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Yes they really are! 🙂
Oui. Ja. Si. Ja. Da. Ken. Hai. 是 [Shi]. Já. Haan. Да. Evet. Nai. Tak. Taip. Kyllä. Ja. Ya.
They are actually killing you site and business, that is if you are building a sustainable medium to long-term online business as most people do. If you are into the “trickery” business (like short term with no brand attachments … ) then unnatural links may still do it for you. (read about it at the end of the article).
Here are a few things on what this article is/isn’t:
- This is not SEO propaganda – just a catchy title 😉
- This is a Serious SEO Case Study.
- This is about link building strategies that work/[or don’t] in 2013.
- This is about real sites with real problems.
- This is about Google.
- This is for every SEO Pro! (penalized or not)
How good is Google at spotting shady links you might ask yourself?
This case study analyzes the ranking trends on a set of sites and correlates this information with their unnatural link profiles.
We took 4 sites in the “birthday invitations, cards and more” niche that were ranking top 10 on a set of keywords representative for the niche. One of these sites stands out with a steady SEO visibility growth in the last year.
This is the SEO visibility of the CardStore.com site for the last 2 years. Looking at the SEO visibility trend, it seems that they also had SERP volatility in the past due to some Google Penalties or Algorithms updates. Even so, they recovered and are increasing their SEO visibility more and more.
Looking good! Their link profile is Green and Orange. This means that the site is having a healthy link profile. Healthy link profiles may have a small amount of suspicious links. Nothing to worry about!
On the other hand, some of their competitors don’t have such a great SEO visibility.
Correlating the ranking data with the linking data, it is almost obvious why some sites are struggling in Google while others are winning.
Looking at the correlation between the unnatural links and SEO visibility, we can easily see that Google pushes up the sites with more natural looking link profiles. The sites with shady link profiles are steadily declining.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into the story of each individual site.
1. CardStore.com
Let’s look at what CardStore is doing, in terms of link building strategies.
By checking the competitive link analysis area we can easily spot a very low amount of commercial anchor text compared to the other sites. This usually indicates a site that is doing either smart SEO or isn’t doing SEO at all. The other sites seem to be a bit more aggressive in terms of SEO.
Another important fact that dictates a steady growth would be a consistent monthly link acquisition.
This chart only tells you that the CardStore site has a constant link acquisition trend, with numbers that are above their competitors’. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the links. If we look at the link velocity we see that this is trend started in 2009 and goes on since then. This single fact increases the chances of something “good” actually going on, leading to a link profile with a much higher number of referring domains.
Trying to discover some of their major link building strategies, I noticed what link building strategies they did not use. I refer to Web Directories and Article Directories Link Building.
Looking at some of the other competitors, we see 2 of them being quite active on Webdirectory link acquisitions, while others have a similar and more natural link acquisition pattern.
Overall this site’s main characteristic is that
No External Backlink Over-optimization!
2. Paperculture.com
Their webmaster confirmed that the site received unnatural link warnings from Google and also said that they did not see a decrease in search traffic.
In the PaperCulture case we see an increasing SEO visibility trend, even though the site has been sent unnatural link warnings. Taking a look at the naturalness of their link profile we can see that they have a small amount of unnatural links.
Their main problem seems to be the struggle to grow their SEO visibility.
It is important to know that unnatural link warnings do not necessarily mean a decrease in traffic they might also mean an SEO growth blockage. Removing the unnatural links might enable the site to grow faster, only if they increase the link acquisition trend in a natural way.
3. SimplytoImpress.com
With the high level of toxic links this site has, this only indicates the certainty of a Google Penalty or Unnatural Links Warning. This is also confirmed also by the SEO visibility trend. The latest major SEO visibility fall is on the Google Penguin 2.0 date.
At a more in-depth look, we spot the main problem in their link building strategy:
Webdirectories …
From my point of view, this “ancient” link building strategy, that once worked extremely well, slaps all the sites that abused it quite hard now. My recommendation for link profiles such as this is to start diluting them by doing “natural” link building and steadily removing the web directory links that were built in the past.
4. Finestationery.com
Their naturalness level is at the lower end limit. This means that they are on “moving ground” and that they are at risk to be hit by Google because of unnatural links.
SEO visibility has a rather big decline! My opinion is that this big decrease is not related to unnatural links but more to a Google Update in January 2013, a possible Google Panda as reported on several sites for that particular timeframe.
Having identified their biggest drop and looking at the rest of the visibility we see a linear visibility with a very small increase trend. It is important to notice that Google Penguin 2.0 did not have any impact on this site, even if they have a link profile with 19% to 25% unnatural and suspect links. I have seen these numbers on a lot of other sites that have problems with their link profile and have not been penalized yet. Looking at how Google’s algorithms have evolved in terms of spotting unnatural links, I would say that it is only a matter of time until these kind of link profiles take a big hit and loose any SEO visibility that they might still have.
In this particular case their brand vs commercial anchor text distribution is looking pretty natural. The “anchor text distribution” is also used by Google, in order to determine the overall naturalness of a site’s link profile.
Conclusion & Advice
With several in-house studies we did, similar to this one, I would “dare” to say that sites that haven’t been over SEO-ed have a very good chance of continuing with steady rankings and growth, while sites that move over the 15-20% unnatural links limit, have a very high chance of being penalized by Google for unnatural links.
Sites with Orange + Green Link Profiles are considered safe sites, in terms of unnatural link penalties. Unfortunately not many sites fit in this category and for the ones that don’t, I highly recommend starting to actively build links by not building links :).
That means forget about SEO for a moment (at least the way you did it before) and try to recover that lost authority that you once had. In order to do that you just need to prove to Google that your site is trustworthy of being top ranked in their index. You can only do this by following their guidelines and not by trying to bend the “law” in order to get a better ranking. Re-build your business model by focusing on SEO as an integrated marketing activity and not by trying to trick Google in thinking that your site is “the site” that should be ranked in the top spot.
And remember … all this makes sense, only if you care about Google’s traffic.
Good luck and I hope this case study helped you understand link naturalness, toxicity and SEO volatility better.
Unnatural Link Detection Tool Used
The unnatural link analysis was done using the automatic unnatural link detection Widget in the cognitiveSEO platform. You can try it yourself, if you have’t already, using the free 14 day trial.
A new feature that was silently added last week, is the Unnatural Link Comparison widget in the Competitive Link Analysis Area. This case study already highlights some of use cases for this chart. The major use case is the ability to compare multiple sites from a backlink profile naturalness point of view.
Always open to questions and discussions … so if you have any, ask them in the comments.
14 day Free Trial!
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PS: If your business model is short term, you should be reading this.
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What we’ve done for our clients is to focus on inbound marketing or more specifically content creation and optimization. Its been amazing to see the growth in traffic and quality leads from blogging even just 5 times per month and then leading into high converting landing pages.
I have a question about blog comments. I like to join in the conversation on professional marketing sites like Moz.org and HubSpot and when I run the unnatural links scan those show up as suspicious since they are blog comments. Any feedback on that? They don’t represent a huge percentage of my overall backlink profile because they are real comments I’ve personally made not comment spam.
My other question is for local businesses we often manually set-up profiles or citations on local business directories to help with their map optimization. Is this advisable or bad since they are web directories?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
any link building tehnique that is abused can be “patterned”. It might be in your case the blog comments are in a very high number and that is why they might be considered unnatural.
it would be ok if there would be a mix of nofollow/dofollow with a majority of nofollow. also do not abuse it. it should be part of the mix.
You are right Caleb, there are sites which are not friendly of comments, but they provide forms for it. And this sounds disgusting.
But thanks Razvan, you’ve got Stars for your post here, especially for that tips on how the google spots those shady links.
Best graphs presentation though, Keep sharing…
All well and good, and for sites with a little content and particularly in local markets this seems not only plausible but is borne out by my own studies.
However, (sorry had to be a “however”… better than a “but” I suppose) this does not tell the whole picture particularly for those with smaller websites and, strangely, those looking to rank outside of local.
I’m going to give one example here, and in doing so risk minimizing my argument, this is one example out of many I could give and you might want to examine.
There is a network of links which are as un-natural as my limited imagination could devise. Primarily links from website footer bars or “tag clouds” – therefore these are SWL’s (site wide links – supposedly not good at all). Many of them are hacked onto the host webmasters site without them knowing using an exploit or a breach in the websites CMS security and sold in bulk.
The websites these are placed on (for a fee – these links are sold) often bear no relationship what-so-ever with the target site and have zero in the way of supporting or relevant content on them. They are anchor text concentrated, little if any anchor text diversity. Typically the link has a high Page rank and the vast majority do not have the rel=nofollow tag set.
And here is the killer. One of thise networks alone has an estimated 14 million of these links supporting, it is estimated, 380,000 target site. This is not “small fry” this is huge – and this is just ONE of many networks doing this.
In this case the network is a four letter word beginning with “S”
I’ll give no more than that, but it is funny (to me anyhow) how that last phrase can apply in more than one way.
Add to that the many other networks and the other methods: Some examples?
PHP code injection from high Pr links is now growing – and again with zero relevance in terms of content and niche required between the host and target sites for quite staggering ranking potential
.GOV sites replacing .EDU sites as another way to boost (as long as the sites in question are NOT on a WIKI platform it seems)
What I think your excellent report shows is the way that individual business owners should note and use as a guide for the style/type of site they would typically have. 5-10 pages of primarily static content, geo targeted to local or regional markets, selling a definiable product or service that requires human interaction to deliver.
In affiliate marketing, lead generation, global “meme” farming, social niches, electronic downloads etc. The weight of evidence suggests that grabbing high Pr links with little or no regard for content, relevance or variation wins more today than ever in the past.
Let’s face it Google have had 14 years to sort this out and not much has changed. Arguments about results being “short lived” really do not cut any ice when this tactic has worked for as long as Google has been the number 1 search engine. All I can see is an increase in this “spam and bank” ability.
Why? I have an idea why there is this duality.
The competition.
“Real” business sites supporting real business have tightened their SEO methods.
This could be that certain markets and keywords have been identified by Google as “live” or “real”. Think of plumbers, builders, local solicitors or medical professionals a car dealership or waste removal company, local produce manufacturers etc.
Then there are the electronic, 3rd party, or trending markets. Downloadable products, affiliate sales for companies like Amazon and the latest specific products (phones, gadgets etc) and sites promoting these seem to have this “other” set of rules that apply to their offsite SEO – or – maybe….
The best of an overall spammy bunch shines through?
Just a possibility.
Dr Paul Rone-Clarke
again it is all about the bussines model. such bussines models exist and I have underlines this in the case study (https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/1075/black-hat-seo-technique-exposed-payday-loans/)
Trickery methods still exist and they will always exist. It is onyl a matter of bussiness model. Would a brand or normal bussiness want to get involved in this and face a really high risk of getting their brand site penalised ? I do not think so.
Sites that constaly are put on the top on super cometitive terms such as “payday loans” and “gambling” are one off shots. They rank for a few days and then are gone and another site comes and so on. … That is the bussiness model. No brand / No anything … just SERP hijacking. Yes it still works but with the implications noted above.
These are only a fraction though. The majority of the sites are normal sites from normal businesses that would not apply such a business model.
I agree entirely with the point here but would adjust the time scale from a few days to a few months, and sometimes considerably more.
sorry to say but i dont agree with your case study , according to my experience un-natural links still work , i know a site which was only one month old and had links about 1000 , on other hand google panda did not effect on it nor penguin update , and the amazing thing is that , its still on first page for its keyword , so my case study is quite different than you
you might have missed some parts of the article. citing :
” If you are into the “trickery” business (like short term with no brand attachments … ) then unnatural links may still do it for you. (read about it at the end of the article).
”
…
“PS: If your business model is short term, you should be reading this.” https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/1075/black-hat-seo-technique-exposed-payday-loans/
They still work for short term bussiness models, meaning if you want to rank high quickly you surely can … but you won’t stay there for long 😉
I read your case study, and its a well & good case study. But I am sure which tool you have used for your analysis. May I know that? BTW good job by your team.
Hi Dhananjaya,
It was written at the end of the article. Here it is:
“Unnatural Link Detection Tool Used
The unnatural link analysis was done using the automatic unnatural link detection Widget in the cognitiveSEO platform. You can try it yourself, if you have’t already, using the free 14 day trial.
A new feature that was silently added last week, is the Unnatural Link Comparison widget in the Competitive Link Analysis Area. This case study already highlights some of use cases for this chart. The major use case is the ability to compare multiple sites from a backlink profile naturalness point of view.
https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/3068/automatic-unnatural-link-detection/
“
Hi Razvan,
Great analysis! 2 questions:
1.) Based on your research are the spammy links causing the website to rank lower than it naturally would have or are these links just devalued to the point where they aren’t passing any “link juice” and the websites that lost rankings didn’t have the natural links to support their previously elevated positions from the spamming links?
Ex. A site with 110 links (10 good & 100 spammy) now ranks the same as a site with 10 good links or would it now rank lower due to the 100 spammy links?
2.) What are your thoughts on negative SEO? Could a competitor pay for a cheap service like a Xrumer blast – 10,000 links for $20 and get their competitors penalized or at least competitors penalized who have a weaker link profiles
Thanks! ~ Bill
P.S. The new Unnatural Link Detection Tool is awesome!
Hi William,
Let me answer:
1). at this point in time i think some links are devalued and some links are sending you a penalty. These links probably are links that are constantly added to your link profile and generate a “long term” pattern.
2). Negative SEO works unfortunately now. If Google will just devalue unntural links and not penalize you then neighter negative SEO will work anymore and sites will lose rankings without being penalized. NS works on faster on sites with low quality link profiles or sites with low authorithy.
Glad you like the tool 😉
Razvan
I noticed that for certain links that are detected by backlink-checker, the domain are already inactive but links are still there. How would this be evaluated by Google?
Hi Sinoschu,
Broken links might only have a memory effect in rankings. There are situations where this “link memory” effect exists in Google, keeping rankings up (or down) even if a link is removed. Some reported that it could be even up to 6 months.
Generally speaking those links should not influence the rankings anymore if they are lost for a longer period of time. It is like they have never been there.
Razvan
Using web directories has been very risky even since 2012. Sites that are continually using them run the risk of being penalized. Instead of going for web directories, choosing to build links with sites that are niche related (that isn’t a directory site) will yield better and safer results. Not to mention a highly targeted traffic.