Advice and Confessions from a Reformed Link Network Spammer
There was only one time when link building was the easiest, least challenging part of my SEO work. I was a link network spammer, relying upon services with names like "blog networks" and "article networks." These services allow paid subscribers to post their content to a network of sites for the sole purpose of building links. Because the sites aren't meant to be read by people, many networks accept and actively encourage spun content. The resultant content quality is absolutely horrific.
I pulled this example from an active blog network site. "Sodium Body of water Town" is spun garbagese for "Salt Lake City."
Using blog networks, I had multiple sites penalized, re-included, and, once I had learned the ropes, I even had a few that gained rankings and escaped unharmed. I ultimately gave up my spam-content ways because it became clear that it was not an effective long-term strategy. The writing was on the wall - Google was getting smarter, and I was at risk of losing any time I invested.
And the writing was, and still is, on the wall. Google rolled out Panda, which dealt a heavy blow to some blog and article networks that had paid almost no attention to users. Starting this year, blog networks, both private and public, starting dropping. In one of the highest-profile incidents, Google crippled BMR's blog network.
Webmasters began receiving warnings in Google Webmaster Tools around the same time that now strike fear into the hearts of those using manipulative or questionable tactics to build links:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to https://example.com/
Dear site owner or webmaster of https://example.com/,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
In short: you're caught - the game is up. Some sites received this warning without penalties, and some sites were penalized immediately. In either case, the links need to be taken down to retain or regain rankings. So what now?
Identifying Posts from Blog Networks
There are plenty of webmasters, site owners, and SEOs who have no idea what Google is talking about when they receive the warning. For example, I recently spoke with a friend from a reputable SEO agency who had the bad lack of taking over the same week his client was penalized for the previous SEO firm's work. In any case, the first step to fixing the problem is finding the links in question. We can use tools like Open Site Explorer and Google/Bing Webmaster tools to find bad links.
Because BMR's sites have already been outed, penalized, and rendered useless for the foreseeable future, we can use an old BMR site as examples of what to look for:
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That's right - you can get misinformation about water shoes, Dubai shopping, and constipation remedies - all in one place! BMR posts actually had limited quality reviews, making them higher quality than most existing blog networks.
The identifying marks of a blog network post are as follows:
- Terrible content and a boring template; you find yourself asking, "Why would anyone ever subscribe to this blog?"
- Topics are jumped, unrelated to the site's theme, and categorization is poor.
- There is rarely an about section, author name, or means of contact.
- Lots and lots of exact-match anchor text seemingly pointing to sites at random.
- Posts tend to be 400-500 words with 2-3 links per post - generally all to the same site.
If you have recently received an unnatural link warning, there's a pretty good chance that you have a lot of links like this in your link portfolio. You will also wish to look for footer/blogroll links, especially from irrelevant sites, and any other links that were clearly not intended to be viewed by visitors.
Fixing and Recovering From Unnatural Link Penalties
There is a way back to Google's good graces, but it's not going to be fast, and it's unlikely that your traffic will reach the same heights it once did if you relied heavily on link networks or paid links to gain rankings. Once you're caught, you must sacrifice all paid or spammy links, submit a reconsideration request, and develop a legitimate backlink portfolio.
Removing Penalization-Inducing Links
The removal of links has to be thorough, or the reconsideration request will be denied. If you rent links on a monthly basis, the obvious step is to stop paying for the links and request their removal. If your links were built by an external company, contact them and see what they can do about taking any links from blog networks offline. For BMR users, I recommend clicking the following link, which BMR was professional enough to offer:
Take them all down! Now leave the site without exporting those low-quality posts that you won't need, thanks to the fantastic new link-building strategy you're going to develop. Other link networks often provide simple solutions to taking down your links - speak with the person who put these links up if you don't have access.
In the case of paid links not submitted through a blog network, you may have to contact the site directly and request removal of links. It's a tedious process, but a reasonable effort has to be made.
Submitting a Reconsideration Request
If your site hasn't been penalized yet, but you received the warning, you can skip this step. Do not skip the step above, as you will eventually face into a penalty if you don't clean up your act and link portfolio. In a blog post on 6 Ways to Recover from Bad Links, Dr. Pete offers some advice for reconsideration requests:
- Be honest, specific and detailed.
- Show that you’ve made an effort.
- Act like you mean it (better yet: mean it).
You have to explain that you have changed your views and your strategic focus. A good way to show effort is by including a link to an accessible Google Doc spreadsheet showing the bad links, which ones were removed, and which ones you made unsuccessful efforts to remove. Be specific, and touch on everything requested on the reinclusion request form:
Tell us more about what happened: what actions might have led to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that. Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith that may assist in evaluation of reconsideration requests. If you recently acquired this domain and think it may have violated the guidelines before you owned it, let us know that below. In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.
Be open and specific about what you were doing, what you changed to comply with Google's guidelines, and what you will do going forward. Right now there is doubtless a long line of websites requesting reinclusion, so make sure you've done a good clean-up. The last thing you want is to have to go through the whole process again in a few months. You'll also have to be patient, especially if you're a smaller site or lesser-known brand. In the meantime, though, we will develop a legitimate link-building strategy.
Build a Legitimate Link Portfolio
Under most conditions, Google appears to assess link penalties algorithmically. Most of the sites that I have seen receiving warnings about unnatural links have serious problems with the over-optimization of anchor text and links from low-quality sites.
Low quality sites, in this diagram, refers to sites (and pages) that have little or no relevance, few incoming links, unnatural link portfolios of their own, and few branding signals. Having too much exact-match anchor text from legitimate domains is a hard thing to do, but it has happened through things like widgets with unnatural anchor text.
Building links from legitimate sources is hard, and in competitive and boring industries it take a lot of creativity and work. Some have taken this as a license to manipulate rankings and build spammy links.
In competitive and boring industries; however, the online world looks very much like the real world. The secret to success in both is a unique selling point (USP): what makes you different or better than your competitors? Your USP can be customer experience, site interactivity, prices, or content resources. Online businesses will profit in much the same way that offline businesses did and continue to.
It is time to start thinking of ways to build links and attract users in a way that is scalable, effective, and long-term. Building links manually is boring, difficult, and often unrewarding. There's a reason a lot of industry leaders have been talking about content marketing.
New Questions and Concerns
There's a lot of change in this industry, and we've become good at adapting and changing our roles. As with all significant changes, there have been a flood of questions about what to do. First, I do not think that this was related to Google's reported semantic search or the upcoming over-optimization penalty. The later was was pre-announced after large numbers of sites had already been pummeled my something else entirely.
My Blog Network is Running Strong. Should I Stop?
Yes. Those who have not received warnings for using blog networks should recognize that blog networks are not a sustainable long-term strategy. You're spending time building bad links instead of relationships and branding. Additionally, Google has hit several blog networks, and it's likely to continue. Standing and waiting for the hammer to fall is strategy at its absolute worst.
Couldn't I Hurt Competitors?
The last defense for the link spammer is a fallacious line of reasoning: "search engines can't penalize me, because I could do it to my competitors." Yes, in theory, you could trigger a link spam penalty on a competitor site. You will find; however, that companies with strong branding signals who have built real editorial links - usually the companies that actually rank highly - are nearly impervious to link spam attacks.
Yes, you can do horrible things to other people - but why? Ethics aside, it just doesn't make sense in this industry to waste effort tearing others rather than building a site up. Restaurant owners don't go around attacking nearby restaurant owners' stores, because it takes a lot of effort and, even if you do temporarily close a restaurant, it doesn't really bring new customers. There are a lot of restaurants in the city - and even more sites on the internet.
Note that there may be legal ramifications if you successfully harm a competitor with link spam. Once the subpoenas start falling, the invincible feeling of anonymity disappears quickly.
Strategies for Agencies
One line in the reconsideration request stood out to me:
"Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith"
People rarely describe a company without mentioning its name. What actions might we expect from firms mentioned in multiple reconsideration requests? Direct action is unlikely, but companies who relied on networks to build links to clients' and their own sites may be wise to worry, devise a new strategy, and stop publishing crap.
I have absolutely no interest in the obnoxious and mostly-imaginary "war" between white hat and black hat SEO. Whether you care about adding value to users - and at the world of link penalties and Panda, it's insane not to - it's time to drop tactics and schemes like blog networks. The links have been low value for a long time, but now they carry with them an unacceptable risk.
Love the post but I have one very, very, very big problem with Google's one very, very, very wrong assumption. Matt Cutts and his team are targeting spam because they don't want all the junk that is out there to be outranking the good, legitimate content. Therein lies the erroneous assumption- that there is good, legitimate content!
I would have thought Google would have learned after Panda. They nuked the crap to have it replaced with worse crap. Now they have nuked more crap so that even worse garbage can fill in the holes. Google needs to realize one important thing- great content doesn't exist online. It just doesn't. In verticals like electronics sure, lots of good stuff out there, but how much great stuff is there about toilets, socks or other obscure things?
I'm glad Google nuked those terrible sites but I think it is downright silly to penalize the people who were using them. If you caught them, devalue the links and kill the rankings on the garbage sites giving the links. Let those link builders think what they are doing is still working. But make sure it doesn't work.
Here's the thing, a lot of people doing link building have legitimately decent stuff. It's not great, but hey, nothing is outside of Wikipedia. If you nuke them all the garbage below them, which is even worse, moves up and fills in. I saw a great example of where this happened where the #3 result got penalized to #12. Now who is in the top ten? One is literally a spun site. All the content is identical to the #2 result but spun. It's pathetic. Why penalize a decent site so that total crap can outrank it? Isn't its content still good? Sorry but this line of reasoning with Google is insane. They have to start realizing that there just isn't a lot of really good content out there, and the more they hurt those trying to create half decent stuff, the more empowering it is to the spinners and spammers out there. These latest penalties are case in point. </rant>
You make a good point, but at the same time Google can't just ignore all these spammy techniques that people are abusing to get crappy sites to rank. If all the content that exists in a niche is crap, then yeah, the crap will be replaced with more crap, but at least it gives a better chance for quality content to rank without resorting to spam tactics.
Bottom line, don't rely 100% on spam tactics to flesh out your backlink profile, or you risk your site getting torched with the latest algo change. If you want to use greyhat/blackhat tactics, use them to compliment your solid backlink profile, or better yet use them to boost intermediary sites which point to your main site, thus lowering your exposure.
That is one point I agree on. Sure, there is great content for major (social) topics, but not for every niche, esp. not in a lot of B2B niches.
Same goes for social: great thing for toppics with tons of users. But how "relevant" is a site with 80 fans/circlers, even if those 80 would be the cream of the crop most knowledgeable experts on this field.
My thoughts exactly. I spend hundreds of hours a month writing page after page of "quality" content that will never get linked to naturally - content about toilets, socks and other obscure things. Meanwhile I'm getting outranked all over the place by sites that have maybe 10 pages and about 10,000 links from spammy forums, directories, etc. Link building is such a time consuming process that there are almost literally not enough hours in the day to do it. So my question is this - if I have questionable links pointing back to my good content, am I going to be penalized?
It used to be that an established website, with a good foundation could stand some spammy link building. That is one of the major changes with this update.
The only site I run that has received a warning from google was because of a blog rol being removed. A blog roll from a PARTNER blog. A legitimate link, but because of the link loss velocity (50k index pages on a single domain) we tripped this filter.
Result is a -10 penality across short tails.
Hi Dan,
If I understand your argument, you're saying that there just isn't any good content in some industries that deserves to rank. If that is true, that sounds like a huge opportunity that sites in the industry should take advantage of. There are lots of ways to make toilets interesting: talk about incinerating toilets, novel features on high-end toilets, etc.
I have never seen data to support claims that web spam is getting worse, but I won't argue one way or the other. The fact is that blog networks are going down, and tactics that involve artificially building links without users in mind are becoming ineffective, so we need to adapt.
Very true, if Google's goal is to get the best content to the top, make the best content. The problem is I can point to no less than a trillion examples of the best content being outranked by something awful. Then Google goes through and tries to nuke the bad stuff. Well, most of the time it gets a lot of the bad stuff and all the mediocre stuff is collateral damage. Problem is the mediocre stuff gets replaced by bad stuff, then Google tries to figure out how to get rid of the bad stuff again. They don't realize the bad stuff will only get replaced with more bad stuff, because there just isn't enough good stuff to fill 10 results on so very many searches. It's quite a conundrum.
Good point. There are some things that are really tough to make interesting content about. I think in these cases, perhaps PPC is the best investment for generating traffic because quality content is expensive and the duller the product/industry, the more expensive it gets. Whatever delivers the best return for the client is the bottom line.
Aaaahh, the meat of what google really wants :) PPC$$$
bingo
100% true. Very keen observation of the current state of the web.
Dan, I have a similar complaint about all of this. Sometimes, for a small company, the only way to compete in rankings with the big boys is with a little gray hat or even black hat thrown in. I'm not advocating that the spam should rank well. But getting good rankings for good content isn't easy. In my industry there is only so much you can say about our products. And there are a couple hundred sites saying it.If you want natural links, you still have to drive traffic so that people know about you to create the natural links. And for a small company on a budget, these link networks were effective and affordable.
I knew what industry you were in as soon as I read your post!
Having been in the same industry for a good few years now I know what you mean. I am detirmined to be 100% white hat in future, it's just that it's all so bloody boring!
Let's do a blog post exchange as you are across the pond? (hence not my competition)
Pm me!
100% with you on that. Bad techniques doesn't equal a bad website - just attack the bad websites and then you'll have better SERPS. Right now, almost every search is polluted with rubbish.
"It just doesn't. In verticals like electronics sure, lots of good stuff out there, but how much great stuff is there about toilets, socks or other obscure things?"
Well, lets make some! Dan, I agree with most of your words, because you are realistic. BUT it seems to me you are speaking like a complete pesimist. Please, don't get it personal.
From my experience if you being pesimistic and not believe in the success of your campaign and efforts you will never succed. Never!
All in all, let's stop whining and go get those spammers :) Create an amazing content, show it to the world, tell us about it and how you created it... report the spammers, hunt them all, make them suffer in any whitehat way. But never ever look down in the pit and never stop believe in the success!
You can spend time trying to remove low quality links, or you can put that same time toward building better links that round out your backlink profile.
I think it's funny to watch article networks being punished, when there are plenty of other kinds of sites with the same backlink-building ease, quality, and lack of human consumption used by the same SEOs that put down article networks.
Ultimately, if you as an SEO make a personal rule to only build links on sites that have a chance of driving legitimate traffic and resulting in actual sales/leads, your rankings may not move very fast, but you'll more than justify your job's existence.
"chance of driving legitimate traffic and resulting in actual sales/leads"
Amen brother.
Well said, Scott, thanks for the comment. As Google gets smarter, building these kinds of links has become a lot like an advertiser working hard to place banners all over the city - in places where no one will see them.
What would you do when a competitor starts to create low quality spammy spun links to your site? I mean how would you (or other people) know that it's not you who are building those links. Its kinda cheap to outsource this task to some cheap labor out there to get this done. But yes, I agree that strong brands are almost impervious to this tactic.
Spot on, strong brands are impervious to this. And less than 1% of all websites are strong brands. Almost every website can be penalized if you just hire cheap spammers. Google is moving backwards and its scary.
I accept it is feasible to create loads of links back to a competitors site however I think Google is probably reassured by the fact that it would probably be beneficial to the competitors and to your websites detriment in the short term (or medium term - until the blog network is discovered) and then to the amount of money / time / effort that someone would have to spend to take down a number of competitors. Plus if you're spending all your time or effort trying to get your competitors a penalty you'd probably not be doing quite as much marketing for your own website.
I agree with your last point Simon - every second spent attacking your competitors is time not being spent developing your own site. Apart from the ethical side and potential legal implications why worry about spending time harming your competitors? Instead concentrate on building your own site and making it the best out there so that it naturally beats your competitors over time and if it doesn't maybe spend some of this time finding out why?
I REALLY hope that Google isn't going to 'penalise' sites per se; removing value from the offending backlinks is one thing - to 'take down' a site is another.
I agree people shouldn't attack others sites (I never would and would never countenance it) but I know human nature!
If it is possible to get an opposition site removed, someone will! The benefit of jumping from SERPs position 5 to 1 for some terms will be HUGE and some of my ex-clients are in position 1 for some quite nice terms thank you; all white hat; but are not strong brands by any means.
As for time and effort, when backlink spamming worked how long did it take people to create them for themselves? Not long, and an industry rapidly grew.
How long before some clever fella provides a site where you just enter any web adress, pay $xx and it creates 20,000 links to that site in the hope of getting it penalised.
I cannot believe that Google would make a mistake like this (I really must test this) - I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that they have been sensible and only 'nerf' the bad links and any 'weaker' possibly spammy ones. (This in itself would 'remove' many sites from the index whithout actually the need to apply a penalty).
There must be a vairety of factors that come into play before the signals are triggered. I personally don't believe Google would have created a system that allows your competition to take you out.
Getting links removed is a lot easier said than done! I know this from experience. It can be virtually impossible - Google must know this as well, I can't believe that they would do too much damage to a business that engaged in some dodgy practices because they had a little bit of knowledge years ago.
"How long before some clever fella provides a site where you just enter any web adress, pay $xx and it creates 20,000 links to that site in the hope of getting it penalised."
There are already sites offering these services. A Google search for "Negative SEO" bring them up and of course at Fiverr you can get 20,000 spammy links for $5. If it is possible to hurt other sites then this is going to turn things upside down for a while.
What will the result be? An INCREASE in web spam. Why? Because instead of inexperienced webmasters buying spammy links for their own site they may believe that buying spammy links against their 20 competitors might decrease their ranking.
That's potentially 20x increase of web spam being generated by one webmaster against multiple targets rather than just their own site.
Ans what about revenge attacks? If someone gets the dreaded "Unnatural Link" message in GWT and they think someone pointed links at them, they may be tempted to retaliate back. Against a small non-branded site this could be effective.
This could get messy!
This whole SEO industry is in fact just Google Obsession. I think it is quite sick that so much time and effort is spent on trying to game one corporation. Not all your faults, but a sick indication of the state of play nevertheless.
Let me tell you one who the most frightened are though. It's the big boys themselves. Google is basically one big fraudulent confidence trick. Just one, and I mean just ONE, decent innovative replacement for so called search could wipe them out in a week. And they know it.
What is needed is something like the "datasphere". Some of you scifi fans will know what I am talking about. Just a little cocktail of two technologies coming together and then content will really rule. Goolge would die a death not because of competition, but because the technology they use would be obsolete overnight.
Stop calling this search engine optimization. It is not an engine, any more than the music "industry" is really an industry. It is as stupid as trying to teach a baby grammar. The baby learns language without any knowledge of grammatical structure.
SEO is totally back to front at the moment because of the corporation in control and it's fans - all you out there that perpetuate the monopoly. Yes you do. Every day. You feed it and nurture it and placate it and flatter it. And when it slaps you, you act like battered wives who go back for more "because he really loves me". Morons.
New technology is close at hand. The current problem is that the reality (the analogue, physical, biochemical reality), has been digitized for convenience (castrated, emasculated, cloned and enslaved).
huh?
I think it's less about what WE (ethical SEO's) would do that people are worried about, it's SEO/Website owners who have legitimite rankings that are worried that lower ranking sites could easily (and for cheap I might add) build a ton of spammy keyword links to the ranking site in order to get it banned. It's ridiculous to look past this as a possible threat.
I agree with Dan Deceuster - If Google is to penalize sites for bad links this way, we are GAURANTEED to see black hat SEO everywhere.... This is inevitable and as soon as it starts to happen Google will have to retract this algo change.
And BTW, try tracking it back to the ranking site - also immpossible as they likely will simply outsource to some offshore workers who they can pay pennies to build thousands of spammy links on IP's not connected to the ranking site in any way.
Dan,
India?? Really?? Spammers are present everywhere and not just in one country.
Cheap labor always does not necessarily mean cheap quality work. It would greatly be appreciated if a specific country is not targeted and labeled as a hub of cheap spammers.
- Sajeet
Removed the country-specific reference on edit. I don't think Dan meant to be offensive, but you're totally right about not perpetuating stereotypes.
Damm True
Hi Dan,
I dont understand the fact that you've mentioned that big brands are impervious to this. Why are they unable to be harmed by this? Considering that a worldwide clothing brand was punished by the Panda update due to buying links. Im unsure which company it was if im honest, but it was large non the less.
a worldwide clothing brand was punished by the Panda update due to buying links
Sorry, if you are talking about JCPenney, that wasn't Panda, as it happened quite before we even know what was the Panda Update.
More over: Panda is not a link related algorithm.
Yes, that is the one which i was referring to! Oh i see, looks like i'll have to do abit of research then.Thanks for the responce.
The nice thing about those low quality links is that they are not worth much to being with. If you aren't spending money on them, ignore them and counteract with your own PR/marketing campagin which you should be doing already. And if lots of links start pouring in and you get worried, you can always preemptively send in a reconsideration request with the details (give specific instances). Be open and honest about what is going on. Write a blog post about it, tell the world. Just be honest and you should be fine.
You are right and this is great advice for us and those who get it. 99% of website owners don't know what they are doing when it comes to SEO and don't know anything about link building. How are they going to counteract anything? How will they even know unnatural links are coming in at all? I just don't think Google looks at things from this perspective because what they are doing is encouraging people to stop spamming their own websites and start spamming everyone elses. If the goal is to eliminate spam, then they need to encourage no spamming.
"The nice thing about those low quality links is that they are not worth much to begin with." I'd love to agree Kate, except for a circumstance that, funnily enough, only came to light yesterday: my client's competitor recently leaped to the top of search results for some of our own prime keywords, and having taken a look at their link profile, it's made up almost entirely of links from these awful linking network sites, with exact match anchor text in abundance for those very same keywords. Possibly a coincidence, of course - perhaps they're ranking well for reasons I haven't yet deduced. We can only hope these sites get penalised quickly and the sites they link to realise that the easy link-building option isn't always worth it. At the moment, though, it seems it sometimes is!
I've seen the exact same thing happen in our niche. Competitors with mostly low quality directory and article links giving us a run for our money even on some of our branded searches. Hopefully this latest Google update takes some of that away.
You must not work in the SEO field.....
TRY NOT TO LAUGH
If you want to see how crap serach results still are (returning spun content, absolute affiliate nonsense etc) do a google search for "build my rank" and qualify it it for the past 24 hours. Really funny!
I've seen link spam attacks attempted many times, but I've only seen it work on hacked sites and sites that were already participating in link schemes. If it's something you're really worried about, and you have the resources, it might be worth talking to a legal professional with expertise in this area.
Aside from that, the only thing you can really do is contiunue to do things by the book and avoid low-quality content like the plague.
I've seen link spam attacks that only appear to help the victim. White hats have to get used to the constant "where's a cop when you need one" pit in our stomach, but the reality is that link spam is still present, strong, and mostly uncaught. Google's been really busy lately, but they've been aggressive before... we'll see if it changes en mass. History doesn't suggest it will, so I don't hold out too much hope.
BMR is an example of an easy footprint to track down, and one that Google can easily take action on. It's SEOs latest poster child, but I wouldn't think it's a deterrent to black hats. The hard stuff to track, analyze, and punish without a shadow of doubt is the stuff that's always been out there.
If you're a white hat, "contiunue to do things by the book and avoid low-quality content like the plague." is really the mantra you need to continue hanging on to.
Very cheap. There are services that will spam 100,000 of these links at once using a piece of software for $20 (aka. an xrumer blast). Does that mean the cost of emptying out page 1 is a flat $200?
For a very long time, I've put faith in Google that they were (or would become) smart enough to 100% devalue bad links, and that no off-page "penalty" as it were, exists (leave that to on-page). In other words, a link can hurt itself, links built in bulk at the same time, and the site it's placed on. But not your site. Not in any huge way.
This appears to be a real shift from that mentality.. as far as I can see in all of the experiences read today (not to mention one client that had a black hat in their history), you can Googlebowl (build bad links at competitors) until the cows come home, and win at it (so long as the target isn't CNN or News Corp).
I could really see this having a net negative effect... I (and I assume most people) would never touch a corporate site with black hat.. but who's going to be afraid to Googlebowl a competitor?
In some cirlces there are already case studies written up on how to take out a competitor with these tactics. Not all grey/black hat SEO's are willing to arbatrage a competitor (believe it or not, there is a level of respect in the community).
That said, yes, these tactics are already being rolled out, and in part as a means to try and influense the google policy.
FYI. Penalties are closely related to velocity. Mass deinxation of a network = loss of link links en mass. That seems to be a common trip of the love letter in webmasters.
Surely, and maybe they'll influence change in the same sort of way that the "ethical hacking" community helps people lock down security.
What I think is more likely is that they're stirring things up in this vague way with the aim of scaring people into clean up their acts. That seemed to be what the very first Panda updates did, and a year later I'd say that actually succeeded. I'd predict that given some time, this heavy 'off-page penalty' becomes more universally a 'devaluation' again, with some lingering sections of code that are better at throwing away all link value from private blog networks.
At least, that's what fits the "if I were Google" concept. Anything short of that scenario seems to leave us with worse results and a spammier web.
I would sue for Cyber-industrial sabotage if and when something that like that occured.
Otherwise, one has to keep abreast of new links that are incoming to the site.
Plus if you're that pathetic that you can only attack other peoples' success, then I doubt you have a site that is worthwhile to begin with.
It must remain impossible for Google to penalize you for anything that occurs OFF your domain. The internet would cave in on itself. I think these warnings are more scare tactic then reality. This would be like the police putting you on probation because felons keep calling your house as a wrong number.
Does anyone actually have an A then B example? "I was #1 THEN bought spammy links and went to #10?" Every example I have seen is "I was #1 and then discovered all these spammy links and went to #10." The links got devalued- you didn't get penalized. It's just not logically possible. Otherwise, why wouldn't ORM just consist of poiinting a bunch of spam to RipoffReports etc to deep six it? Just not going to happen.
Alright, I'm on the side of "spammy links don't get you penalized" and I'll tell you my beef with this argument.
1. When you say "spamming a competitor to get them de-indexed isn't worth the time", you can bet your biscuits that someone out there is going to launch a nuclear campaign against someone outranking them for a high-value term like "car insurance". If it's going to make someone several thousands of dollars in a month, it's definitely worth investing in.
2. I agree completely that an overtly unnatural link profile that gets you to rank for a competitive term can lead to a situation where your site comes under manual review. AT WHICH POINT, it's possible that you can be de-indexed. I cannot accept that spammy links can drop a site out of the results without a manual, human filter to verify, at least not at this point. We've seen far too many case studies that crap links can still make a site rank (read "How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs" from this very blog), and little to no hard evidence that a site can be dropped out of the ranks completely just because of spammy link profiles without a manual review. However, I see a lot of people say "my rankings are gone! It must be those links" without a thorough investigation.
3. Thinking that people won't spend time on a predatory link campaign is naive, especially when you consider how easy it is to plug-and-play hallmark spam software like SENuke. If link spam worked to get a site de-indexed, I see no reason at all why a serious black-hatter wouldn't set up several of these on virtual machines to target his main competitors.
4. Referring to "brand signals" is kind of ambiguous. Do you mean searches? Branded keyword anchor text? These are fairly easy to bake into spam links or fake on other levels. "Strong brands" are not impervious to these, as we've seen with the latest snafus with JC Penny and the like.
So I went a little rant-mode here. I don't do spam links or black-hat whatnots, and I'm firmly against it. To me, black hat vs white hat is not a question of effectiveness, but of ethics. A savvy black-hat can obtain long-lasting success and rankings, just like a stupid white-hat can get themselves penalized.
tl:dr; Yes, de-indexing happens, but only when a manual review is involved. It's not an algorithmic penalty.
Thanks for the thorough response, Mitch. I'm not sure where you heard de-indexation. You're probably right that de-indexation requires a manual review. You'll note that I was talking almost exclusively about penalties. We've seen way too many warnings and subsequent drops in rankings for all of them to be manual.
Regarding the things you could do to competitors, we could probably send hundreds of thousands of spammy links progressive's way without any impact. And what if we do? To move from position 21 to 20 for a week while Progressive sorts it out with Google? You can also punch someone in the stomach and take their money - this is life. That doesn't make it ethical, legal, or a smart new business plan.
Edit: note by "we," I'm referring to SEO forums and Moz Q&A.
Carson,
Thanks for your reply. You're right about my de-indexing comment; you didn't say that specifically. I still disagree with the idea that an algorithm will make that determination, because there's no mechanically descernable difference between a guy who doesn't understand link building, a black-hatter just spam linking, or a legitimate site being attacked by unethical parties.
I'm not saying that attacking other sites is legal, ethical or even permissable. What I'm saying is that it's viable. I can't get behind someone's claims that it's a penalty without hard data to back it up.
I'd be interested in a case study or something that can definitively point the finger at poor links being the cause (I'd even be willing to contribute to the testing/research involved), but until then, I really can't agree with a purely mechanical penalty making such a huge decision about something that has so many interpretations.
Mitch, I'm in agreement with you. I've read several articles about how Panda de-indexed the BMR blog network. I think that's wrong. Panda might devalue the inbound links from spammy blogs, but somebody at Google is making an example out of these blog networks and de-indexing them.
Hi Mitch,
This is a point that I don't think I've made clear enough in my post, so thank you for highlighting it for me. Some people in the Q&A and on forums received a warning and ranking penalties on the same day. That would seem to establish cause.
Others received warnings, followed by drops after several days or weeks (see this very thread for examples of that). There were initial drops, caused by the loss of linkjuice, which were then followed up with penalties.
Still others received penalties and no drop yet. In most cases, these seem to people people who were on the edge, and stepped back from the questionable tactics enough to avoid a drop.
Completely agree with this, how do you go about removing 4100 links to one product page that you did not build in the first place. This is just insane. Even if you did make every effort, ultimately it is out of your control.
We inherited an account that had engaged an agency who were investing in the above link acquisition methods. Obviously, we put an end to it immediately and began to do things the right way but have now had to deal with this. I think the appropriate phrase here is "left holding the baby". Let's hope Google can work through their reconsideration requests in triple quick time as I'm certain they'll be getting a higher volume of requests.
I sort of enjoyed your "little rant-mode," actually. I don't necessarily agree with you, but I'm certainly not going to pretend like I know more than you (which I'm sure I don't). But I think it's important to bring up counter arguments, even if it's ultimately to understand the original arguments better.
I agree that black vs white is not a question of effectiveness, but of ethics.
Just like the image "link-spam-venn", i think google won't punish a site because of many links from low quality sites. I tried to build 1000 links on "low quality sites" for a client, many of target terms had got a very good rank on google for a while.
Sadly, Google's link based algo is fundamentally flawed and incapable of differentiating between good content and bad. If you need proof search for anything. Google's search also has its roots in academia, where citations are common currency and encouraged, there's actually a genuine need for them. Extrapolating this into the world of business and commerce is a nonsense. As someone above has said, who's going to link to a site about toilets or socks!
In the Google founders paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, as presented at WWW7 in Brisbane, Australia, the guys explained, and I quote "The Google search engine has two important features that help it produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is called PageRank and is described in detail in [Page 98]. Second, Google utilizes links to improve search results." So there you have it, right at the heart of the Google algo circa 1998.
Just in case you missed it, so far as Google is concerned a page with no links has no quality (notwithstanding domain strength - thanks SEOMoz).
So where does this leave us? Well, site owners hire SEO's, SEO's realise their client's site is going to struggle to earn links, they also recognise Google needs link signals to rank the site's pages and so it goes on. Furthermore, site owners can spend time and energy creating great content only to find nobody links to it, because mere mortals don't even know what a link is, let alone how to create one. It's a quite incredible vicious circle and Google sits in the middle pontificating, never quite having the integrity to accept their algorithm is busted.
There's also another uncomfortable truth. Any link a site owner or their SEO plays any part in securing, is not a genuine merit base link, sorry about that. Need proof? OK, when was the last time you saw a Matt Cutts video explaining what kind of link building Google are comfortable with? I'm guessing never because the Google millionaires only ever tell people to build great websites and hope others like it enough to link to it. But remember, the overwhelming majority of web users wouldn't know how to link to something if they wanted to.
Blog networks, full of spun garbage, add no value to the web, and thankfully they leave a footprint that ensures they can be devalued. However, what about all the garbage stand alone blogs, living off other people's hard work, yes, I'm talking about that white hat world of wonder that is the guest blogging phenomena. Have you ever looked at some of these? These guys are like the fat kid in the playground who the cool kids suck up to while he has sweets/candy to share. Many (most?) are complete garbage but as they have no footprint Google can't devalue them, at least not yet.
If Google had its way nobody would ever ask for a link or create content with a link in it to stick on someone else's blog. The only links that existed would be those that web masters, for it is these mystical beasts who have the skills, added to their sites because they believed the content they were linking to was worthy of a link. The thing is, who's to say these people know good content from bad. There's many a single minded mob have been so wrong it hurts.
I've no idea where this is all heading. No doubt the SEO glitterati will write article after article explaining all the latest 'white hat' link building strategies, but it's mostly hot air in my view. Ultimately, someone who creates a great site, in their niche, has no way of ensuring it's recognised unless they build links, and if they build links they are in breach of Google's T&C's. What a mess....
Matt Cutts has now got guest blogging in his sights: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-blogging/ ...
The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO Posted January 20, 2014
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.
I could run a sabotage campaign on my competitors? buy 400$ of the worst link package available for them and watch them get penalized? :P
I think that because Google doesn't punish all offenders of this it's unlikely to attack competitors with link spam. Basically you "could" waste your time completely with zero affect, you "could" even boost their rankings if they're not caught (and not all are caught or acted upon), or you "could" get them penalized. With varying probabilities like that, no-one in their right mind would spend time/money/resources on smacking a customer up with a dodgy link profile.
Aside from that, I suspect/expect that there are far more complex signals involved here... similarities to guilt "beyond reasonable doubt" such as in the justice system, where you'd have to set off a few different alarm bells more than a couple of times before anything happens. So if Google came along and saw a site with a clean history, some okay rankings, some decent usage data, etc... a normal looking link profile... and then that site suddenly gets a whole bunch of crappy links, well then I would assume Google would rather ignore those links and assign no value than punish a site that may be innocent. let's face it, what's the % of sites that recieved those warnings who were totally innocent? None of our clients have had them, and there HAS been dodgy activity in the past with their link profiles... so it's not even hitting sites which "might" be guilty, just those that "very probably" are.
I'm curious with Google now throwing tens of thousands of sites out of the index in bulk (in contrast to standard filtering practice), how much of the OSE data today is actually deindexed.
Very interesting post Carson - I think your diagram in the "Build a Legitimate Link Portfolio" section clearly highlights where you don't want your site link profile to be. I have always worked by the principle that a strong link profile takes time to build and establish - if somethings worth having it isn't easy to obtain and takes effort and dedication. I think this post just highlights the fact that it is getting more and more difficult to take shortcuts and game the system, which I think is great for those that are taking time to produce decent content and earn worthy links from relevant, reputable sources on merit.
Note that there may be legal ramifications if you successfully harm a competitor with link spam. Once the subpoenas start falling, the invincible feeling of anonymity disappears quickly.
I just couldn't stop laughing hearing this comment of the author. Its good to desist people from doing Negative SEO but threat of legal action where its not possible is a bad bad idea.
Ok consider this for eg.
I buy a negative seo service from a service provider against one of my competitors
They use a VPS with proxies on a third world country to do that link spam and the site goes down in google ranking.
Consider these questions.
That is a lots of ifs and buts even without considering that there may be multiple countries involved in the whole process (including proxies) which itself is a detriment to the whole legal process.
So, all in all the legal threat against Negative SEO is as True as the google's statement "Its highly unlikely that a person can effect ranking of a website negatively"
Wake up people, Negative SEO is live, alive and in current scenario, absolutely possible.
This author is misinformed. I have fixed numerous penalties for sites that do all kinds or risky SEO strategies: For example, NEVER submit a reinclusion request unless you have received a manual penalty. Doing so makes google do a deep algorithmic check of your site, in which case they typically treat the site with a stronger filter. Don't confuse a "Fetch as googlebot / submit to index" in GWT and a reconsideration request. Basically, if you have received a algorithmic penalty there is no need to ask for manual reconsideration. Unless you were banned (de-indexed). Then you need to do so, after you have deleted the bad links, exact anchor text, and dup content. It is quite easy to fix any kind of panda or pagerank linking penalty, I do it all the time (for other people's sites mostly - my sites have never been hit). If you want to know how just contact me.
Unnatural link penalties are not Panda penalties; Google specifically asks you to submit a reconsiderating request in the warning. Yes, it might be possible to build legitimate links and eventually recover, but A) the discovered unnatural links are still going to be a drag on your site, and are likely discounted, and B) you might be waiting a long time. When it comes to link-based penalties, proactively getting it behind you should be a high priority.
These unnatural link notices are in effect manual penalties. So I'm sure he got it right.
When you submit the RR, you get a reply - either "Manual Spam Action - Revoked" or "Some pages still violate". Had these unnatural link notices been automatic, you would have gotten back an automatic reply saying: "No Manual Spam Actions Found".
I hope you use some caution before calling people misinformed.
Nice article. You don't need to waste your time removing the links. Google is de-indexing all of the pages and removing them for you. Spend your time researching long term link strategies instead of trying to remove bad links. The "penallty" you see is a result of losing the value those links were passing at the keyword level.
Totally agree with you on that! One should better focus on something more important like:
- Removing duplicate content within the website
- Adding new original content
- Fixing broking links and redirect issues
- Fixing duplicate title tag issues
The article is good, as always at SEOMoz, nicely researched, documented, etc., BUT I don’t actually see anything ‘new’ here.
Every time we face Panda updates, we hear the same things:
- Do not link from low quality websites
- Do not link with too much exact anchor text
- Do not spin articles, but write quality content instead
- Do not create link wheels
Blog networking might too be addressed to excessive anchor text linking and excessive external linking too. As far as SEO community concerned, creating blogs to promote your content is a ‘white hat’ idea, isn’t it (if done in a natural way of course)? So my point of view is that maybe guys from BMR had too many clients to keeping linking in a natural way.
I suspect you misunderstood the Private Blogs' Network issue.
It is not Panda, which is not a link related algorithm. Don't get confused by the closeness in time of the two events, but the fall like flies of the private blogs network started at least a couple of weeks before.
And it seems that you don't have quite clear what a private blog network is. It is not just an editorial initiiative which previews several blogs on several topics, but a centralized redaction. No, they are a web of blog where people access in order to write crapola content just for the sake of putting an exact match anchor text link after having paid a subscription. Pure spam on steroid.
Deindexed does not mean forgotten :) What I've seen a lot of in Q&A is people seeing a slight drop as a result of losing their BMR and other posts, followed by a sharper drop and penalty a few weeks later if they don't clean things up.
We now finally have search engine deoptimization - Scrapebox and Xrummer blasts on your competitors. WTG Google!!
I completely agree with you.
What's the fastest *undetectable* way to get traffic to my Google ads and CPA offers?
-- That's the real thing to address Google.
I've seen a lot of recent posts like this warning about blog networks. However, none recommend a viable alternative. Are there any resources that you can recommend for building links?
Absolutely! Beginners can read the section on linkbuilding from SEOmoz's beginner guide. Intermediate users can read Distilled's linkbait guide, or pretty much anything posted here on the link building section. Advanced users can continue to read, research, and attend conferences (like LinkLove in Boston).
Jeff, here's a resource for you https://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421
Or you can check many blogs especially related to link building (WH version) as - just to cite three of the best - these ones:
https://www.rosshudgens.com/
https://pointblankseo.com/
https://wiep.net/
Thanks for the mention Gianluca! :)
What about if you have your own blog networks? Say 20-40 of your own keyword rich blogs that point at each other random and are highly optimised, contain solid (not great) content, regular content etc. Of these 20-40, all point to at least 1 other blog in the network in some way and your 'central site' (the one you actually want to rank for) gets links from about 30-40% of these blogs.
How is this any different to getting links from external blogs/sites?
I know many people who were following the blogs network to rank well, but I ve always told them to stay cautious, Google may turn back to these network anytime and same happened, Google hit the pretty hard, and now not only them but all the sites depending on them have lost the ranking as well as traffic...
I hope people learn from these things and not to go for the black or gray hat methodologies...
Great Post
But after sending Reconsideration Request some of my clients revieved an email which said that just cleaning unnatural links from your website is not enought and your request dd not approved they said that all links that might be bought or they are suspisos which pointing to your website from other websites should be clean.
It mean that just cleaning your website is not good we should clean all the mess we made around the net.
Just attended LinkLove London and I asked the question "could you damage a competitor if you built crap quality backlinks to them"
Martin Macdonald said yes, if you built enough of them then you could.
Another speaker said that you would be unlikely to hurt anyone with a really good link profile such as amazon but how many sites have a profile as strong as this?
I have just checked googles page which covers this question and I am sure they have changed it, it used to say "No"
it now says this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34449
I'm more inclined to agree with what Martin said on the basis that he's more than likely played this game before.
Yes!! I wish I had seen the change - nice find.
I personally think Google has no clue as to what they are doing.. if in theory everyone is able to kill their competitors by spamming their sites with bad links, we have a whole new black hat industry on the rise.
Also, I was checking the SERPs today for my keywords and some really crappy websites which have OBVIOUSLY spammed using forum links are ranking near the top.
Not good news.
I think Google knows exactly what they are doing.
Fact: They are delisting businesses that may have been spending money on link building programs that are designed to increase rank and drive traffic. They are creating an environment where a percentage of businesses may see buying mass bad links for competitors could get them delisted.
Fact: I manage a fairly large companies SEO & PPC programs. We do not use link building systems and only have about 150 distinct domains linking to us. We were delisted 3 days ago. So after 20 years in business, and 3-5 years of sitting near the top of the rankings for our key terms... POOF - We're are nowhere to be found.
Fact: There are 100+ employees in the online department here to service customers needs. We have two choices when traffic is cut by 20-30%. Keep the traffic coming in by Paying Google for de-indexing us (Thank you sir may I have another) or eventually, if nothing changes, rationalize our workforce.
Speculation: The net effect of this will be a surge in paid search revenue as business that have infrastructures based on certain levels of online traffic are pushed to make up the traffic deficit created in the absence of organic rankings.
So yes, if no one else has already, I will float up a conspiracy theory.
It is incredibly naive to think that negative seo isn't real and that it isn't being practiced with deadly efficiency. You don't need to look far to find many example, here's one from a forum (https://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-content/152912-i-penalized-my-competitor-aln.html) where $200 worth of ALN links was all it took to demolish a competitor (thanks to Google's new algo).
If you want to know what is cutting edge pop into a few forums where blackhat seo hang out. They would never in a million years even respond to google's invitation for a review as that is an admission of guilt and only brings further human scrutiny on top of the automated one.
You'll note that I don't recommend responding unless there was a penalty.
This is a sad state of affairs which can only happen when a self regulating organisation has complete domination. In this case I’m taking about “Web Search” (with a hint of dictatorship emerging). I am really disappointed since the new Google Taxation (penguin). This is a clear message from Google leaving webmasters only one choice: You can either go pay-per-click to get income generating traffic or F**K ***. Now all those niche sites have drop off from top rankings for keywords, Google Shopping results appear higher on SERPS; thus Google makes more revenue, win + win for Google’s shareholders. I have received several “We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines” – REALLY WTF? A domain I owned since 2008 but haven’t marketed for in over 3-years received a penalty. In the past the only SEO marketing done for this site was article marketing and directory submissions. I’m not going to remove footer links to our sister site domains we own. Higher PR sites such as Amazon are allowed footer links to Javvi, and several other domains they own – why can’t the little guy’s business be the same? Thanks for the advice Carlton, but in my situation the above advice on dealing with a penalty is pointless. Yes, I have requested reconsideration on the above grounds, to no avail. The email reply was along the lines of “We have processed your reconsideration request… but have found your www.example.com is still in violation”
Someone should get fired at Google for such a screw up.
It is rare event when Google warns someone
True. These warning are fairly new - I remember when the only warning that ever existed was a sudden and drastic drop in rankings. I like the move towards telling people what's happening rather than simply slapping their site with no explanation, as with Panda.
i just readed all this comments, peoples looks you are joking! You are all in grey/black hat area when you building ANY (absolutely any) links to your site. Google want only end-user build them. And google not want to give webmasters any clear rules of that game (all is top secret).
Them watching into link profiles, into anchors (generic/urls/exact match), dates of links placement, site cms, outlinks, etc. But true is only one - new site (if not viral) not have any ways to rank well on google if it not government/edu site who will get backlinks almost automatically. It why almost all webmasters going to gray area when start building links. Somebody build few links, somebody more (spammers) - but it not natural links anyway in both case. And until google not make rules of game clear - it not going to be changed. And any automatic system will have such trouble with cheaters.
Also in fighting with spam google forget about normal webmasters. Too much ads penalty (for us, because google can put any num of ads (+misleading ads) to their search results), over-optimization penalty, panda-shmanda - this year of full seo surprises. And like usual - we paying money purchasing content, hosting, domain, etc - but google not cares giving us any info how we can rank well using some approved method. Just 'our updates, new panda, hole at panda was fixed, new anti-seo penalty coming soon, banned new blog network, banned all wordpress sites'. Too informative, isn't it?
Just see google search results now - wikipedia/youtube/amazon/news is everywhere. I hate to see that websites in their search results. If I need to search them - I can use video search or add "site:wikipedia.com" into my keywords. Also their personal search (and keywords autofixing) killing me, if i voted for site - it not mean what i want to see it everywhere in my search results.
Also not a top10 now, now is top6 really. That news, youtube, 1+Google, wikipedia links almost on every search page. So see how much competition was increased.
So my own conclusion : google start to dying, them need more money and it now more money making project (see their misleading ads at their search results at top1) than was before. All what them need to die (or at least start work in normal way) is good competitor. Only lack of competition give them ability to make such money and I still not understand why antimonopoly laws not working here. Looks like it because of lovely relations of google & govs.
So after few months here can be new google seo or may be will will see a competitor.
We use blogs for quite a lot of our link building, however, i would like to think it is genuine posting of links. We look for genuine quality blogs and then offer free products that we think the bloggers readers will be genuinely interested in. The bloggers than use and review the product and usually link to our website - we leave it to them how to link and to what pages and what anchor text they use. We only target blogs that we think will have readers who will buy from us as a result, however obviously we do get new links to our website as well.
Is this a practice that you think is acceptable and white hat enough? Would love to hear peoples opinions on this. Most bloggers we work with seem to use wordpress templates and have their own domain name.
it unnatural links, greyhat. because google want only peoples who not have any relation with your site/company distribute links (such as in social sites, forums, etc) only as personal interest (not any business interests). it how google see perfect links and what him looking for. Stupid? yes, but it what them want - perfection.
But looks like them collected default-acceptable anchor stats and created default-acceptable backlinks categorization portfolio (%) not properly, it why many genuine sites without any self-made links not ranks well currently. Also that spam 2.0 sickness...
I don't think that giving bloggers a product to review is a problem at all. From what you described, you have nothing at all to worry about.
You run into problems with Google if you tell bloggers that they must link to you (or use a followed link, or use specific anchor text).
I have been out of the loop for a while due to an extended illness so I’m a bit behind in the game. First I do agree with Google’s move on vast artificial blog networks but there seems to be something else new. That would be “link wheels”. Does anyone know Google’s view on those?
Link wheels are the type of link scheme that violate the webmaster guidelines. Google definitely does not like them at all.
Hi Carson,
Google's WMT notification says to make changes and then submit a reconsideration request. Your advice is not to do it, unless the site has received a penalty. I would like to ask why you deviate from Google's advice - is it because you don't think they will take any further action or because you think that by submitting a reconsideration request that may trigger a manual review of the site followed by a penalty?
it is nearly impossible for SEOs that were using blog networks to get rid of ALL the crap as many services simply wouldn't take spam down. What doesn't make any sense is why is Google asking users to remove links from deindexed domains... I cannot see any point really as those links have been devalued anyway. Maybe it is Google's way to figure out whether the websites themselves built those crapy links? So, if a site owners gets notified and removes the crap, this is a signal that they were aware of the spammy links, hence they should be penalised!
I reckon Google sends those notifications to make us do their work by:
1. Removing the crap that can be removed
2. Reporting the crap we cannot remove (so they deindex those domains)
If they were sure that a website was manipulating their algo, they would simply penalise the site without any warning as they have always been doing. The fact that they did send out those warnings makes me think that it is a rather sneaky way to make SEOs work together with them by intimidating site owners, that in most cases had no idea of the risks. Personally, I don't even see those tactics as grey because if they work it is then Google's fault and they should find a way to devalue them.
Google is the spammiest site on the web because it indexes spam and allows for spammy links to pass link juice. How come they change the rules overnight, so where they used to devalue spammy links (if detected), now want to devalue them by penalising the seller and threatening the buyer by sending notifications? Did you notice that in the notification they do not say anything about removal, exclusion or penalty? Why should we make a reinclusion request if the site hasn't been excluded?
it seems that they have decided to keep all the money for themselves as the blog networks part of SEO was massive. So, if you are a small business obviously SEO will become unaffordable because the low end SEO agencies could only make sites rank with spam. Therefore, SMEs will either spend their money on Adwords or simply shut down.
Regarding not submitting a request if you haven't seen a drop: the ostensible reason that Google sent out warnings without penalties is so that people would have some time to clean things up. If you can clean it up enough for the algorithm, there's no need to trigger a more strict manual review to ask something to be fixed that is not broken. This was my reasoning, anyway.
I can't really comment on Google's intentions, but you do put some interesting theories out there. I only know that the steps I laid out above are one way to fix things when they break :)
You are Cypriot I guess. I am almost shure , I know from the way ho you speak. You think that you know everything. Im shure you just discovered the site after my name. Well, here is not our small island , whre you can play the scientist mr anonymus. Watch and learn by the experts.Why you hide who you are by the way?
apparently they have updated this page 3 times recently. It used to say "there is nothing that can be done by your competitors" then "almost nothing", now they have removed that altogether.
Its cheaper and easier to build shit links to your comp than it is to build great links to your own site. im not saying this is what I or anyone should do, but it is what people WILL do.
every month just go buy 10 x Fiverr gigs and build a load of spam spun crap filled with porn anchors and fire at your competitors and watch their rankings tank.
Most sites wont have the strength of Amazon to out balance this.
That is the unfortunate possibility. I spoke with a lawyer over the weekend, and he suggested that you could almost definitely be found liable for damages if you do this to a site. He referred me to an expert in the matter, and I will try to get a post up somewhere with the interview.
Ok guys, my personal opinion about it. Me personally I don't lime spam. I hate when I see my sites passed from some spammy competitors sites. I know is frustrating but everything is coming to an end. Me personally I never buy, or outsource any task regarding link building. I do everything manual. I had one effect on the sites which I am marketing the last 2 years. They never get out from top 10. Why? Thanks to the "killer" https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/. I know is very hard to get the same backlinks as your competitors but this brings long lasting results. Stick on that. In case that you can't do it alone, seomoz allows multiple users from a single account.(we are using it on 2 pc, I don't know if allows more, but I guess yes) just hire somebody to help you. In my experience is the only tool which can bring long lasting results. I guess soon will come also the end of the spammy links builder by robots(xrumer,etc) or link networks.
All messages like teh one above from Google - IGNORE IT. I've not seen one client, either direct, or from one of our white label agencies we do work for, receive this notice with a penalty or even dimiished rankings that are for sure associated with that message.
That message from Google reads basically: HEY, LOOK AT ME, come visit my site Mr. Google, do a manual review, check out all my bakclinks, check my on page, and while your at it, do a whois and see what other sites I have and hit those as well... Maybe take down everything I've been doing. Oh, you have links on this page? What other sites are linked to from this page? Are any of them related to you by whois, or client lists on your site? Let's whack the whole bunch for shits and grins...
What is this, grade school? Ignore the message, keep your head down, and keep doing what needs to be done, depending on your market, niche, threshold for risk, etc.
Either build a squeeky clean site, spend a TON of time or train someone to make backlinks, and work your way up the corporate ladder and get a gold watch after 20 years
OR
Thow up a site, keywords in title tag, url if possible, meta keywords, meta description iwth compelling call to action, keywords as title, in body copy a few times, then NAIL it with links... maybe 30% to home page, 70% deep links, depending again on site, niche, etc. of the 30/70 80% of those keyword specific and 20% click here, url, more info, home, etc. Build them out using the same methods as before - what worked.
Google is trying to shake down and scare everyone from using blog networks for a reason - they are effective. Links are the DNA of the internet. Removing links from the algo would be extremely difficult. They've been trying for over 10 years. THey're making an example (JC PENNY anyone?) of a few sites, will kick up some dust for the next month or two, try to learn as much as they can from the folks who do rat on themselves, giving up valuable info to them that they can try to put together to take care of this algorythmically, which I seriously doubt they can now. These hae been manual.
If they weren't TERRIBLY effective, they wouldn't be shaking them down so hard...
Also, I think I remember reading somewhere that doing anything in an effort to artificially increase or affect a sites performance and ranking in the serps is in fact, against the terms and conditions....
If that is a fact, then anything remotely related to SEO is against TAC. So, now what do we do? Work on seriousness of infraction? We'll have to build that into our SEO models now, taking risk analysis and calculations for the perceived seriousness of the infraction this month.... Last summer content networks, Panda/Farmer for a year, now blog networks. Press releases and other stuff coming soon, round and round and round we go... were it stops, well, depends on how tight the beld is on Page and Brin, and if it's cutting off the blood flow to their brains...:)
Everyone take a DEEP breath, calm down, don't do anything, put the blinders on, and keep plugging away.
Happy April...:)
I read almost all comments from this page , the guys who talk about "negative SEO effect " are totally right, I know a person that destroy all websites from first page just to make a test, he is using an software names Xruner, he is able de destroy in 2-3 weeks any small and medium website, so , my opinion is that google will give to his users more and more low quality results , this is already happening , to bad , I was liked google so much , I starting to use Bing more times because google not even found titles of pages many times , I started use quotas some time when I use google because I realize will find better result ..
One things is still unclear - a lot of people are now saying the unnatural links penalty via WMT was manual. Matt Cutts says inone of the google videos that manual links are like a"time out". This suggets they expire over time. Can you offer any calrity on this ?
I have a link on my blogger blog (links widget) to a friend's site and apparently this is causing 230 links to appear. No if Google sees this as spamming but it's strange because only Google software is being used.
Great post! thx.
What do you do if you have sold the site that google previously marked as breaking quality guidelines ? Will they update their records by themselves ?
Thanks.
Thanks a lot bub/jen...I definitely agree and will be following your directions.
Do you think it's better/beneficial to also yank my site out of google webmaster tools?
Thanks Carson for this post.
We haven't seen this in Romania yet, but I am really happy to find out that some websites will receive an warning related to unnatural link building. I really thought that Google will cut all the rankings without telling why.
Just talked with a small business owner last days and he got no experience in SEO. He just told me that he found out about a blog network and he started to use it - he was very happy to see results. I explained this guy what's next with blog networks and he got scared. He solved the issue.
For those website owners that do not read about SEO a lot and they just found out the miracle of using blog networks, the warning about penalty is crucial. Those guys are usually naive and just try what it works. They will get out from blog networks when they receive the warning.
But true, why they do SEO if they know nothing about it???
Bound to happen to people who can think they can trick the system.
Google has the best engineers working on their product in the entire world. To think you can outsmart them, just no.
JRT
I seem to have run accross the old scam of enticing a link exchange and a few days after the exchange the link to my site vanishes, leaving a one way link to the perps site. I'm in a pretty tight niche and have discovered quite a few occurences of this practice from one site. I called him on it and he had the gall to tell me there was something wrong with my computer because HE could see the link.Can anything be done about this scam? What, if anything, does Google say or do about this practice?
Dude, Google doen't like link exchanges... They are something being done to artifically inflate your site in the SERPs. Google doesn't say or do anything about link exchange rip offs, I"m sure they actually LIKE them, because it most likely discourages what Google actually detests - link exchanges and aggressive SEO. It's part of the hypocracy of the seo landscape. Google is the biggest scraped site on the planet - having very close to 0% original content on it's site - it rips off all it's content from OUR sites to profit from, yet, when we do the same, in the form of affiliate sites, or otherwise, we're smacked down and relegated to beg for scraps from Bing and Yahoo.... :)
What can be done about your plight? Well, two things. Get a script, utility, or program to manage your link exchange programs. There are plenty of 'em out there that will monitor for reciprocating links. There are hosted solutions, one of the oldest and best probably being LinksManager.com There are also plenty you can run on your own site, search for link exchange management scripts, or reciprocal link monitoring scripts or software. Then, pull down links immediately when you have indeed manually verified that there is no reciprocal link. Software isn't 100% foolproof, so don't go screaming at site owners until you've manually verified and looked and can't find your link. If it shows up in your software that no link exists, google for it - In google type: site:www.SiteThatShouldHaveMyLink.com my keyword Look at the page or pages where it should be, and use the search function on the site itself as well. THEN if you don't see any link, give 'em one warning, then whack their link. That is probably the best way to handle it...
Remember - Google dossn't like link exchanges, they don't like three way link exchanges, they don't like blog networks, they don't like content networks, they don't like over-optimzed sites, and they SURELY don't want you doing anytihng to artificially inflate your site in the SERPS, BUT, they DO want all webmasters to give them all their traffic and otherwise data, and use their webmaster tools so they can better detect and control the dissemenation of all information in all mediums, period... all they like is good, original, clean content that they can scrape and put into their serps and surround with AdWords and profit from...:) If they can get AdSense on the site as well, all the better. It's the best, eat the whole carcass business model I've seen in a friggin LONG time....props for sure, friggin brilliant for sure...
Hi ho Hi ho it's off to farming I go, two scoops of Panda, and a glass of blog networks on the rocks... and some yummy article network sites for dessert...:) Mmnnnn.....
Thanks coolbubba. Well so Google has not changed it's outlook a bit. It's just what they're doing with it that has changed since i was last paying attention. I have been sort of out of the action for about a year. In any case, if I can now marshal my thought process I will take steps to fix what has happened to a good number of sites I take care of marketing wise. Let me throw this out there: Does anyone think that by adding more links, better links with other link text will dilute the presense if too many that have exact keyword anchors to even out the link profile a bit? Or is that wishful thinking?
We've seen clients with page penalties, but not site wide penalties. Theyv'e basically "abandoned" hte "penalized" page, created another page for the target keyword elsewhere on the site, begin to link to it, and it begins to come up..... We were linking to a site that came to us which had been having bad results already, links exceeding 2.5 million, I"m assuiming either via xrumer or something similar, and we linked to it, and it continued to tank. I don't know whether it woudl have tanked harder and faster had we not been linking to it or not, I'm leaning towards not, that the damage had been done....
I received this message on April 7th!
My site was registered in 2001..I took it over in 2008 and built it until today. I did some quality link building and some garbage link building too while I was learning the ropes of SEO. I only have about 1k links.
My site was ranking for certain keywords but far from page 1...page 5-30 in google for a bunch of keywords so it was getting no visits anyway. I hired an SEO guy and within 3 weeks I was ranking on page 2-4 for most keywords. It remained that way for 3 days and then my ranks went to page 5-10 and a day after that they went to Mars. When it was dropped to page 5-10, I got the lovely message in my inbox that same day "Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to mydomain.com". I asked the SEO exactly what he did and he sent me a report. He targeted my homepage and about 15 subpages with varrying anchor texts on all of the links...built about 300-400 in total. He built directory submissions, article submissions, social bookmarking, article bookmarking, built web 2.0 pages. So if anyone wants to create a deoptimization business, that is how it's done it looks as though. I believe my SEO messed up bad on the articles...he would create an article for a given page and then publish that same article and links to 50 article sites causing so much duplicate content. I actually requested for him to delete them. Should I actually delete all of the links my SEO built and start from scratch? Will it benefit me in any way?
Do you guys suggest that it's better to build a new domain and site from scratch instead of attempting to recover this one from googles bad books? I actually investied a lot in to this domain and had the site on it for years with aged links on it, etc. I would just hate to build a boatload of awesome links and never having it rank in Google due to it's penalty.
I read a lot about the reconsideration request and I'm leaning towards NOT submitting it. I don't want it manually reviewed and may do me more harm thatn good. I'm going to just delete my site from google webmaster tools and never log on to it again.
What are your thoughts experts?
I would suggest that you a) IGNORE the message from Google first off. You don't want to raise your hand for a manual review. You don't want them looking at your linking footprint and site.
I'd quit with my activity on the links you were doing, and start building some high quality links, like the ones from (shameless plug) Dallas SEO https://www.coolbubba.com :) I wouldn't throw away the site yet..
I totally agree. If you get a message AND respond - you are telling Google you are looking at things (remember - the general public is still clueless about SEO - so why would they be looking at their webmaster tools unless they have hired an SEO? It's best to appear ignorant). AND, if you get a message and freak out and make a bunch of changes - you are telling Google you do indeed have control of these links and basically are saying "Yes, I was/am buying links (knowingly against your terms)". Duh.
Instead, if you ignore and don't take down old links, but simply increase your high quality links/content, you are saying, not only do I not have control of the sites/people linking to me, but this was happening organically and therefore those links should help, not hurt.
The key is to continue. If you stop linking, you are screwed and will likely turn what could be a scare tactic into a permanent penalty which could take months or years to recover from.
Google makes me want to puke. Let the free market take care of things, stop shuffling the rankings just to boost ad sales. Google is a monopoly and like all monopolies that went before it, it will be chopped up and lose its power. Give it 5 years.
Also, is this blog funded by Google in anyway?
Carson, nice post!
It amazes me the shear number of people that actually use blog networks (or used to!). I have always felt that these would eventually be seen as 'link schemes'.
I think something additional may also be going on at the moment... I won't say too much here, as I just submitted a youmoz post about it (my first, actually!).
Good post though Carson, very informative and thought provoking!
The recent Google updates (starting a year ago with the first Panda... if you call that recent) seems to be stirring up a lot of emotions... the world has changed, the world has ended. Maybe the Mayans were referring to the digital world coming into a new age in 2012. Or better yet, maybe the Mayans were using pandas to make their predictions.
Jokes aside, I thought this was a great post. It brought up the age-old argument that building links that will help long-term is always better than the quick-and-easy (and inevitably dirty) methods like blog networks. But what I liked about this post is it brought up that argument with force.
I am all for goggle finding and devalueing the spam links. Penalizing the website that got them is a bad decision. I know of industries on line that have a lot of these bad links AND good content. Good content was not enough to rank well. The companies that relied on only "good links and good content" went out of business. This went on for the last several years. It is Googles fault for creating an environment that required these links for legit sites. Those that that did both the good and the spam links are the ones the ranked well. Overtime, if you wanted to compete, you had to do what the top sites were (are) doing.......and these are all legit sites with good content.
If Google does this in the industry I am familiar with, all the major players will disapear, or worse, it will be random as Google only hits a few of them.
Ouch! Would not want to be on the receiving end of that warning--Great advice!
This is all well and good but what if you get a penalty WITHOUT having spun crappy articles and used link networks? It's not only crappy links from rubbish sites that get penalised, it's any anchor text heavy link, regardless of whether or not it is actually paid for or how relevant a site it has been placed on.
The entire process is a manual process - that 'report paid links' function in webmaster tools is what you need to focus on in order to get your competitors penalised and there isn't a high-ranking site in the world that doesn't have anchor text rich links pointing at it. So go find a few, report them and wait for the manual penalty.
I'm not sure Google have taken the right approach in this instance, if their goal is to 'level the playing field' then introducing manual penalties only benefits those companies and agencies who have gone unnoticed and spent time reporting everyone above them. As the article alludes to, most high-ranking sites are not there purely because of a spammy link profile, they have a range of branding signals, links from press relesases and other content that actually gets read and commented on - so sites that have gone unnoticed, don't rank well for a number of reasons and tend to not be the most popular brands in the market. These sites should rank higher? According to the changes implemented so far by Google, yes they should. My take on it? use Bing, because Google is tying itself in knots here and will end up with second-rate brands outranking better ones.
"Restaurant owners don't go around attacking nearby restaurant owners' stores, because it takes a lot of effort"
I'm not sure I would agree - in fact, I've seen some horrible cases of this in the past through Google Places; one in particular where a competitor left a review claiming that the owner was a pedophile - completely destroying his business.
This issue is that it's not 'a lot of effort', leaving a review or buying an XRumer equivalent and letting it spam the hell out of a competitor is not difficult.
The only way I can see the competitor penalty issue going away is if blog networks are all taken down so that it becomes (ironically) difficult to spam the web with links.
In INDIA all websites are non branded. If google wants to make spam those website, then how to possible doing online business in INDIA. It's terrible.
There are elements of this post (and following comments) that appear to doubt that everybody that has received this email is in line for a penalty - do you really think Google is not going to penalize everyone involved? If so why?
Those that I have spoken to seem to beleive that a penalty will hit all 2-6 weeks after receiving the email & to my knowledge I have not heard one story of those that received the message in February not being hit with a penalty.
My experience and research leads me to agree with you - that those who don't back off questionable tactics and clean up their link profiles are headed for a penalty - as for when, I can't be totally sure, but I expect to hear a lot of "my site suddenly lost all of its traffic" questions in the near future.
Thanks for the great post. I look forward to joining SEOMOZ after I get these two sites fully designed.
Great... we just took on a new client, and reserched their link profile. IE YI YI. Looks like 70% blog network.
I think I will send them the link for this blog. Nothing like taking on a client and seeing the site penilized in the first 30 days. Thanks very much for providing this.
thanks for great posting.
my website has recieved the notication from Google 3 days ago, and i found some of my keywords have slightly dropped (not huge), so i am guessing i have not got penality yet. I was using buildmyrank.com as a part of my seo strategy. i have requested bmr to remove all my links and this process will take about 1 week. As you mentioned above,
If your site hasn't been penalized yet, but you received the warning, you can skip this step. Do not skip the step above, as you will eventually face into a penalty if you don't clean up your act and link portfolio.
Do you mean that i just need to clean up the unnatural links and do not need to request a reconsideration as i have not been penalized yet?
One of my friend website got the same notice two weeks ago, and he missed this message. all the keywords have been dropped hugely today. Does it mean Google just allows two weeks to delete the unnatural links?
thanks
Great question, and it's a point I didn't make as clear as I could have.
Google's warnings tend to be just that - a warning to clean things up and avoid penalization. This is what we've seen so far:
I recommend being in the later group. The degree to which you need to take down links will depend on your link profile, as I've tried to show in the venn diagram above.
Carson, thanks for making this clear. How can one tell the difference between a simple rank drop due to the blog network deindexing, (therefore these links to your site no longer are counted), V.S. a rank drop due to a penalty for using these networks?
Thanks in advance.
I have seen a few sites in the Insurance niche get taken down in the last few weeks, but the funny thing is the new sites which have come up are even more spammy in terms of link profiles.
In the end of the day I work in making long term strategies which will focus on assisting clients for the long term of their website rather then short term quick wins by throwing new clients on a network, and the worrying thing is that this happens more and more, many businesses do not offer transprancy of link building work completed, clients are left in the dark to what goes on, all they see is the results and think WOW these guys are doing good but in the back ground they do not see what actually goes on untill their ranking drop and they go WOW hit the pannic mode.
Yes people will use this to derank the competitor this is really bad !
I can easily buy a spam package of links for competitors, but wou;d never do that, but I think GOOGLE should be careful about this because it's done all the time, and hiring a seo company with bad practices are very common.
This screams for open source based search algorithms. There needs to be someone to lead the way. We need brillant ideas in this field, otherwise we're fucked big time. Whole "unnatural linking" issue is so riduculous that beyond words. What control I have over links pointing to me? And what's the defence of a site to not get all messed up by unfair competitor linking me to anything he wishes?
Hi
If you have received this message from Google and know you had tested out some links on a network which was outed recently, but you have since removed these links and your website hasnt yet seen any drops or penalties are you best not submitting a reconsideration request? or do you recommend only doing that if website drops?
I wouldn't do a request unless your site drops - just make sure to clean up what you can and do it by the book going forward.
Completely agree - submitting a reconsideration request will prompt a manual review of your backlink profile, which probably isn't a good thing if you've received a GWT warning. If you don't see any drops, leave it alone and just concentrate on building some high quality, relevant links, and maybe try and get rid of some of the dodgier links if you can.
Great post Carson!
I have to say, it was refreshing to see a post that included advice that didn't follow the "Google way" 100% (i.e., "If your site hasn't been penalized yet, but you received the warning, you can skip this step.") It's created some great discussions in the comments.
Speaking of comments - how is it that EVERY comment has at least 1 thumbs up?
Thanks for the post. One thing though, you said,'We can use tools like Open Site Explorer and Google/Bing Webmaster tools to find bad links.' I'm not exactly sure how to find bad links with the help of Open Site Explorer, could you explain how to go about that, please?
If I use dofollow high PR blogs & create forums profile Google will be give us penalty or not.
Its a quite useful article for all those SEO's who are still using old spamming techniques.
One question : Above article has still not cleared my one question that does it hurt our website if we submit one article in more then one article directory. Sometimes it is possible and necessary to submit one article in more then one article site. Some reasons to do this : Articles getting rejected and removed by article sites after 10 or 15 days.
In this case is it allowed to submit to more then one site.
Let me know.
Thanks.
It obviously doent do a lot of good in the short term for someone to totally ruin a site with spammy links, but I run a site that was actually BANNED PERMANENTLY from Digg a few years back, when someone, I assume a disgruntled competitor posted about 500 separate diggs in about 5 minutes (I assume via automated script) never again and to this day could someone "digg" our site. That was a minor annoyance. I see no reason why now someone wouldnt do the same with Blackhat SEO to get a site banned from Google. for very little money anyone can purchase an xrumer blast that will create hundreds of thousands of spam links.
Whoa, Carson you sure are comfortable flaunting your Black-Hatted roots these days! Nice post. One more reason to avoid directories, I suppose.
Flaunting is so not the word - trying to help others avoid bad strategy is all :)
I would like to get little more clarification on google changes.. Is it only for spammy blogs? or Links in general? like directories? social bookmarking?
The recent changes are specifically focused on private blog networks - you submit content with links, and the network posts it somewhere automatically.
For directories and bookmarks, I'd just refer you to the venn diagram above, and suggest that directories (especially those of low quality) and social bookmarking sites should not be the cornerstone of any SEO strategy.
Google is timely updating their algorithm and thus they are causing a big impact upon on SEO and also encourage the white hat SEO methods which are the best strategies for making users experience better but also to assist search engines to provide quality work on top.
I'm extremely excited about all the changes that Google is making. There is simply more money, and more opportunity when major changes are taking place.
Getting the unnatural links detected message means nothing. Google has been finding and devaluing untrusted links (and networks) for a very long time. The only thing new is the notification. All the notification is meant to do is scare webmasters. Fear is the only tool Google has against "unnatural link building".
The argument, that some are making, that it is a good preventative measure to remove spammy looking links, or to submit for reconsideration, is poor advice at best. All you are doing is hurting yourself.
Google doesn't penalize a website purely for having some "unnatural" looking links. Any ranking losses that are experienced would be from previously valued links being devalued (Submitting for reconsideration would not change that). A short 30-90 day trust loss can occur if there are a ton of "unnatural links" detected but that almost never happens to sites with other "Natural" looking links, social signals, quality content etc... Again, submitting for reconsideration will rarely result in a removal of the temporary/automated trust loss. All it will do is prompt Google to do a manual review of your site.. which rarely is a good thing for the webmaster...... accept in the very rare case that there was sabotage. Even then, Google is no longer empathetic to the story that "my seo company did it without my knowledge".
If you are an affiliate site with fluff content, zero natural links, no social signals, etc... Than yes you will probably be "penalized" if a ton of "Unnatural" links are found. But again, this has been the way of the world for many many years.
IF YOU GET THE NOTIFICATION, YOUR BEST BET IS TO IGNORE IT. Continue to perfect your link building skills, build quality content, build a social presence etc... and your rankings will come back in no time.
Well, as someone who has received this message, from my experience it wouldn't have helped ignoring it. A week or two after receiving this we lost rankings for all our main keywords.
We have attempted to remove all links that we thought might have caused the problem, and also sent a list of all the other sites where we couldn't remove the links.
We have submitted reconsideration requests twice and received negative replies.
Exactly my point. Its a waste of time to submit for reconsideration (Except under very rare circumstances, which I wont go into here)
Ranking losses are going to happen regardless of whether or not you submit for reconsideration. It takes 2-4 weeks after getting the message before the effects of link devaluations start showing up (As ranking drops). 2-4 weeks has been confirmed by hundreds of people accross the web in various forums. I have also seen it happen a dozen times first hand. Submitting for reconsideration is not going to prompt Google to revalue links it devalued.
In the unlikely scenerio that you were able to remove every link that they saw as being unnatural, you may recieve a positive response from them..... BUT YOUR RANKINGS ARE STILL NOT GOING TO MAGICALLY COME BACK. You may shorten the recoverY period of any trust penalty you recieved (thats a big IF though), but that recovery will be blunted by the fact that you probably removed a bunch of links that were likely helping you. Trust penalties are short lived anyways, its better to wait them out and to counter them by doing other trust building activities.
I'm sorry you fell for their trap, and I wish you the best of luck. Unfortunately you have now admitted to them that you have control over removing links, thus you have ultimately screwed yourself in the long run.. Google's algorithms can only guess as to what links are unnatural... and they can only guess as to who built those links (competitors, site owner, random link), but now you have removed all doubt. I hope others learn from your mistake.
To add to my last point. Your time is best spent building up your site, and doing proper content development and link building. Spending your time removing links in response to a Google notification is only going to make the problem worse in 99.9% of the scenarios.
Rank drops and trust penalties (even harsh ones) can all be overcome over time. If you or your SEO did something very stupid (like overoptimizing for a few keywords), you can still make a come back over time... and do it in a way that will minimize any future drops; while at the same time being proactive and conservatively aggressive with your link building.
To add one more point. I really wish Carson would rewrite this post. His intentions are good but ultimatly he is providing bad advice. I have clients who have read this post and followed his advice only to dig a deeper hole for themselves. Getting the notification is not the end of the world and if you lose rankings because of overoptimization you are not going to get those rankings back by admitting guilt to Google. You are only going to prompt a manual review of your site in which even a positive outcome is not going to magically bring your rankings back. You are only going to get them back by doing GOOD SEO.
Totally disagree. You mean you can just push a ton of spammy links to your competitors and then your site will rank? If it were that easy then I will be a millionaire right now.
You misunderstood the situation as far as i understood... read the article again, that will answer your question I hope!
Hi Carson Ward,
Really it's nice post. If you have unique & attractive content + SEO + USP then dafanatly you will success in SERPs.
Thanks,
Build my Rank was one from biggest and strongest blog networks. Build my Rank refused even domains with Page Rank 4, 5 and above to include in their network and had the only quality content, not allowing spin content. No doubt she will run again and victimization with Google will start again. My observation is that smaller networks still work fine - all networks that i use (100 to 500 sites) are ok.
With advanced seo tools from today is not a problem to reduce the effect of use of any paid network, even if it's as large as Build my Rank. Just make one or more quality submits in 1000 or 2000 social bookmarks submitted on three or more parts, not at once, from 5-10 different user profiles and with over 80% uniqueness of texts and your average link profile will look for the search engine ok.
It's true that BMR was one of the "better" sites quality-wise. They rejected really bad sites and really bad content, which is more than I can say for some of the networks that remain.
I think the message here should be that Google is not ok with these networks, even the high-quality ones.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket! I also believe that is just a matter of time until every blog network will be eliminated by Google from the game. However, I have found this network that is based on a different concept. It's called The Content Facilitator and it’s a kind of guest blogging marketplace. Bloggers looking for quality articles may come and browse for content. If you want to reach a larger audience and get some backlinks in the process you can submit your articles there. The C.F. runs on a credit system. Membership is free and every time one of your articles is picked up by a publisher, credits are deducted from your balance. In this way you don't wind up with hundreds of articles being published at once, avoiding an unnatural link profile. You also can use their coupon code DistributeMe for getting more credit(just enter it inside the members area after you will join). Here is their link: thebrilliantdeals.com/cf
https://www.brownseo.com/2012/03/the-end-of-buildmyrank-com-a-study/ ---> I tend to agree more with this guy.