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
-
Does "google selected canonical" pass link juice the same as "user selected canonical"?
We are in a bit of a tricky situation since a key top-level page with lots of external links has been selected as a duplicate by Google. We do not have any canonical tag in place. Now this is fine if Google passes the link juice towards the page they have selected as canonical (an identical top-level page)- does anyone know the answer to this question? Due to various reasons, we can't put a canonical tag ourselves at this moment in time. So my question is, does a Google selected canonical work the same way and pass link juice as a user selected canonical? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Lewald10 -
After you remove a 301 redirect that Google has processed, will the new URL retain any of the link equity from the old URL?
Lets say you 301 redirect URL A to URL B, and URL A has some backlinks from other sites. Say you left the 301 redirect in place for a year, and Google had already replaced the old URL with the new URL in the SERPs, would the new URL (B) retain some of the link equity from URL A after the 301 redirect was removed, or does the redirect have to remain in place forever?
Technical SEO | | johnwalkersmith0 -
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
How to fix broken links?
Hi, I use WordPress CMS with Yoast SEO plugin. I have just found out that my 403 errors increased dramatically. It seems that all my tags below of each post are being broken for some reason. When i click on the tags i get the following massage: **403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. ** I assume it has something to do with the configuration within Yoast SEO plugin. Dose anyone know how should i fix that? Thanks, Raviv evsGujA
Technical SEO | | Indiatravelz0 -
Why my site is not indexing in google
In google webmaster i have updated my sitemap in Mar 6th..There is around 22000 links..But google fetched only 5300 links for long time...
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Chandran
I waited for 1 month till no improvement in google index..So apr6th we have uploaded new sitemap (1200 links totally)..,But only 4 links indexed in google ..
why google not indexing my urls? Is this affect our ranking in SERP? How many links are advisable to submit in sitemap for a website?0 -
Google webmasters showing links from my own IP
Was looking at Google webmasters earlier today and I noticed that links are shown from my own IP address. Really weird. Any clue on how to fix that?
Technical SEO | | EricMoore0 -
How Does Link Juice Pass?
Say there is a link on an authoritative site to my site, and the link points to www.mysite.com. However, I have set all URL variations (https://mysite.com, www.mysite.com, mysite.com, etc.) to redirect to http://mysite.com automatically. Does the link juice from this authoritative site pass through the www.mysite.com URL to http://mysite.com automatically due to the automatic redirect? I guess my question is does the link juice automatically pass on to the destination URL, even though it is not the original URL the authoritative site pointed to?
Technical SEO | | NiallTom0 -
Too many footer links?
Hi. We're working on http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ at the moment, and I was wondering what's everyone's opinion on footer links. There's quite a lot on the page, and I was wondering if there might be a few too many. If so, what would be the best plan of action? Remove them altogether, stick them in an iframe or in a bit of JS so they can't be crawled? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | neooptic0