Climate of fear in the world of SEO
-
There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason.
I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there?
I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it. I'm sure most of us on here could do the same.
Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?
-
Some great feedback here - firstly, thanks EGOL - I'm focusing 100% on content on a new site. Should be interesting - and that's a good point re: vandalism. I am concerned with the consequences of negative SEO / scrapers, clones, etc., though. Would be so good to be able to cut nasty incoming links in some way (I can but dream...) Love that saying too Donnie!
Good points there Marie - yes I get plagued by that stuff too - I'm beginning to wonder whether many of these comments are more about hoping some lunatic will click on the link than about manipulating SEO though.
To be totally honest, I wouldn't mind if Google laid down specific rules for linkbuilding. We advise that site owners should only proactively build no more than 10 links/page from relevant sites. The rest should be generated naturally. Something far more specific than we have at the moment.
And thanks Arpeggio. A very good point indeed. I agree.
-
The more advanced technology and logistics etc. becomes the further away human accountabilty becomes. I think thats a major challenge in the modern day in general.
-
I think the latest changes made by Google are accomplishing exactly what Google wants. They want website owners to stop "building links" and instead make the best possible site that gives the user the best possible information.
If they simply discounted links then many people would still go on building them "just in case" they helped. I mean, everyone knows that nofollowed comment spam is very unlikely to be helpful, but I get thousands of crap automated comments on my blog each month that are killed by Askimet, so people are still doing it.
But by building a culture of fear around links they've managed to get a lot of people in the SEO world saying, "Man! If I keep building links I could get a big penalty and my site could tank." The result? People stop building links.
Now, there are some links that are not a bad thing to build and this is the scary thing. People will be afraid to get ANY links to their site and that's not right. I know of someone who got the Better Business Bureau to remove all links to their site because they thought it could look unnatural. That is a good link
-
Thanks
-
"Give the people what they want and Google will give you to the people"
Thanks... that's a great saying!
-
I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there?
Google finally realized that merely "discounting" the links was resulting in a continued vandalism of blogs and forums as linkbuilders deposit their rubbish.
Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?
I think that they have "stuck" with their use of links for way too long.
Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources.
A method to try would be to place 100% of your effort into building content and allow the links to slowly build on their own. This will start very slowly but will build to a rate that reflects the value of your content.
-
They want to give users the best results possible, by ensuring that their SERPs are not easily manipulated they can ensure a better overall user experience.
My saying has always been:
"Give the people what they want and Google will give you to the people"
Its quite simple.. they want sites that have a natural link profile and a great user experience (bookmarked, linked to, or shared)
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
-
Is it bad from an SEO perspective that cached AMP pages are hosted on domains other than the original publisher's?
Hello Moz, I am thinking about starting to utilize AMP for some of my website. I've been researching this AMP situation for the better part of a year and I am still unclear on a few things. What I am primarily concerned with in terms of AMP and SEO is whether or not the original publisher gets credit for the traffic to a cached AMP page that is hosted elsewhere. I can see the possible issues with this from an SEO perspective and I am pretty sure I have read about how SEOs are unhappy about this particular aspect of AMP in other places. On the AMP project FAQ page you can find this, but there is very little explanation: "Do publishers receive credit for the traffic from a measurement perspective?
Algorithm Updates | | Brian_Dowd
Yes, an AMP file is the same as the rest of your site – this space is the publisher’s canvas." So, let's say you have an AMP page on your website example.com:
example.com/amp_document.html And a cached copy is served with a URL format similar to this: https://google.com/amp/example.com/amp_document.html Then how does the original publisher get the credit for the traffic? Is it because there is a canonical tag from the AMP version to the original HTML version? Also, while I am at it, how does an AMP page actually get into Google's AMP Cache (or any other cache)? Does Google crawl the original HTML page, find the AMP version and then just decide to cache it from there? Are there any other issues with this that I should be aware of? Thanks0 -
New .TLD domains - SEO Value?
Hi all, I see that a new wave of domains are to be released soon. We are not talking or 1 or 2 new extensions, but more like 700 new extensions on a TLD level. What's your views on their SEO value? thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | bjs20100 -
Giving Follow Links is good for SEO ?
Hi Friends, In my website I am having PR 5 for my home page and I am giving 25 external links as follow link. Reason is all links are natural links so I gave as follow links. Will my website will be decrease PR in future. 1) Should I need to give as nofollow links? 2) Can I update only for reciprocal links as nofollow? In total 25 links I have 3 reciprocal links only. Your suggestions on this are important for me. I had watched couple of videos from Matt Cutts on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4UJS-LFRTU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g37bwBlifnk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg1A5wF3Ac4 Thanks for your valuable time.
Algorithm Updates | | zco_seo0 -
Yoast SEO plugin and Weak Links
The plugin has what I thought was a great feature. My main site is often scrapped and I thought 'well at least we're getting a Link out of it' - due to the RSS feature of Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin (you can add a link to the bottom of your RSS feeds). Now Google is talking about Links from weak/crap sites and how they may impact your rankings. So - with this in mind.. Do we want links from scrappers? Are we now better off discontinuing the usage of this feature? I imagine there may be varying opinions on this so I'll open it as a discussion... thanks
Algorithm Updates | | TheHockeyWriters0 -
Help with local Seo?
Hi, I am really struggling with current predicament i find myself in. I am a small to medium sized business based in Newcastle in the UK and am trying to rank well locally for the keywords that i feel my customers will be searching for locally. I have got to the stage where i am on page 1 of google uk or nearly there but cannot compete against the national companies who have the search terms then just add pages for virtually every city in the country. For example my main product is "Artificial Grass" and my city/town is Newcastle This is where my office is and where my customers are. This is also where my google places page states. Now theres a company that sells Artificial Grass called www.asgoodasgrass.co.uk that are based no where near but use the power of there site to come up in every local search by adding a page "Artificial Grass Newcastle" as well as hundreds of others. They rank 3rd and im 8th. There actual Newcastle page is poor, where as i put everything into my page including pics, video etc. Still no joy. I feel i am always going to rank behind these big boys even though i am the actual local company and have no intention of working others area that are not local to me. By the time i rank behind the above type companies and the likes of yell.com i feel i am never going to be seen and fall back on expensive adwords to help me along. I am a complete newbie at this and would love any help or tips you could give to give me a fighting chance in my area. My site is www.totaldrivewaysne.co.uk incase you want to look as you will have gathered my other primary product is driveways for which also i feel like i have a million competitors! many many thanks for any responses John
Algorithm Updates | | totaldriveways0 -
Video SEO: Youtube, Vimeo PRO, Wistia, Longtail BOTR Experience and questions
Obviously Video SEO is changing, Google is figuring out how to do it themselves. We are left wondering… Below we have tried to explain what we have learned and how the different sites work and their characteristics (links to graphics provided) Our problem is: We are not getting congruent Google site:apalytics.tv Video filter results. We are wondering how duplicate content may be affecting our results… and if so, why will Youtube not be duplicate and prevent your own site SEO efforts from working. Is Youtube special? Does that include Vimeo too? We see our own duplicate videos on multiple sites in Google results, so it seems it is not duplicate related…? We’d appreciate your experience or add to our questions and work as a community to get this figured out more definitively. Thanks! We’ve tried four video hosting solutions at quite a cost monetarily and in time. 1.) Youtube, which gets all the SEO Juice and gets our clients on to other subjects or potentially competitive content. Iframes just don’t get the results we are looking for. 2.) See Vimeo Image: Vimeo PRO, a $200 year plus solution that allows us to do many video carousels on our own domains hosted on Vimeo, but are very limited in HTML as only CSS content changes are allowed. While we were using Vimeo we allowed the Vimeo.com community to SEO our content directly and they come up often in search results. Due to duplicate content concerns we have disallowed Vimeo.com from using our content and SEOing our content to their domain. However, we have many “portfolios” (micro limited carousal sites on our domains) that continue to carry the content. The Vimeo hosted micro site shows only three videos on Google: site:apalytics.tv During our testing we are concerned that duplicate content is causing issues too, so we are getting ready to shut off the many microsite domains hosted at Vimeo. (Vimeo has an old embed code that allows a NON-iframe embed – but has discontinued it recently) That makes it difficult if not impossible to retain SEO juice for anything other than their simple micro sites that are very limited! 3.) See Wistia Image: Wistia, a $2000 year plus solution that only provides private video site hosting embedding various types of video content on one’s site/s. Wistia has a free account now for three videos and limited plays – it’s a nice interface for SEO but is still different than BOTR. We opted for BOTR because of many other advertising related options, but are again trying Wistia with the free version to see if we can figure out why our BOTR videos are not showing up as hoped. We know that Google does not promise to index and feature every video on a sitemap, but why some are there and others are not and when remains a mystery that we are hoping to get some answers about. 4.) See Longtail Image: Longtail, Bits On The Run, (JW Player author) a $1,000 year plus like Wistia provides private hosting, but it allows a one button YouTube upload for the same SEO meta data and content – isn’t that duplicate content? BOTR creates and submits video sitemaps for your content, but it has not been working for us and it has been impossible to get a definitive answer as I think they too are learning or are not wanting the expose their proprietary methods (which are not yet working for us!) 2O9w0.png 0eiPv.png O9bXV.png
Algorithm Updates | | Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.0 -
SERP and SEO Moz ranking
Until a couple of months ago the predicted SEO Moz ranking for a specific keyword was fairly close to what I actually experienced with my website. However, since then the correlation has not been good. For example, according to SEO Moz I am ranked #1 for a specific keyword with google.ca and google.com yet my site actually shows up consistently at #3 for that keyword. Has anyone else noticed this divergence?
Algorithm Updates | | casper4340 -
Addicted to SEO: Please Help!
Hello. My name is Justin. And I am an addict. I have recently starting dabbling around with SEO about five months ago. And I have found myself wanting more and more. I feel like I needed to come to this group of other addicts and admit it to you. I am constantly checking my ranking in Google. I am obsessed with my keywords. And I will sell my soul for a PR8 in-bound link. I desperately want my site: www.findahealthcarejob.com to be the best in the universe and it has been a wonderful drug for me. This must stop. Please help me. What are some steps of your own 12-steps that help you detox from this addicting lifestyle? Thank you.
Algorithm Updates | | findachristianjob0