking the newer sites higher than those with most authority. Why? I have no idea. Everyone is just taking the black hat route of making more sites, newer sites that can cheat the system for now, until Google packs up it's ideas and changes the algo.
I mean look at what has happened this year with updates, everyday is an update. I think we need to hold tight for the storm to settle and wait for everything to stabilise. Google can't keep this up for long, the SERPs change everyday!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
Too Many Links?
Search Term is Indianapolis Wedding Photographers. Site is http://www.tallandsmallphotography.com/ Their metrics are through the roof compared to everyone else's. They've dropped from 27 in May to 40 Now. 'A' Grade on-site optimization. Either there's too many links, or there's some bad links involved... I don't know which it is...
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay0 -
Its now been 12 days since since google notified me that my manul link penality was revoke.. how long before I'm reindexed?
Hi, Its been 12 days since google revoked the manual link penalty they had one me, I'm still ranking 335 for my domain keyword, there has been no movement yet.. Googlebot spiders my site daily, and I have also tried resubmitting the page from within GWT, Fetch Web Page.. How long do you think it should be before I see some movement...? or should I file another reconsideration request just incase they forgot to remove the penalty and just thought they did.. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Robdob20130 -
Link to Articles for news sites in Google SERPs
I'm trying to figure out why when I search for "international news" or "world news", for example, some sites in the SERPs have links to news articles, while others don't. For "international news", result of Fox News and New York Times have links to articles, while CNN (the top result), only have sitelinks. I would appreciate any theories on why this happens. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | seoFan210 -
Remove Links or 301
Howdy Guys, Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take. For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet... We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links. I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site? Or Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them? Has anyone had any success in 301ing? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Unnatural Link Warning No Longer Showing in GWT?
Hi, We recently took on a new client that had been hit by the recent Google updates. After having a really good look at their analytics and their link profile it looked like they had been hit with over-optimisation of anchor text. Over the last month or so we have been working to remove a pile of links that contain their main keyword starting with the easiest to remove and the lowest quality. At the same time we have been building links using sematic keywords and junk anchor text in a bid to dilute the ration of main anchor text within their profile. We have a timetable of tasks drawn-up which we are working through, at the end of the timetable when all tasks were complete we planned to write a very nice reconsideration request to Mr Google. I have logged in to Google Webmaster Tools this morning and I have noticed that the 'Unnatural Links' notice has been removed from that domain. Does anyone know if this signifies anything? We haven't sent a reconsideration request to google yet. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | AdeLewis
Ade.0 -
Too many links on your blog?
In all of my campaigns, I have a lot of URLs with too many links on the page (defined loosely as around or over 100 links per page); these links are virtually all found on blog pages. The link count shoots up quickly when you start using things like tag clouds, showing all the tags/categories a post is in, in addition to all the cross linking thats typical of blog posts. My question is: Does this matter? Do you work to get blog pages down under that 100 link limit, or just assume most blogs are like this and move along? If you think it does matter, what strategies have you used to cut down the number of links while still keeping popular elements like tag clouds?
Technical SEO | | AdoptionHelp0 -
How much effect does number of outbound links have on link juice?
I am interested in your thoughts on the effect of number of outbound links (obls) on link juice passed? ie If a page linking to you has a high number of obls, how do you compute the effect of these obls and relative negative effect on linkjuice. In the event that there are three sites on which you have been offered the opportunity of a link Site A PA 30 DA50 Obls on page 10 Site B PA 40 DA50 Obls on page 15 Site C PA 50 DA50 Obls on page 20 How would you appraise each of these prospective page links (ignoring anchor text, relevancy, etc which will be constant) Is there a rule of thumb on how to compare the linkjuice passed from a site relative to its PA and the number of obls? Is it as simple as page with 10 obls passes 10x juice of page with 100 obls?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0