OK enough is enough, if you have not seen a message in your webmaster tools account in the last few days (Friday 20th July 2012) then you are lucky. There has been another round of email messages sent out advising of un-natural linking practices.
Firstly we would like to say if you have received a message like this in the last few days, then its OK you can just ignore it according to Matt Cutts.
Yeah right Matt, ignore it just like many advised in the last round of emails about un-natural links, and look what happened there.
Maybe Matt didn’t get the last memo about sending out manual notifications in which they definitely should not be ignored by any webmaster who receives one.
This has really sent the SEO community into a frenzy again, so much so that over the weekend another version of this email has been released due to the amount of feedback Google received from thousands of webmasters. Now the email has been re-written clearly defining what it is they are notifying you about.
Make sure you keep reading and you will find out why Google is broken and how you can take advantage of that right now…
It is said that Google’s intention was not to deceive but to be open and transparent about what they were doing which in the case was “Ignoring Incoming Links” however it really back fired and they received a lot of feedback about the whole mess they created.
Making Sure Your Links Count
Firstly why would your links be getting ignored in the first place? This is something that has been happening for many months and you really need to beware of what is going on and how we believe these links are being identified by Google.
You can spend countless hours building links to your site so make them count or you are wasting your most precious resource online, “Your Time”. The biggest mistake most marketers make is not building links to their own back links. Think of it this way, what happens when you write a post on your site and you do not build a single link to it, how long can it take to get indexed or in a worse case scenario it never gets indexed.
Building back links to your own articles where you have links pointing to your site is the fastest way to have those links found I think we all understand that right, but if the article you have your links on never gets links or any social interaction how important are the links from that article. It is a very good bet that those links with no interaction are being ignored and this is how Google is finding them.
Why Is There So Much Fuss About Links
You really have to wander why the fuss, is there more to all of this than what we think? As you know the Penguin penalty was for over optimization and especially incoming links to your site. This gets me thinking that there is more to this than meets the eye, firstly you need to understand that search engines can not read content they use indicators built into the algorithm to evaluate the content on the site.
As an example you could write the worst piece of content on the planet and then get as many likes,shares and tweets as you could as well as a few quality backlinks and I am pretty sure that article would rank, just have a look at some of the results in the serps right now there is a lot of rubbish being shown for that exact reason. I have even seen a site that had a few high PR links using only one keyword term in the anchor text (density 100%) rank in the top three for “affiliate marketing”. The content was poor but the links were solid and so was the social interaction for the site.
Another example has an affiliate site at position two for the search term “affiliate marketing” which has no social interaction with a keyword density of 7.3% for the primary keyword and an incoming link density for affiliate marketing to the home page at 85.8% so should be flagged as web spam according to the many guidelines and experts.
What If You Could Force The Search Engines To Create Links For You? How Much Time And Effort Would That Save You In Promoting Your Online Business. Find Out More
That site is using back links to get that listing, from high PR sites. Simply by finding sites that allow “Dofollow” comments or forum signatures this site has been able to list well in the serps, it has even placed links in some older guestbook sites and the kicker here is that none of the sites are related to that niche. Everything that Google claims they are stamping out with the Penguin updates does not seem to be working in this case.
What Google Does Not Want You To Know
So are the serps actually broken has Google lost control of Penguin and Panda?
It is looking that way.
What if I told you that sites are ranking in the top 10 for many primary keywords right now using 100% link density and nothing more than footer links on other authority sites or comments on EDU sites that are not niche related in any way. Every link they create is instantly indexed into Google which again goes against everything you have been told since the updates.
For us this is saying that back links are just as important as they have ever been and these algorithm changes are encouraging web spam more than ever before. There is an opportunity to take advantage of all this right now and if you do it right, you can future proof your site from the many updates that will be released in the coming months.
If you are using WordPress as your marketing platform you really need to check out the ABC 3K Plugin so you can start building links to your links faster and on autopilot.
Affiliate X, as a hands on DIY Guy I find this article very useful. I have read numerous articles on the importance of links and backlinking since the Google Penguin Update. Why? Because I got slapped by the update and lost a whole lot of traffic. Since then I have corrected how and where I do my backlinking and am now starting to see traffic return.
Thanks for breaking this down and making it easier to understand and what to do!
Galen
Hi Galen
I have been messing around with this for the last two months, my objective was to decrease my bounce rate which was at 72.87% as well as my time on site per visitor which was around 2:30 per visitor. Two months later and I have reduced my bounce rate down to 43.91% and my time on site per visitor has increased 13:02.
It is still only early days as yet but I have not seen any improvement in traffic due to being hit by the Penguin update which was when my traffic started to decline by more than 70%.
I am now working on changing my linking strategy and looking at getting some authority links from sites as per the examples in the post to see if that helps me out any.