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
-
Is there software that makes it easier to reach out to websites and webmaster to have toxic links removed?
I'm currently trying to disavow toxic links that I have found on my site, that our previous SEO company created. Google requires that we reach out to the individual websites and try to have them removed. Does anyone know of software that makes this process automated or easer? I'm currently doing it manually, uhg! Also, is there software that can help you find toxic links? I'm currently also doing that manually, uhg! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | milehigh52800 -
Links below linking (not sitelinks)
Hi All, Please can you let me know the name and / or point me at an article / blog / directory on how best to achieve additional links under a search engine listing (I don't mean site links) e.g. I do a search for 'home insurance' on Google.co.uk and under the listing for Compare the Market it has - home insurance, building insurance and landlords insurance. Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Joseph-Vodafone0 -
Too many links? Do links to named anchors count (ie page#nameanchor)?
Hi, I have an internal search results page that contains approx 200 links in total. This links to approx 50 pages. Each result listing contains a link to the page in the format /page.html and also has 3 more links (for each listing) to named anchors within the page. eg /page.html#section1, /page.html#section2, /page.html#section3 etc. Should i remove the named anchors to keep my links per page under the Seomoz suggested max of 100? Will it impact crawl-ability or link juice being passed? Thanks in advance for your response.
Technical SEO | | blackrails0 -
Too many on page links
Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important. But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
4XX Broken Links
I am attempting to fix the issues SEOmoz found when crawling my site. I have a list of 4XX errors that I am attempting to fix. Basically I know one option is to redirect them to another page, but I would like to have the option to remove the links completely. The only problem is I can not find where the links are located. Does SEOmoz provide where on my site these broken links are? Or do they only provide the url that is linked to?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
How to find artificial or unnatural links in OSE?
Hi, I just got a message from Google Webmaster Tools telling that there are "artificial or unnatural links" pointing to one of my subdomains, and that I should investigate and submit my site for reconsideration. The subdomain in question has inbound links from 4K linking root domains. We are a certificate authority (we provide SSL certificates) so the majority of those links come from the site seal that customers place on their secure pages. We sell certificates to a full spectrum site types, from all sizes of ecommerce sites to .edu, .gov, and even adult. That said, our linking root domains have always been a mixed bunch, which tells me that these offending links were recently added. Here are my questions: Is it possible to slice my link reports with some sort of time element, so that I can narrow the search to only the newest inbound links? How else might I use OSE to find these "artificial or unnatural links"? Are there any particular attributes I should be looking for in a linking root domain that might suggest it's seen by Google as "artificial or unnatural". Any help with any aspect of this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Dennis p.s. I should probably state that I've never bought links or participated in link schemes.
Technical SEO | | dennis.globalsign0 -
A Puzzling Link
I'm stumped and I'm hoping some mozzers will be able to help. I run our company blog (http://scottymacblog.com/). The last couple of days I have noticed that the blog is receiving some traffic from cnn.com. I looked, but cannot find any mention of the blog on cnn. Adding to my frustration is that the content on cnn is constantly changing. Our blog doesn't do any sort of advertising and no one affiliated with the blog posts on cnn. As great as it is to be getting traffic from such a valued source, I have no idea why. Has something like this happened to (for?) anyone else? Any ideas on how I can research the source of the link? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | EssEEmily0 -
Value of Twitter Links
Let's ignore the "social metric" value of Twitter links and mentions and look at it from the pure link juice point of view. Twitter accounts such as http://twitter.com/randfish used to have their own PageRank and were treated as separate URLs. Twitter changed that to http://twitter.com/#!/randfish consolidating all their content to a single URL. When I search for "randfish" in Google, however, the result is the first URL version. Some clarification on this matter would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0