At the end of February, Google announced that it was updating its search algorithm to serve higher-quality results to searchers. The update has since been dubbed the "Farmer Update" due to the algorithm's new bias against what Google considers "sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful." Translation: if you own www.how-to-rank-better-by-reading-these-articles-i-stole.com, things aren't going to be looking as peachy-keen as they may have been beforehand!
In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows how to avoid being penalized by Google for suspicious linkage and having your rankings slip or completely disapparate as a result. He uses the example from the SEOptimise blog of What Happens When You Build 10,00 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 hours. Hint: if you do own the aforementioned domain, you may want to reconsider your users' needs - for at least a couple of reasons.
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking about preventing link-based penalties. So, a lot of you have likely experienced the kind of thing that I am talking about. Whether you are a consultant or you are in-house, you're working at an agency, or you're just kind of tuning on your own site, you've seen this problem of the temptation to build, buy, borrow, beg, steal lots of links that are questionable in quality and value.
I want to share with you a quick story before we get started here. The blog SEO Optimize wrote a great piece about an experience they had in building these types of links. They started with a traffic graph of what had happened with their site. They put the new site on the Web. It's a relatively new site. They were growing sort of slowly and steadily. The spikes were a little bit lower than the valleys every week. They were sort of growing and growing. Then they decide, you know what, why don't we buy/build 10,000 dodgy links. I love the British because they use much better -- hi, everyone in London -- they use much better language. So, they go to these dodgy neighborhoods, maybe the East End, that's where it's dodgy, right? They build some links. They built 10,000 of these links. That's a lot. I think I should put a "whoa" there. Spell whoa. So, they build 10,000 dodgy links in this period, and what happens to their Goggle traffic? Shoots up. Skyrockets. Look at that. Insane growth. They, in fact, more than 5Xd their Google traffic, at least according to the graph that I was looking at on their blog post. You can see that it actually stayed like that for a few weeks. Google clearly not catching these links. I love the description that the blog post has. What he says is, "Just as I was beginning to worry that Google couldn't recognize this kind of crap, pow." It just drops down. It dropped down to a level so low that it was below the prior level of traffic, and essentially all they were getting here is branded terms, so people literally searching for that website itself. They're not ranking for any of their old keywords. These links aren't just not helping them, they are actively hurting them and preventing them from ranking, and it has been going on like that.
The moral of the story is invest in low quality links and temporarily you may see some benefit, but for the long term it can be quite harmful. You might be thinking to yourself, wait a minute, if this is the profile of how Google operates, couldn't I just build 10,000 dodgy links to all my competitors? Let's back up in time and remember that this is a new site. This is a new domain. They are likely looking at the profile of this site and saying, "Hey, they haven't built up a reputable, important, powerful brand yet. So it is much more likely that links can hurt them dramatically than it is a site that's been around a little while." That being said, there's likely many of you, possibly some of you even watching this video, who have sites like this or have friends with sites like this, clients with sites like this, and so you are wondering how can I prevent this kind of potential if I have seen that they did acquire some dodgy links, I did maybe acquire some dodgy links, I am considering it, or I am worried that my client did, I am worried the previous SEO did -- remember the case study with JCPenney and losing all their rankings because of the ins and outs of how Google measured them. You might want to be thinking, boy, I am in this period right now, maybe I am in that grace area. How can I prevent this from happening to me?
The first thing that I want to ask you to do is to ask yourself why. Not why are you going to get penalized. Why do you deserve to be ranking number one? Why do you deserve to be in the top few sites for these particular queries? Is it that you have the best product out there? Do you have the most innovative UI, the most usable format for it? Do you have the highest quantity of information? Are your user reviews the best that they could be? Is it the fact that you have access to data that no one else has? There has to be a unique value proposition for any given business and that includes a web-based business model. If you don't have this, then, yeah, you're only option to get links, to get references, is to go to those dodgy neighborhoods because no one is going to organically want to link to you editorially and say, "I endorse and recommend this particular business."
Once you have answered that question, I need you to focus on content. Well, I don't need it. You need it. You need you to focus on content because content is where those links are going to come from. In the absence of a reason apart from money or manipulation or some type of a personal relationship, the only way to get good reference links, good editorial links on the Web is to be the best resource for that particular query. Being that resource means content. I don't just mean text. I mean everything. I mean images and video. I mean other forms of content like user generated material. I mean things like the interface that you're putting on it, the UI that surrounds it. I even mean things like the humans, the people in the real world that are associated with creating that content. Having the authority and the credibility that comes from a big name in your particular field, which could be a very small field and a very unknown person to most of the rest of us, still matters quite a bit.
The third thing that I would do is go look at the top link sources to brands. So, where a lot of SEOs get into trouble is that you go and you look at the links that are pointing to the people who are ranking number 1, number 2, number 3, maybe top 10. A lot of them might be in this neighborhood. They might be the type of people who have built links for the short term, and they are ranking in the short term and Google is eventually going to catch up with them, which is why I encourage you to go find the brands. Those particular sites/pages that have built up authority, not just in the search results through links but in the equity that is built through mindshare, through branding, through knowledge of that website, and those brands will often have references to them that come from very good places. If you look at their top links using Open Site Explorer, using something like the Link Intersect tool, if it is a local site you could use Ontolo Whitespark's Link Finder, which I think is a great tool as well, even doing searches like, if I do a search query, let's say that I see a brand like O'Neill who makes surfboards and surf equipment and that kind of stuff, right. So, I might do a search like, "Where is O'Neill - site: O'Neill.com?" What I am doing here when I am searching Google like this, is I say, "Show me all the places where this brand is mentioned that is not on their website." That will show you a bunch of places that are talking about that brand. Those types of mentions often lead to links, often lead to references, build that brand's equity, build that brand's awareness and knowledge. Those are probably really good places to get links.
Number four, finally, and this one might even be a priority depending on how nervous you are that this is about to happen. You want to clear out the worst links. This means digging into your link profile and identifying anything that looks especially manipulative. Sometimes those huge long lists of reciprocal link pages, where you're pointing to everybody else and they're all pointing to you, that might be a good thing to clear out. You might want to e-mail your link partners and say, "Hey guys, sorry, but I think Google might really jump on us about this. I need to get rid of those." You might want to go and dig through any link brokers or buyers that either you have engaged with or the client previously engaged with or who knows, whoever was working on the site before you engaged with, your evil alter ego fight club style Tyler Durden worked on. You know, a guy gets up in the middle of the night, never know what he's going to do. Finding those links. Clearing them out. Getting rid of the ones that you can. Don't panic. Bad links aren't always going to hurt you. Everyone on the Web has some bad link pointing to them. Scrapers. Back in college, I built some bad links when it was late at night. That happens to everyone. It's okay. But, if you can find the worst of those, you are going to prevent some of these penalties. If you can find those really good ones, you build up that profile that protects yourself from some of this negative stuff.
All right everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday and hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by SpeechPad.com
Ahhh, it's great to hear someone recognize the, "Why?" question. Too often sites that don't deserve to be #1 get it in their heads they do. In this business honesty goes a long way. Sometimes it's better to start with, "Do we belong at #1?" rather than "Why aren't we #1?" If the answer to the former is, "No", then focus on crafting an offer that deserves to be #1. Once that is done, move on to the latter.
The number of sites in the downloadable games industry that take this dodgy approach to link building is staggering. Moreover, they don't just do it for one site. They build many, many sites and do this for all of them. That leaves us fighting against a never ending march of spammy sites trying to unseat us. Great for job security, I guess, but bad for hair on my head.
and to those who are considering "spamming" your competition with 10,000 backlinks overnight, ethical and karma considerations aside, are you willing to deal with the distinct possibility that your efforts will actually help them? What if they benefit tremendously from the short term spike? What if google doesn't penalize them? What if even with a penalty the site "bounces back" like the one in the case study did and you find yourself facing even tougher competition as a result of your efforts?
Interesting comment by seoptimise: "Just an update guys, the site has literally just bounced back to ranking #10 for the main keyword."
If google was really penalizing this site for low quality links, assuming nothing else has been done to the domain, why would the site bounce back like this?
Suggests to me that even after the Panda update Google doesn't mind the links, just the rapid accumulation of them. Perhaps now that the links have stayed up and the site hasn't been engaging in those tactics anymore Google let their original penalty expire which put the site back in the rankings.
Not a strategy I would recommend for a brand site (which is the only kind I work on ;-) but for what was coined above as a "burn site" it would almost seem ideal, especially if you could get the timing right in a seasonal industry.
Agree totally.
In any event, if I it was that easy, I would just send 10,000 Xrumer links to all of my competitor sites and I would be number 1.
Agree about penalties expiring. All algorithmic penalties on G last from about a month to three years, they are never permanent. The only times you get deindexed (i.e a permanent penalty) is when you get a manual inspection and an actual person has reviewed your site and hit the deindex button.
Just something worth pointing out. When we have researched anchor text over-optimization in past, it is almost always an egregious accumulation of unique inbound linking domains. In particular, we look at 3 metrics --- percentage of external mozRank per anchor text, percentage of unique inbound linking domains per anchor text, and percentage of total links per anchor text. Google seems by far to be most sensetive to unique inbound linking domains. This is probably the case because most spam linking building techniques tend to target a large number of sites, but low quality links. Thus, the spam signal to google would be sites with tons of links with exact anchor text from unique domains, but not necessarily an over-representation of quality.
I hate to be a Negative Nancy, but most of what you said is BS. This is for several reasons.
1. The volume and rate of the links you build can have negative impact. Not because of an algorithm calling it spam, but because Google favors current trends in their results. Building links fast will have a great impact because the algo considers your site hot news. Unfortunately, it also sets up the expectation for that linking volume to continue. If and when it does not, Google considers the buzz and interest dead. Building dodgy links consistently would not have the same impact.
2. You use the word penalty (i think). This is totally frustrating. Even best case scenario, if Google had a clue, they wouldn't issue a penalty, they would just devalue the incoming links. This is the way the game is played. I know you wish all those people kicking your butt for terms like "SEO Software" would receive a penalty for their dodgy links... but it just isn't how it works. Unless manually reviewed (like JC Penny), there is no penalties that are issued by google. What can sometimes happen, when a link network is discovered or sites are identified as selling links, is that the quality of those links are devalued. If you use the same dodgy source for all of your links, then if they are ever devalued, your site will lose ranking. This is not a penalty. I wish people would stop using inaccurate terms.
3. You speak about all "dodgy links" as if they are the same. You sound like all you have to do is go to the store and say, "I'll have some dodgy links please" and you'll receive the exact same thing every time. This is another thing that frustrates me. Be specific if you are going to claim evidence of something. If you want to claim that doing a couple of Xrumer blasts to your site and then doing nothing else might not be the best idea, I'll join you in that chorus. Just saying "bad links" or "dodgy links" is to me an intentional attempt to conflate the worst and least effective practices with everything that is not lilly white.
This is the thing that frustrates me about the while link strategy discussions. Nobody ever speaks in specifics. I have looked and have never been able to find a firsthand account of someone receiving an obvious penalty (not just a decrease in ranking from an algo shift) from diversified gray-hat offsite linking activity. All of the accounts I have found are either obvious manual reviews or so vague in their claims, that it's impossible to separate the truth from the BS.
This story is one of those. There are too many variables and everything is too unspecific for your claims to be credible. If anything I would suggest that it's somewhat irresponsible for you to be positing a vague third hand account as evidence of fact.
Google is not the omnipotent all knowing master of the universe, it is an old man looking for his keys in the bushes.
That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Nice WBF. Seems a lot work for the affected black / grey hats - but they don't get my sympathy.
By the way you informed us about some link building tactics :-)
say goodbye to reciprocal link building. :) better safe than "sorry, you've been penalized".
Didn't we say goodbye to reciprocal link schemes like three years ago? I say schemes, though, because there are cases where two sites might just think the other is valuable. In my case, I debate with people all the time, and Google doesn't mind a bit that we're linking to one another (the debate would be nonsensical if we didn't).
OT: can somebody exaplain to me what 'dodgy' means? dodgy = spammy? Thanks
Dodgy means suspicious or questionable - kind of like "shady" or "fishy" or any other "kind of strange" adjective. It's mostly British, so who knows what any of those people are saying... =)
Thanks, now everything is clear.
British is really weird :P
I think the best way of doing things is just to have the best content and high quality links. The thing is but their are soo many blackhats around who don't care becuase they will spend $1 buying a .info as a burn website and just bombard it with dodgy links so it ranks for a few links and they make money off affiliates or what ever else.
The problem with some brands linking profile is, that it is hard to acquire links on their website for example if you have a large brand who does long term sponsorships then yeah they are not going to link to you but if you have like a reseource list and your website is of similar quality it can be a easy link, very long process weeding out the good from the bad ;)
But yeah one of the biggest problems is where you have a previous SEO company who has purchased a bunch of paid links, they loose the account then you are left with the problem of fixing up the mess which is left, but the end results are worth it =)
I love the phrase "burn website", but i'm going to bit.ly it to create a new SEO phrase - "burn site". As in...
Client: "Why did our ranking move down from #1 to #2?"
SEO: "I'll look into it, but don't worry, that's just a burn site. It won't be there for long."
Of course, all credit goes to connections8.
Great WBF, as always.
Had to laugh at the college reference at the end...
Who doesn't know the sickening feeling of waking up with a screaming headache to find dodgy links we only vaguely remember and can't identify. It all seemed like innocent fun at the time, of course - but we were such naive young SEOs. Who knew the consequences of one boozy night of reciprocal linking would haunt us all these years later...
Something I think about is... new websites (or at least new pages) can suddenly get thousands of links all the time when something goes viral. In fact, creating something legitimately viral would be considered an amazing SEO success. So I wonder how does Google tell the difference between thousands of legitimate viral links and thousands of dodgy links that willl get penalized... And if it can tell the difference, why did it ever count those dodgy links before penalizing in the first place?
I guess they look on the pattern...
If you get lets say 10.000 links in a month... and then several months without links or much less... google may think it's not natural, or it was something what was popular for a while only....
google may see that "they got 10.000 links then, they got ranking, suddenly when they are much higher in results, they get much less links then before, so... what they offer.. is not as popular now as it was before"...
I guess if you get 10.000 links in first month... second should be the same... and so on... with time even more, when it gets broken, it may mean that users dont find your site so interesting anymore so it drops...
We can call it spammy, but sometimes we can call it "trends", depends on the situation and the way we gain links, cause I guess if you hit high with something, you can get 10.000 links in a month (but its hard for sureeeeeeeeee)... that's why mostly it's spammy :)
Good question. I can't imagine that every inbound-link spike of a website will be verified manually.
A little while ago we published some interesting news via a service provider which posted that news on different press portals where it got picked up by other sites. The news contained 3 deeplinks back to our site. Shortly after that we got hit by a penalty (we did not even rank anymore for our brand name and most of our pages got removed from the index). Only after a few month everything went back to normal (without sending a reinclusion request).
No idea why the penalty was removed.
10k Natural viral links will have a very different link signature to 10k spammy stuff
Well that's not so difficult to figure out, Google looks at where the links are coming from which should tell the story. The channels via which content goes viral are usually social media platforms of some sort with high PR and authority.
For people that may be doing niche sites, or product review sites, how do you think that they can make an authority sites out of reviews, or maybe promoting other products as affiliates? I'm saying, if we want to build an authority site for the long term, but at the same time being in the first positions in Google, and again, for the long term.
Is that possible?
Just to be fair....
According to the quoted blog post about the 10,000 "dodgy" links, the site is actually back to #10.
Also, it appears that the tester stopped any significant link building after building the links, which is about the worst thing one could do, especially after a site drops back in the rankings. Too many people become scared when their site drops back after link building and stop cold turkey when they should keep things going.
Great idea about looking at brands links, however small sites may have difficulties getting much of the links given to big brands for obvious reasons. Another thing is there are sites who persistently link from low quality sites and getting away with it and doing really well. How does one compete with that going whitehat only?
Google REALLY needs to stop penalising one and letting the other go.
Some of our low quality link profile competitors have suffered a bit in the SERPS recently...not dramatically though. It's good that Google devalued some of the article sites, I'm sure, but it doesn't appear much has happened to directory sites as far as I can tell. I find 700 directory backlinks more offensive than article directories, but in terms of a user experience, I suppose Google did the right thing. After all, it's unlikely you'll ever just happen upon a PHP directory in the SERPS...
In more than one of my smaller niches, the #1, 2 and 3 guys in Google for my most competitive keywords have an almost exclusive blackhat backlink profile with nothing but xrumer profile links and scrapebox autoapprove blog comments on sites with hundreds of outbound links...
WHY can't google pick up on these incredibly blatant footprints? It's almost impossible to succeed without dipping at least a little bit into blackhat tactics to compete with some of these guys.
And they haven't moved from their thrones at the top either... The same guy has been #1 for over a year now and his site hasn't been updated last year.
Google is too smart not to see these guys but why aren't they ever penalized? It seems like the bad guys are invincible and as always, nice guys finish last.
I have just been pondering this over the last couple of days. I have one site that retains backlinks built from a "previous life" one domain in particular is pointing approximately 10K backlinks to a single detination URL.
Now it is a "related" website and the anchor text used is also, however, they are blog-wide links and I have been giving some serious consideration to requesting these are removed as it just doesn't sit right with me.
These links would not affect the sites primary niche or rankings only a sub-niche, which for all intensive purposes does not provide much in the way of ROI at present.
Anyone care to comment?
I'm in the same position. One of my sites got a site-wide sidebar picture link from two blogs a while ago. The blogs and the alt text are both relevant to my niche. But will a site-wide link which means thousands of links from the same domain hurt or benefit my page?
Hey Rand,
Nice WBF. It's good to see case studies of blackhat SEO being penalised - even if it's only to show that an SEO halo is a badge of pride rather than just a shiny thing floating above your head and that a slightly darker colour of headgear would not be a good fashion statement
Having said that, the author responds to a question in their comments section with
"@Dan It went from ~15 organic visits / day (mostly very long tail) to ~150 organic visits / day (almost entirely from a single keyword)."
That's a lot of growth in a short space of time.
This has set me wondering about a couple of things. Mainly, what would happen if you kept on building these links? SEOptimise's experiment finished after one round of link building, but if you built 10,000 - or even 5,000 - links in one week of each month focussing on a range of keywords would Google catch up with you? The graph on the original post indicates that it took Google around a month to work out what SEOptimise were doing, so if you can build links ahead of that time you could stay at the top for an indefinite period. A lot of work, but noone ever said being evil was easy. What are your thoughts on the probability of that tactic working?
Good work.You are right with your content.Its better to play safe than to indulge in link dodging as it has risk of backfiring at you in future,Thanks for sharing it.
google and links..gosh!
Great tip about checking links to brands websites! I fall into the trap of just checking competitors (never brands) when doing analysis for link acquisition!
I think the best solution for Google is to count the low quality links for a short period (to try fool Black hat SEO's) then to gradually not count the low quality/spammy backlinks, that way a competitor couldn't do any damage to your site anyway
Happy to see that dodgy links don't work! I think people have to gain a huge amount of dodgy links over a short period of time to get noticed by Google unfortunately! Cheats never prosper!
wow, what a WBF, i love it... Getting links from good website or do not get any link...
We all know if we are going to make suspicious links, it could be penalty..but after panda update I am seeing some keyword rich domains getting much more preference even they have suspicious link structure..they are just getting advantage of this new algorithm even after poor and trash links..
Am I the only one that had problems with watching the video at the 2 minute mark? Mine froze up, at 2:41 3 times in a row, on 2 different browsers.
It was a bit laggy for me around the 2:40+ mark, but it sorted itself out before 3m. - Jenni
Awesome Post! Gotta love that whiteboard Friday!
This is what I needed to hear. Now I can make practical changes to my link building strategies so that my campaigns are not negatively affected. Can't wait to hear more about building quality campaigns, that are relevant and more news on how google is cracking down on the spammy content and links.
Thanks!
-Craig Out-
@rand hello I found this post interlinling in searchenginejournal i also commented there
"I think Google needs update here. If we can find spammy links pointing to our site, then we can say Google boss this is spammy link and we have not built it. In robots.txt we can say Google please dont indexed this page then some syntax should be built where we can say Google please dont indexed this I have not built backlink to this and please dont count this is our backlink."
WILL THIS IS POSSIBLE TO INVENT OR TELL GOOGLE ABOUNT SPAMMY LINKS THROUGH ROBOT.TXT
Hi Aaron,
I just viewed the March 10th edition of Whiteboard Friday and it sobered me up a little bit. I launched a new review site on March 8th and now in mid May I'm getting 500 to 800 visitors to my site a day, but I want it all now. I've been working furiously to add more unique content and videos to my site, but also looking for new ways to expand my back-links. I believe, after watching the video, that I've been pretty reckless lately and need to slow down and just focus on the content side of things. I'm new to IM after loosing my job in January and need to start showing some results, or it's back to corporate America. Rome wasn't built in a day, however.
I finally got a chance to look at this WBF, great stuff as usual.
I have a new client who's link profile looks a bit suspect to say the least, massive jumps in volumes of links for no apparent reason. We've taken down the recoprical links pages and written to the respective webmasters.
There are other pages with vast volumes of text with embedded links, that look like they've been bought, to us, these sites have no contact page or details - presumably there is not much that can be done about these links - we just have to let them be?
Rand, this is another awesome whiteboard Friday video. Thanks for putting this together and I'm looking forward to catching up with you in Sydney next month at SMX.
Hi All,
I am running a blog on Apple: www.iwebsnacks.com. A brief synopsis:
1. Started the blog on 31st Jan 2011. 2. Till date posted more than 250 articles. 3. Google has indexed about 79 pages (and shows 1920 results just below the google search bar on reaching the 79th Page) 4. Backlinks are about 18 pages (till yesterday)
Questions and Concerns:
1. Earlier google was showing 90 pages indexed (about 5 days back). Why has it been reduced? 2. There were more backlinks shown by google about 5 days back. Why has it been reduced?
Kindly check my webblog and make useful suggesstions which I should keep in mind while posting, writing comments on different sites/ blogs etc...
Also, how to increase Twitter and Facebook followers. Any suggestion(s) would be highly appreciated
Karan Mehta www.iwebsnacks.com
Great WhiteBoard Friday for our current times, I've seen a few sites go up and down in the rankings - a lot more turbulence than usual for sure. Some of it has been good, some of it not so good. The best takeaway I got here was to be proactive about maintaining that link profile, not forgetting about links that previous SEOs might have made - I hate cleaning up other peoples messes but sometimes it needs to be done. You can't sit back and not think that old links that somebody else made won't affect whatever site you are working on. Perhaps some people might be inspired to take action against the scraper sites out there but it looks like Google has taken care of some of them. The SERPs are looking quite different lately, I'm still on the fence as to how improved the results are. Improved sometimes but not always and there is still a few bugs in the system that need to be worked out before it goes worldwide.
Thanks a lot for a great for once again a great white board friday. Can you please clarify the search query to look at the links "brandname" - site:"www.brandname.com" is not returning any results. Also can you comment the links google display when you search for link:www.nameofthesite.com - are the results displayed what google consider highes quality links? or not at all? Thanks as always for your response Olivier
Great whiteboard! This is a huge issue in our industry, and we here at Hanapin get peppered with emails from these “link builders.” Personally, it is adding to my email trash folder nearly every day. In addition to some of the resources you mention, here are some more link building tools to check out-- https://www.seoboy.com/linkbuilding-tools/
Hey Rand,
Thanks for reposting my experiment, appreciate it and glad you found it interesting :)
Marcus
Great content and especially great delivery, and yes im from UK :D
Everyone says "create great content, work on it and it will be ok"... but the truth is, that there are thousands of websites and each of them has great content, check SEO blogs, you can find so many of them and each of them has great content... about same things even, just covered with different words - only sure thing is that you won't have time to read them all, and you won't find many of them even.
Truly speaking, you need good capital to be able to not only write great content (as that's the matter of spending time), but to buy links and I don't mean "buy links", I refer to directory submissions (like BOTW and other kind of).
I do think that is more than important to create great and unique content, as the other way you just can creat not so interesting one, however... in many cases simply writing great content is not enough.... but that what we have to do anyway... and be sure we have also money to promote it, other way it may take a while to go somewhere.
Great WBF, and i'm sure as for us it's sometimes not easy to achieve results we want, especially in very competitive fields.. we have to understand google and other engines that is not easy for them as well to recognize who is worth what.
I feel sorry for small and new brands now, as it's not easy for them to achieve success online, I mean they need now a lot of time to be able to pay back all the efforts... and hopefully there won't be any big competitor who invested in some scrappy sites just to link to new brands to keep them away at least for several months... a year?... and at the start of a new brand... it can be crucial. (it's when a brand/store is focused on online business only)
The other way is to spend time building up authority after creating your awesome content, and then you'll get tons of natural backlinks if you're successful. - Jenni
dissaporate?
I'm sorry - sometimes I can't help myself! It's the closest thing we have to high-speed rail in Seattle.
beam me up scotty
:-)
Thanks Rand, very important informations. We know, you are number one on the SEO Industry.
ouch Burn! I'm watching this from London's East End (where I can get you a real good deal on pie, mash, eels and links).
So, I should buy dodgy links only to new competitors to knock them out of the rankings then?
S
Left a reply to another, similar comment on this above. Basically - no, don't do it. Not only is it very unlikely to work (Google's shockingly good at figuring out when the site is the culprit vs. a third party), and evil (if there's any karma, this will come back to bite you), but it's a useless waste of time compared to working on building up your own site and making your inbound marketing, content and user experience rock.
Dont burn your competitor, it's evil and karma will come back to haunt you... Got it Rand!!!Thanks!!!
Evil only matters to those of us with business ethics.
Seems like when Google closes one door to underhanded tactics, they open another.
Not only is it very unlikely to work (Google's shockingly good at figuring out when the site is the culprit vs. a third party) - if anyone could give me any indication of how this would be possible, then I be more inclined to believe it. I have not seen a single argument anywhere on how Google would know who is building spammy links to new domains and then know who to punish and who not to punish.
but it's a useless waste of time compared to working on building up your own site and making your i rock. - vs slinging a few hundred £s across to some folks who automate it? That seems a hell of a lot less work than inbound marketing, content and user experience
Im lucky enough not to have to bother with crap like this but if we say "dont do the bad stuff" then we need to provide the science behind the "why not" and not just personal and moral beliefs - half the argument is built on science but the other half of the argument is built on belief and magic
If karma isn't scientific enough for you, call it Newton's 3rd law of motion.
Well, this karmic belief is actually backed by science which has logic and proof.
Excellent comparision to the Newton's third law of action and reaction.
I haven't signed for a pro account to get science but seo. seo atm, with Google leading, isn't just about science. I prefer getting an advice from the seomoz people than having them prooving a bunch of non useful things such like that one. If you think they aren't right or that you're more right than them, please help us all, do the test/s and talk about "crap".
I did it myself, just like he states in the video, some months ago: and the results are pretty the same as described by Rand, anyway this wasn't a new site and didn't get much penalization to be honest (just for a few days) but in the long run, those $ were lost bucks. And I'm talking about 1k backlinks, can't imagine the 10k pointing to a new new site.
So... those are my 2 cents
Great WBF. Quality links are always better than quantity. Don't forget Google is watching you! ;)
You are totally right! I look at the links from everyone who ranks above me. I noticed they are directory driven backlinks and many of them have tons of links coming in from only a few URLs. I started submitting to the same directories with the right Anchor Text and I feel that if I continue to sumbit my site to these spammy directories, ny client's site will get Google Wacked. So today we paid the $299 for Yahoo! Directory and $300 for a local Chamber of Commerce. We spend $400+ for the BBB.org link. Hopefully these links make offset the spammy directory submissions I did last week! lol
Cisco
Interesting i have the same experien ce but for the moment i didn't invest on yahoo directory or local directory because according to me that wont help us to rank well on google.fr. But let me know if you get some good results by your current tactic
Those have been very solid links in my experience. Well worth the investment.
So basicly i spam my competition with xrumer and other spammy links and he gets penalized?
Nope! Watch the rest of the video. I talked specifically about why this tactic will almost never work (and, besides that, it's evil and wrong - and besides that, it's a horrific waste of time + resources to take down competitors vs. building yourself up).
I can confirm that massive XRumer links pointed to a competitor's already-ranking site will have little to no negative impact on their rankings. Don't ask me how I know that.
Sure an established authority website wont notice it prob. but there is no reason why you could not build links in a negative way to newer and not so strong websites this way.
If you can drop your own website in a test you can drop other websites.
I agree it is a waste of resources and also nothing a nice SEO would do but its a bit strange when you say it is not possible when you show it in your video. :)
ROFL!
Good answer and reply! Why people spend their time doing this kind of stealth reverse seo action amazes me. Its kinda analogous to click fraud. Competitor X hires a Turk to click Competitor Y goog ads and use up his daily budget and bam he's out of the game. BTW, this was one of the better exlpanaitions of how Panda / Farmer algos are rolling out. Strong work!
So, what if somenone (possibly a competitor) does these bad things to my site thinking that these get my site penalized?
I had written this earlier also in one of the past comments and I know it sounds boring but I am still of the opinion that the term 'link building' itself is an incorrect term. Links do not have to be built but they should get built naturally in the process as your website starts getting a wider web presence and preference. The inbound links are something that your website earns by virtue of the quality foot prints it creates on the web as you reach out to more and more people by being focused on the valuable services and information offered by your website.
When it comes to inbound links the focus should be on how to earn every link to your site as a result of unique, quality content and information on your site. CONTENT is still the uncrowned king of the web since the first website went online and shall always remain inspite of millions websites coming on the web regularly.
Create a whole ambience and atmosphere around your website which shall make websites link to the site you want. In a way ensuring that you don’t have to run after links but they instead walk up to your site and acheive the true purpose of the PageRank Technology by Google. I think that it is the responsibility of every web developer, SEO and any one even remotely related to uploading and affecting the content on the web to add value to it in its own little way.
I think with this approach no one even needs to give a second thought to link based penalties as you will never be at the receiving end when Google decides to go on a penalizing or a cleaning the SERPs spree.
I still believe link-building is the correct term, but is usually misinterpreted to assume that it always has to be pro-active, direct and aggressive. Think of "link-building" as analogous to "relationship-building" and it makes a lot of sense. Always think about whether it makes sense offline. If it does, then it probably makes sense online.
Don't tell people you are funny and interesting - BE funny and interesting.
Don't interrupt and hijack conversations (forums etc) - Contribute to them and don't talk about yourself.
Give and you shall receive - Reference and recommend others. What goes around comes around and you should start to get the recommendations (links) yourself.
I realise that as an SEO you know this. But thinking of 'link-building' as always being asking for links, or manually building one link at a time is the wrong interpretation.
Yes, in a way you are right but usually whenever people discuss about building links they refer to quick and easy methods of how to attain them.
Inbound marketers who work on these wrong methods or as how Rand puts it getting links from dodgy neighbourhoods go against the whole concept of PageRank and that is what is actually affecting the reputation of the SEO industry.
But I guess you are right it is not the term but the thought and the correct perspective behind it that is important.
Hi Rand
One of my best WBF in a while!
Really interesting post especially with all the hype of Google Panda Update in past weeks.
Definitely good information. There was a lot of scare regarding the panda update, fortunately there weren't a lot of spammy inbound links, and I've always acquired new links a few at a time.
Sounds like a great way to rank your Charlie Sheen site to make some $$$ during the madness ;-)
J/K... or am I?
For me the timing of this white board friday was perfect! Just this morning I had to review a website which lost traffic overnight due to a sudden spike in crappy links.
Very well produced video. Congratulations and thank you
So what about established sites.... how much can they get away with?
Jean Madden
Terrific WBF. Great topic, lots of useful info. I'm a newbie to link-building and it was great to get info like this. I particularly liked Rand's discussion of asking yourself why your site deserves to rank high. (I know many times I've answered this by saying "because I'm managing the site." :) This will help me improve.
How important is the already built up trust? Is there a negative trust through bad links?
The short spike in traffic due to "dodgy" link building is never worth the long term pain and suffering.You might get away with it for a while (Google's got a lot to do), but sooner or later it is going to catch up with your and you're even lower than square one. Good SEO takes time! There is no way around it.
As much as this article shows that google can identify sites with spammy links , it shows that these sites may have their traffic peaks for couple of weeks. Basically it means doorways still work, which is a bad thing, since google said they were fighthing it. So, situation is really the same as it was.
Great Content - I think We all have this fear we have links that will haunt us one day
I really appreciated the idea of tracing big brand names in that industry, that's my take-away tip from today, definitely worth a read (couldn't listen as my wife was listening to the sad news on Japan).
Thanks for sharing, really helpful.