Has Google Made Unnatural Link Building Easier?
-
I see lots of competitors and crappy sites ranking well for highly competitive keywords in the web hosting niche.
After analysing their backlinks, I noticed that most of them had only 1 or 2 backlinks to the page they wanted to rank. The anchor text is usually a slight variation of the targeted keyword.
Now suppose you are able to rank well for a handful of highly lucrative keywords using very few spammy links. That would mean that even if you got a Penguin penalty, cleaning up your link profile would take an hour at most.
I really have no intentions of using this strategy but it's frustrating to see spammy competitors outranking you with crappy sites and a handful of backlinks.
Your thoughts?
-
I don't think they buy google ads for most of them (the spammers)
-
I see this all the time within my niche and almost every niche. Google has become a useless engine, unless you are looking for news or information, but in that moment you decide to buy something, BAM, pure crap.... maybe because those sites are the ones that buy google ads?
-
I also happen to see new websites coming in and out of the top 10 on a weekly basis for some competitive keywords. Lots of them are about 6 months old.
-
There's a guy I see he just buys a sh*tload of spammy links and ranks high for about 1 or 2 months. When his website gets hits, he just buy another domain, puts back the exact same content (doesn't even care to change the website name in the image), spams the hell out of it and now he's back at the top with a domain he bought on August 25!!!
That's right! He ranked a brand new domain only 3 days after buying it! The website already got over 15k backlinks.
-
It seems that everyone is talking about this at the moment.
Google would appear to have got super addicted to providing fresh content, that it is ranking the newer sites higher than those with most authority. Why? I have no idea. Everyone is just taking the black hat route of making more sites, newer sites that can cheat the system for now, until Google packs up it's ideas and changes the algo.
I mean look at what has happened this year with updates, everyday is an update. I think we need to hold tight for the storm to settle and wait for everything to stabilise. Google can't keep this up for long, the SERPs change everyday!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
3,638 mystery inbound links from google.com
Hello, can anybody help me. I my webmaster tools, under "Links to your Site" and "Who links the most" It shows Google as the top inbound link source, with 3,669 out of 4,14, all these links are pointing to one sub page of content. Yet when I click on the source it only shows me one Google Plus page. My traffic hell by 60% when I first noticed these links. we have not been building unnatural links and we have not had any Manual link building warning. This is the site: iunlock.org Two questions:- I have deleted this one linked to page what else can I do to reverse this impact Does anybody know what has happened? See attached WWwnb1W.png
Technical SEO | | Jack4ireland0 -
Too Many Page Links
I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement. So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content. Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase. Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites. Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows. This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Google Sitelinks
Hello, Good afternoon. I am having a site issue with Sitelinks. For some reason when I search Google for the brand I represent "California Olive Ranch" Sitelinks are not being generated. When I search for "Cal Olive Ranch" our site links are being generated. Our domain is Californiaoliveranch.com. Is there a way to tell Google to to change the site links to match our domain and brand name? Is this something that can be done in Google Webmasters? Thank you very much for your help. Adam P
Technical SEO | | apost40 -
Are my graphical top level nav button links read by google spider
I have a site hypeled.com - the top level nav buttons are images. I have checked in Fireworks (with style off) and Lynx how the site appears to the Google spider and the top level links are not visible in either representation. In the source code the links have alt tags - The buttons are CSS and are referenced like this: <a <span="">class</a><a <span="">="company" href="</a>/the-company/"> Does google read these links? Does google read the source code of the site and give the proper weight to the top level links? Thank you, Jonathon
Technical SEO | | jonniewap0 -
Need advice on search listings and link building
Search results on my keyword (engraved wedding glasses) produces several pages of linked domains. (My domain is giftthings.net) Some are good. And admittedly, some are not so good. My question then is simply, why does seomoz link analysis show such a small number of links? And the second part of my question is, "Is there some sort of "magic number", some sort of thresh hold that triggers Google's interest? With a link list that is small but growing, am I missing something in my concern that I'm not moving up in the search listings? I've written a few articles, continuing my work on link building but I remain buried in the search results.
Technical SEO | | AhmadS1 -
If I get a natural link for a great site and I have my keyword with anchor text in this link, how should I proceed?
If I get a natural link for a great site and I have my keyword with anchor text in this link, how should I proceed? I need to contact the site and ask to remove the link or request the removal of the anchor text and leave only the site URL? Or yet do not I need to worry about this issue?
Technical SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Limit number of links in a page, how to build the menu?
Hi, One of the first SEOMoz tool recommand to me, is to avoid multiple links on the same page. This is fully true, i've more than 600 internal links placed in a menu on the header.
Technical SEO | | vdgvince
This means that each page contains these 600 links at least. User-experience wise, i need to keep this multi-level menu accessible. What would you suggest me ? => No-follow on the links would be useful and not penalizing (if i still have other do-follow links to these pages) => Javascript menu, so that i can't be crawled by google => Any other suggestion? Thank you in advance!0 -
Google Off/On Tags
I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan1