After last week's Whiteboard Friday on the penalties paid links can incur, I got several questions about whether paid/spammy links could be used as a weapon to potentially harm someone else's rankings. In this post, I'll walk through why this is rarely the case, how you can defend yourself from potential scenarios and why this isn't a great tactic to employ against your competitors.
Can Paid Links Be Used as Weapons in the SERPs?
The short answer is "almost never." But, as is typical in the SEO world, there's a lot more in the long version.
In general, it's very, very hard to bring down a white hat site/page ranking well in the search results. Although Google isn't perfect at catching spam (e.g. our recent video featuring the success of some very obvious paid links in a well known network), they seem to be surprisingly excellent (almost prescient) at detecting the intent of links. My suspicion is that sites who buy links to prop up their own rankings have very different patterns than those who have competitors buying links to them. These patterns exist on the sites themselves, in other sites registered to the owners, in link footprints and in usage/search behavior.
It could, in fact, be that the "penalties" many SEOs often ascribe to paid links are in fact the result of a much more sophisticated analysis by Google looking at multiple aspects of a site's presence before making a determination of the link intent. Given that, in nearly 10 years of SEO, I've only heard of two reasonably verifiable instances of "Google-bowling" (the process of pointing bad links at a site or page to hurt it's rankings) working, my guess is that Google's webspam team has developed some very impressive methods here.
Many SEOs have also suggested that a certain "bar of trust" can be achieved in Google, after which, negative links may be devalued, but likely don't cause penalties or rankings drops. This makes a lot of sense to me (though it's nearly impossible to prove), since "Google-bowling" is largely defeated and even good sites who stray into black/gray hat link building will simply find themselves wasting money, rather than being removed from the results (which could, for many popular brands/sites, cause a loss of relevance in the results for users).
Thus, if you are trying to wield paid links as a weapon against your ranking competitors, it's far more likely to work against the new(ish) site ranking #65 for your keywords rather than those who've earned their way to the top spots with white hat techniques.
Defending Yourself from Potential Link Attacks
Have you recently broken the heart of a black hat link broker's son or daughter? Stepped on a link farmer's superhero cape? Talked smack about a nefarious panelist at an SEO conference not realizing they were just around the corner? The best defense, in this case, is a good defense (don't go buying and renting links to others; you're only enriching the spammers).
Many, many SEOs and webmasters worry a tremendous amount about spammy links pointing to their sites and pages. By and large, this isn't a concern and it happens to every site on the web. Just look at some of the spamtastic links that point to SEOmoz (via this Yahoo! query):
If you see a collection of scraper sites filled with pharmaceutical, financial, legal, real estate and other questionable links with surprisingly well-optimized anchor text appearing in Google Alerts or your 24-hour reputation monitoring queries (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?as_q=seomoz&as_qdr=d&num=100 - which queries Google for all pages mentioning "seomoz" in the past 24 hours) don't panic. If you exist on the web, you're going to attract these types of links and the search engines will not punish you for it, even if you're a relatively new, untrusted site.
However, if you start acquiring links that look an awful lot like they're part of an intentional, paid link network (great anchor text, pointing to internal pages on the site, coming from footers and sidebars that contain other irrelevant, anchor-text rich links), there may be some cause for concern. Your best course of action is to submit a spam report to Google from your own, verified, Webmaster Tools account, noting that you have nothing to do with the links and want to make sure Google doesn't think you've created, endorsed or paid for them.
This action is rarely necessary or worthwhile, but if you're highly concerned about competitive conduct, it's not a bad route to take. Of course, you'll want to make sure you don't actually engage in any black/gray hat activity yourself or it could trigger the wrong kind of review by a webspam team member.
Should I Buy Links to Push Down My Competitors?
Not unless you feel the link brokers of the world are more worthy than your favorite charity.
Seriously, the chances you'll have a negative impact are far lower than the changes you'll actually help (again, I refer back to our paid link WB Friday experiment in which the obvious link network had positive effects, even on the brand new site). The money is far better off spent on editorial content, public relations, social media campaigns and white hat SEO efforts for your own stite. Bringing someone else down may seem temporarily, emotionally satisfying, but it's the wrong way to approach SEO (and life in general, if I may be so bold).
Looking forward to the discussion in the comments and happy to talk through the filtration processes and failsafes (or at least, my speculation) Google may employ.
p.s. The new Beginner's Guide to SEO has more on understanding + recovering from search spam penalties.
A very timely post indeed following my rant the other day on the benefits of paid links (I responded further down that post to this topic as a matter of fact.).
So: pointing spammy links at websites is something that I have done a great deal of testing on, to both my own "throwaway" domains, and random inner pages on top domains (wiki etc).
The key is all about two things:
1) existing link profile
2) domain trust factors.
Lets say for example, you own "Site A" which is a box-fresh domain with not a huge amount of content, maybe 10 pages or so, with very few inbound links. If you were to point a few hundred links from something like tnx or tla at it, it would more likely than not disappear from the serps within a few weeks. (not rank for its own domain name etc., ie. sitewide penalty). The same goes for if you buy footer links from a half dozen sites, with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages, with spammy looking keyword driven (and not the keywords that appear in your domain name) anchor texts. Again, site goes pooooffff..... and gone from the serps.
If however you own "Site B" which has existed a few years, has a few hundred pages of unique content, and has thousands or tens of thousands of links... to replicate the same disappearing act you would then need to multiply significantly the amount of spam links that you sent to it, to the hundreds of thousands to millions (we are rapidly getting to the stage where this is going to cost a fortune, and indeed you would be much, much better off investing that in your own site.
Now lets look at "Site C", which has 5+ years of history, hundreds of thousands of links, and tens of thousands of pages of unique content. You would in theory need to send, millions of bad links to that to have an impact. You could alternatively take that amount of money, and have a nice life somewhere in south america. I know I would.
So: as long as you already have a website with both unique content and lots of good links, its not really an issue (unless you really p1ss some black hatter off ofcourse!)
*CAVEAT - it is possible to nuke inner pages for certain keyword terms with a much lower amount of spam links, but they do come back when those links expire.
MOGmartin.
A further footnote: I had lunch with a friend yesterday at google - when I was in reception he came down and jokingly said:
"did you see those alarms go off? Thats what happens when a black-hatter comes into the building".
He did ofcourse mean it as a joke, I would never, ever do anything remotely black.
Just grey.
Is this a typo?
If you were to point a few hundred links from something like tnx or tla at it, it would more likely than not disappear from the serps within a few weeks. (not rank for its own domain name etc., ie. sitewide penalty).
nope, not a typo - perhaps its a british specific saying though:
Q:
What is the meaning of "more likely than not"?
A:
Just like it sounds - It is more likely to happen than it is to not happen ; It has a better than 50/50 chance of happening
...Source
SO: it is more than 50% likely that these links will negatively impact the serps for that domain.
hope thats clear? I go on a bit sometimes ;-)
Nevermind...lol.
It's amazing how much more dangerous (anecdotally, at least) any gray- or black-hat tactic is for a brand new sites. If you have no link profile and no history, I've found it's pretty easy to get in trouble. Once you're established and have some trust, then you can get a way with a whole lot more.
yep - good call - established sites are able to get away with a lot more, the trick is not only getting away with it, but using it wisely for beneficial results.
To my mind, the patterns point is one of the most important in this post. Someone would have a tough time bringing down a site whose entire backlink profile looks clean. We already know that Google is brilliant at analysing backlink profiles for optimisation it finds undesirable; a big red flag on an otherwise pristine domain would, to me, warrant a look from a member of webspam, who'd in turn take no time at all to identify the bad links' source and note that the activity is entirely uncharacteristic.
Individual circumstances would vary and sometimes a person or a computer will get it wrong, but it seems to me that patterns and footprints are sites' biggest safe-guard.
Where I see this working best is in SERPs that are already hyper-competitive and often err on the side of grey to begin with. It won't work on SEOmoz.org, but if you're a well-ranked gambling affiliate? I'd be a bit more concerned if I saw horrible link networks swarming to my site.
Completely agreed on patterns. When people say "There's no way Google could write an algorithm to detect paid links!", I think they almost always mean individual paid links.
If we meet up for a drink, you mention that you saw one of my blog posts and liked it, and I say "Hey, if you link to it, I'll buy the next 3 rounds," Google will never be able to detect that transaction (unless Matt Cutts is sitting on the stool behind me). If you collect dozens of paid links from sites that are irrelevant, cross-topic, low-quality, and in "bad" neighborhoods, it's really not that hard to tell.
I'm amazed how often I can detect a paid link in less than 60 seconds on Q&A. Sure, I'm a human, but I don't have the benefit of seeing the entire link-graph simultaneously (or the processing power to digest that data). Google can do a lot with link profiling.
When I first read "If we meet up for a drink", I thought your analogy was going to be "... and you ordered something completely different from the last thirty times we'd drunk together", and you'd make some comparison between drinking habits and the patterns seen in spammy backlink profiles.
I think a spam drink would be a Jaeger bomb. A whitehat drink would be Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.
Anyhow, comment thread: as you were.
I think you need to write that blog post now :) The number of SEO stories that could start with "If we meet up for a drink..." is infinite, I suspect.
I think the issue here is that it is difficult for us to determine what is require to push a website over the edge.
Let's say that you have a website that is already buying links and has a disproportionately high MozRank per Anchor for the specific keyword you are going after (Perhaps 75% of inbound links use the exact anchor text). Buying a handful of very high PR (think a handful of PR7+) paid links with exact anchor text can shove them over the edge.
However, a site that has acquired its rankings naturally will take far more links over a long, sustained period of time to be affected.
It is near impossible to prove, but there are plenty of us out there who are certain at one point or another we google bowled ourselves with paid links. If you can do it to yourself, you can do it to a competitor.
I cant believe it was still available!
www.spamisthenewblack.info
Now to just "borrow" some content and we can all start building spammy links .
:)
Do it, lets see if it will affect my competitors er... I mean increase my sites rankings.
I have a newsflash for all you theorists, spammy link strategies do, and can, work against white hat websites and, no, Gogle does not catch all of it. Our site which was ranked in the top 5 for most major keywords disappeared to page 7 and 8 of Google.
I use a professional SEO team of developers - i.e. guys who have CS degrees. They found over 2,000 spam links pointing to our site and yes we lost significant rank and it did much financial harm. This is no theory we are living it right now in 2012.
We are submitting a reconsideration letter to Google but not until we have spent hundreds of man hours removing all the spammy links.
How does this get under Google's radar? Spammy black and grey hat software's, like Senuke, get used and these guys know just how many links per day they can get away with. Think you are not vulnerable - guess again.
This has already cost our site in excess of $30,000 in just a little over a week in lost sales due to rank cratering and no it is not bouncing right back up.
This is a real world and painful experience talking here.
I believe that one of the major changes in Panda, that appears to have gone relatively unnoticed is that spam links, rather than being discredited are now doing tremendous harm.
I too am the victim of spam links, its cost us significantly. We're losing about $5,000 a month.
To test this thoery, I took a website that was doing quite well, paid for 150 spammy links (cost me $50) and within days the website was gone.
This is utter nonsense and Google need to re-evaluate the decision, as it's ruining lives.
I agree with you buddy. I know that a lot of people would just say, "ohhh, but it can be so many other things than just the links!!!" and that's true, but it's ignoring the fact that it is not only likely that it's the links, but it is extremely likely that it is..
We were doing pretty well (as you know because you read & answered my question that I posted right after Penguin!), but then all of a sudden the rankings started dropping post penguin.
In my situation it was also pretty likely that it was the links that were causing it. (you see the discussion here)
What I keep discussing with my buddy that introduced me to SEO is that Google needs to man up and start being more up front with what they want.
Our website is a comany website, and we actually sell products and customers are actually looking for us.
We were just doing what a lot of people that do SEO seemed to think they should do (based on their results with Google)
It seems like nonsense to me too, especially to an extent.
I mean shouldn't it be more common knowledge to just not order spammy links and cost less than thousands of dollars per month to learn that fact?
Fantastic post and much closer to home than some previous ones discussing this topic. As far as I've been able to surmise google is of the policy "better to let 10 slip through than penalize one unfairly". As a result when google does sniff out a bad link, more often than not it is devalued rather than penalized at the linked-to site level. This is why parasite hosting is still so effective. Sure a large portion of those angela/paul/joefinn garbage backlinks are going to get devalued.. but some wont and in mass they will end up having a positive impact more often then not.
Most any grey-hatter worth his salt wouldn't be too dishonest if he said "I learned most of what I know about linkbuilding from viagra". It's far more damaging for you to link out to a bad neighborhood than to be linked to FROM a bad neighborhood. The important thing to consider is of course the value of your time. If you know that a large portion of spammy links will be devalued (even if your site is not penalized) is the juice worth the squeeze? If you can find a way to reduce your effort and time spent then maybe... if not? Stick to whitehat.
P.S. Its always far easier and more cost effective to create high-impact links than it is to buy them.. even in a blackhat world. Remember time is money.. if it costs you less time than money to create the link.. then buying it is a waste.
P.P.S.S. Ripoff Reports + high-volume link spam are far more damaging to competitors than google bowling. If they are spending half of their SEO budget on reputation management, it means your job just got easier. Not suggesting any of you do this of course :P Also if you are very evil you could find a way to "help" your competitor link out to bad sites... or help them find their way out of passing the "moderate" filter (default setting) in google. Again.. not suggesting you actually do this.
"Have you recently broken the heart of a black hat link broker's son or daughter? Stepped on a link farmer's superhero cape?"
They get to wear capes... I am in the wrong side of this business. ;-)
I disagree. Spammy links can downrank a site. Our site is 10 years old and has maintained a top 10 listing for 8+ years. 30 days ago we noted over 1K links from a single site. We looked at it and figured it to be a new directory just picked up. Then last week our site was gone. It seems the spammy links pointed to the non-www root of our site. Even though we have been meticulous in our internal linking and have had a 301 redirect in place since 2002, the attack was effective. Hopefully only temporarily. We have since set the preferred site setting in Webmaster Central, but we have no idea when or if we’ll get our ranking back.The linking actions of another site directly affected ours.Does notifying Google of these spammy links really help?
SaraJaymes, thank you for this information. I was abcolutely shure, that old sites can not be damaged by spam attack. It is new information for me.
Sara you are right. I have proof - living painful proof
There is no doubt that competitors or SEO firms hired by competitors are hurting sites that break through to page 1. I've seen it happen first hand over the past month. With careful work, a site was modified along with anchor text to achieve page 1 status.
Almost immediately, the blog for that site started to fill up with dozens of pingbacks to spam related viagra sites and other garbage. In addition, checking the server logs showed a ton of traffic coming from hundreds of new spam related sites.
Here are only a small number of sites the attackers used:
https://www.watchau.comhttps://www.glamour-watch.comhttps://www.replicahandbagsite.comhttps://www.wowgoldwizard.comhttps://www.dinovedo.comhttps://www.ecyclingday.comhttps://partyopedia.comhttps://www.seomarketingservicesonline.comhttps://www.thisisitfitness.comhttps://www.gasmall.comhttps://www.glamour-watches.comhttps://www.herve-leger-sale.orghttps://makeupsuppliers.bravehost.comhttps://www.farmcashguide.comhttps://www.glamoursell.comhttps://www.helenamatchmaker.comhttps://plasticgardengnomes.nethttps://www.ecwfunds.comhttps://www.lightyearsofwar.comhttps://www.cladgenius.comhttps://www.clutterpros.nethttps://www.glamourseller.comhttps://www.khronikcabaret.comhttps://gardencanopies.org/https://www.gig-harborford.com
Shortly after the attacks, the site in question bounced off of page 1 back to the middle of page 2. I have watched this happen 3 times so far over a month. The attacks always begin as soon as Page 1 status is obtained and taper off almost immediately after the site drops away.
We have some reports in with Google to see if anything can be done on their end to combat.
Amen brother - you have got that exactly correct.
Hi, How Can I prevent this problem? tell me please.........
I was number 2 for the most competitive search in my niche. The person at number 1 has just build spammy links from as much as 1000 domains in the past 4 days and now I am down at number 5 ranking there with another page (home page penalised). Some of the links say "viagra" etc... but a lot also have relevant keywords to my niche including the keyword I was #2 for. So.... what do you say to that?
Thanks for the post. Another know-it-all bozo myth debunked.
Hey Rand, competitor bought for me link again.... and it work. They shutdown our first webstore, and now, after we changed domain, they start buying new links. How i can notify google for these links? How i can protect? Is it no fair.
Thank you for your post, i do not rent links like my competitors. All the number N.1 ranking buys and rent links a lot. Also they have setup satellites where they exchange links pointing back with the exchanged link to their sites. It seems never mind, white, grey or black, if the domain is old and strong, and get trust, they can use risk tecnics.
good read, thanks
Rand,
quick unrelated question...what program do you use for your graphics? They are always very nice
Thanks Rand for the heads up.
Link building is most effective using blogs, tweets and fresh content..this is true path to success...
Buying links is the fast buck, quick fix way to success but you may be walking on thin ice with killer sharks beneath...so don't risk it!
Rand, Great piece and I think this article is a great segue into another post on brand management. When discussing how to push down the "Company Sucks" type results in a SERP "the Company" always questsions whether they can just pay for obvious links to the negative press URLs. This post obviously suggests that it won't work, but would be interested in your take on other best practices in this area. (ie. subdomain creation and social media sites + interlinking, etc.)
My feeling has always been that it would be foolish to punish a website for bad, one-way inbound links because it is something that inherently can't be controlled by the website owner. If not... this would be an excellent way for competitors and Black Hats to attack unsuspecting victims.
Rather, I think Google would simply disregard these links out of hand. So, buying such links wouldn't hurt you, but would certainly be a waste of time and money. Bad reciprocal links on the other hand... ;-)
I've always found it helpful to try to think "What would Google do... and why would they do it?"
It really seems like the article is saying that if you have been on the web for a long time and your site is trusted then getting a few paid links is ok as Google trusts you and the fact that the majority of your links are organic.
I believe that engaging in negative SEO tactics can also leave you potentially vulnerable to civil and possibly even criminal lawsuits should the victim figure out who you are and what you've done. Intentionally sabotaging a competitor's business through SEO could be seen as similar to hacking someone's website or vandalizing their storefront.
Very difficult and expensive to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Think about what you would need to present to the court:
1.) Proof that the person actually created the links
2.) Proof that those links alone actually hurt the rankings
The prosecution would call 1 expert witness (SEO) and the defense would call another to dispute the charges. The judge would yawn at SEO.
Google is killing it self. Just in case some one build spam links for my site i get penalize?! however, I can get rid of it if i work a lot on recovery process which means consuption of time, money and effort. I think Google lost it's mind it meant to be Search engine before 2009 later on became web spam fighter by the grace of MATT CUTTs. If same trend continues long time that can be a threat to Google popularity.
You sound like a staunch black hat SEO who promotes low quality content for better rankings and more clicks!
If you are a true SEO who practices according to its best practices then you would certainly realize that Google is helping us to come to the top and only penalizing those who dont offer anything good to the user
What about negative link growth?By that I mean lots of links pointed to a competitor, wait until they are crawled and indexed and then, at a period down the line, all pulled together en masse.
I welcome your views on this specific aspect of paid links hurting a competito.
Cheers
Jason
this is a very good--and detailed--explanation. many thanks!
I've always wondered about this. Thanks for the post and the new vocab word.
A useful post indeed.This goes against what Matt always says that "links to your websites can't hurt you" which it appears it does to many including one of my clients.
Question is that how long to wait before a filter or penalty on a specific anchor text is removed?
Would you be interested in sharing the verifiable instances of google bowling with us? I would be keen to havea read, I just find that kind of thing so interesting?
Thanks
idiot as a search returning georgebush as the result. thats the best example.
I have to disagree here. Paid/spammy links can be used as weapon to downrank competition. Now how many links will be required to sabotage ranking depends upon the current domain authority and spam mass of the competitor's site. New and less authoritative sites can be taken down with just few hundreds spammy links. Old and more authroitative sites may require several thousand or even million spam links. The point is no site is immune from such type of deliberate downranking. However it is not commercially viable to spend money in downranking the competiton. I mean how many competitors one can downrank. If one will go, another will come. Better way is to spend money on links to push ones own rankings. And even better, is to spend money in developing a top notch website.
Do you have some examples where you've seen this happen and succeed long-term? One thing I'd expect is that even if Google gets it wrong and penalises a site, a reconsideration request and spam report from the site's owner should take care of it (unless the webmaster has taken part in other unrelated spammy tactics, at which point reporting an attack won't help).
There are no long term gains in the black hat world. Regarding example, the best one is on this blog itself: Whiteboard Friday on the penalties paid links can incur. Some friends of seomoz who run a fairly well established site vanished from Google. Y? Becuase they bought 4 paid links. Any person could have bought those 4 links on their behalf. Regarding reconsideration request, Google is not so lenient with new and low authority sites. So repercussions can be dreadful for them.
I saw the post; I asked if you had any examples as it sounded as though you had experience of seeing this work and work for more than a short period. That was just my assumption, so I apologise if I read that incorrectly. I've personally seen it attempted, but thwarted, when the owners caught wind of the activity. Can't say exactly what would have happened if they'd not noticed it.
Hi Jane,
I have made this work, moved a certain (inner) page down from 2nd for a specific search term to 11th.
It happened within a week of sending the links, and returned to 2nd a few days after removing the links (a month after the test began).
Naturally, I would rather not share the url or search term publicly...
;-)
MOGmartin
What I get from this interesting post, and the replies to it, is that a big fish in a small pond would take most of the pond life to bring it down ... a small fish however, is fair game to all ... while white whales who live in the ocean are untouchable, even by a nefarious SEO Captain Ahab.
So build your site with unique content, all white hat methods, which builds that 'bar of trust' and makes you a big fish ... So Rand, does this mean that content is ultimately 'king' after all, trumping SEO, or just particulalrly SEO of the worst kind? Something to think about in 'that' debate.
Thanks for clearing that question up, the replies to your video did make me wonder. While the replies to this post also provide food for thought, "who knew".
There are a lot of locally high ranking sites that maintain the number one spot with a low-link backlink profile (500 or less as reported by Yahoo!) - I would have to believe those sites would be vulnerable to this type of technique.
That said, I am still not convinced that there is any specific penalty put in place to deal with paid links on a mass or automatic way. I think Google goes after certain niches or a few highly visible sites to make a point every once in a while.
I also don't really agree with this statement:
My suspicion is that sites who buy links to prop up their own rankings have very different patterns than those who have competitors buying links to them
If a company all the sudden decided to hire an overseas link-seller to get them a million high quality links for $39.99 then the pattern might look similar to a competitor hiring the same person to attempt to knock them out of the rankings.
Thank for the great reassuring post,
One of our sites has spammy links to it, which have been acquired before my days in the company, and optimised consistently for wrong keyword.
They been there for more then a year before I came on board and although I did try to remove some of them I did not get to all of them as by this time site owners were not responding.
So according to this article I should not try any further?
Can anybody please tell if you need to install special software to watch Videos posted on SEOMOZ blog. I can not watch any videos. Recent one I tried was white Friday. Instead I just see black space instead of video player.Or where is support email id so that I can get in touch with?
You're going to need Adobe flash player in order to view the videos. Make sure your browser supports flash and it is correctly installed on the browser. On some browsers flash is now updated within the browser itself. Feel free to pm me if you have any more questions :)
Very useful post. This subject isn't talked about much, but its always good to have this in the back of your mind if your site loses ranks quickly for some reason.
Nice post. But I have used your tools to see that no.1 ranking sites do use different tactics to avoid getting caught by Google algorithms and stay on the top.
Keep up the good work.
I agree with everyone else who is impressed with this response to the Whiteboard Friday discussion...thanks for listening!
I'm a stickler for consistency, so I'll repeat what I said at the end of the Whiteboard Friday discussion...I know Google HATES paid links, but one of the recommended first steps for SEOs in the community when kickstarting a new site is...
to buy links.
So if I'm going to shell out to Yahoo and Joeant and other directories (of less and less value)...when do I stop? When does Google decide the financial transaction is a problem?
It would seem to me that the bigger threat is paid non-spammy links. I find them to be more offensive. Spam is spam, but I work hard to get a mention on a magazine's website...I don't want to see someone simply shell out money for it.
I always thought the biggest problem was purely MFA (made for adsense) websites that artificially jack-up advertising prices and clog up the web.
I think that to talk about directories is a discussion that can never end.
Yes, they are paid links in their nature... but what you pay is that the directory will consider the opportunity to add your site in its lists, not the inclusion in the lists.
That is the big difference... because the other paid links are:
1) or an ad link that should be signed as no follow accordingly to Google recomendations (that's the case of many banners)
2) or a link that is falsely put as an editorial endorsement.
The problem is somehow similar to what happened in the offline press, where articles about certain products were masked infomercial... since legislation came and all those kind of article were signed as "Infomercial" by law. Or the same in the Tv media.
Finally, in my opinion, the presence of paid links is due to a lack of Internet legislation in this sense.Or due the many shadow points the actual "legislation" (based on suggested best practices) has. Infact, returning to directories, I agree with you: apart a few number of them, many directory seems that are there mimetizing an upper editorial intent, but really looking at the money they can gain from websites.
Google's policy has always been that some directories are different because they have editorial review. Pay-for-review is different than Pay-for-play, in their view. You can agree or disagree, of course, and there's no question that big brands (like Yahoo and BotW) get preferential treatment, but there is some logic to the idea of editorial review as a quality signal. I've certainly seen good directories and bad ones.
I have to say that I'm finding these discussions and postings getting more and more interesting by the day, precisely because they are theoretical and open to debate.
We're certainly of the view that sites can achieve a "bar of trust" and become relatively immune to the effects of poor quality links. However, we've also found that anything other than top quality links to these sites seem to be almost valueless, meaning 'standard' link building activities can achieve very little.
We also work with a couple of clients whose content is scraped and republished constantly and so far we haven't seen any confusion on Google's part, nor have we seen any penalties being applied. It's frustrating but perhaps also flattering that the content should be so good other webmasters want to copy it.
Coming back to your other post, where we are particularly concerned is the impact of pure paid links, which we see in pretty much every sector we work in. Just the other day in fact I was on another SEO firms' site and they were boasting about their network of 'thousands' of topic-based sites. It shouldn't work, but it does, no doubt about it.
How can I use Disavow link in google webmaster tool for my new website ALDictionary. I have afraid in my mind to use this disavow tool. [link removed by editor]
Finally the post i was expecting. Thank you tons Rand :)
Good post - thanks. It matches pretty much what I've seen. I've audited the work of other agencies, and some have created masses of visibly spammy links. The best impact I've found is they have is that for a few weeks to a few months, there's some weight applied to the site for that anchor text, and the keyword drives some traffic - then it dries up. But there's no penalty to site, unless the link profile massively overwhelms the "normal" distribution.
I got worried when one client with a few thousand links to the home page, was suddenly found to have ten thousand plus links to an inner page, with a unique capitalisation - which affected the sitelink capitalisation. I got those links taken down, ASAP. If sitelinks are affected, then Google's paying attention to the links... and I didn't want anything negative to accrue when Google came to wonder at the strange link profile. That client is no longer using the agency that was daft enough to have created the mess.
And, yes, I've pulled the trigger, on a few competitor sites that had a handful of legit links (DMOZ/Yahoo, etc), but were ranking highly on clearly engineered spammy links. And they've vanished from listings. :)
Unless the link profile is really clearly abnormal, I'm not worried by even a relatively high quantity of rubbish, if the site is otherwise well linked. I'd get worried, if the links kept being formed. I believe I have a client where Google may be applying a "notch filter", selectively ignoring a specific keyword/anchor text, because it was persistently spammed by that clients' agencies for a long time - years.
Great post! A good follow-up to the WB last Friday.
Agreed! :)
Ok, I defo won't be buying paid links.
Thanks for showing us the light.
Love the way you had to do four experiments in detail to show how effective paid links are, but then pull the rug from under us saying "This is evil, don't do it!" Nice one. HAHA!!
Very nice post Rand.
It is very hard to crash any website who have a rank 4 or 5 with white-hat tactics.
And any bad website with a black-hat tactics and rank 4-5, its not possible to stay a long time on a white list of google, it will be penalized 100%.
You can contact the hosting-provider, domain registrar, etc..
But i give a small one tipp:
What i do if somebody spamm my website.
a) How i work?!
- I have always 4 websites, one its main website, and another 4 are nothing, write sometimes about technology etc..
now:
1.) Spammer are crashing my rank, and the first what i do its:
- report to domain registrar
- report to hosting provider
If not accept?! Then???
2. I contact this Spammer, and i tell him:
a) Hello sir, i see that you have a very good website, and my website Kevin505050.com need some juice. This outband links what you have configured on your website, are helping a very good website with a rank 5 or 6, and my website have a rank only 1 or 0, please help me to increase my rank, i pay you if you put my anchor on your website.
Then i give him, 3 urls with different anchors.
this is a small tipp, but can find 100 possibilities to stop spamming.
But if you have any problem, please write here on the best seo website seomoz, then we help you!
What a great post and what great comments following.
As far as it was my experience since now, I cannot but confirm that in case of trusted Sites with an already established history, the fact to have been "attacked" by a small % of spammy links is not affecting the overall rankings and seems that Google is quite able to detect them as an anomaly, as if it were assuming is something that will be corrected in the future.
But things can be different in case the % of the spammy links is getting higher, closer or above the 50% of the link profile of a website.
That can explain also the theory that the bigger the link profile is the hardest a spammy link attack can sink a website, and - on the contrary - that if the link profile is small, therefore is easier that the website suffering the attack can be penalized.
What to do?
Obviously to ask for a Google revision is the start, then the suggestion to ask to the Hosting Company and the Registries (and why not ICANN itself if the case is really an harsh one) to act in your defence can be useful. And, obviously, clean the code (if the attack is from both sides > hacking and link spamming), counter attack with a large scale white hat link campaign using especially viral content.
About what said by Conner, I think that sometimes we confuse Great Content with Great Number of Links. The two are no so connected. What connects them is our job... link building (with every legit tactic) spreading the news of the existence of that great content is there in our site.
The most important is to follow the basic of link building:
blank_pageYou can sometimes get maybe thousands of links with a sensational blog post or some great newly created website. For example if that did hurt your SERPs, OSE would get penalized after it launched :)
You are right... link baiting are surely one of best tactics and to have a site like Opensiteexplorer.org is equal to have a link magnet. But this two examples are usually in the line of my last point (there's something more viral than link baiting?) and normally have a great diversity of anchor text. OSE, for instance is linked with almost 93 different anchor text (seen using OSE itself).