In order to make sure you use the Google Disavow Tool right, you must first know when you are actually allowed to use it. This advanced Google feature should only be used in specific scenarios.

If you’re interested in finding out when you should use the Google Disavow Tool, keep reading, because you’ll get all your answers in this article.

1. What Exactly Is the Google Disavow Tool?
2. When to Use The Disavow Tool
   1. When there’s a dramatic drop in traffic & rankings
   2. When your site has been spammed with Negative SEO backlinks
   3. When you know your SEO Agency built spammy links to your website
   4. When you have a manual action applied on your site
   5. Other cases
3. When NOT to Use the Disavow Tool
   1. When there’s no drastic drop in rankings
   2. When you’re not sure if it is a penalty
   3. When there’s a small drop in rankings
   4. For testing purposes
4. How to Easily Disavow Links
5. Is the Disavow Tool Actually Helpful? (READ THIS)

A lot of webmasters see this tool as the ultimate salvation for their problems when they get an algorithmic or manual penalty. Even though generally  the objective of the Disavow Links tool was to be used as a resort to resolve link problems, it is not as simple as it seems.

What Exactly Is the Google Disavow Tool?

Long story short, the Google Disavow Tool is a feature in the Google Search Console (former Google Webmaster Tools) in which you can submit a list of backlinks that you want Google to disconsider. It was launched in late 2012 and was a pretty big deal back in the day.

The Google Disavow tool became a very popular topic in the aftermath of the Penguin 2.0 update. The changes made to the algorithm “dissolved” a lot of abused black hat SEO techniques and affected a lot of webmasters that found themselves on the wrong side of the street all of a sudden. The effects were harsh and visible and the website owners were desperate to recover their dropped rankings.

It became clear that this tool was developed in order to help webmasters solve their issues regarding penalties. The process seems simple. You have to create a file in order to show which links you want Google to disregard.

However, later on, people found out that the tool is actually much more than that. Through this very tool, Google collects information about spammy links across the web as users submit them. This way, it can improve its database of types of backlinks to better identify spammy and shady ones in the future.

For this very reason, the Black Hat SEO community doesn’t like the Disavow Tool. Many advised people not to use it, because it will help Google get stronger and catch their tactics quicker. But fearful webmasters rushed in to submit their spammy link profiles, in hope that they will be spared or forgiven.

Today, as of the new version of GSC, there’s no actual way of accessing the Disavow Tool from the Search Console. Although Google sends you to the new version, the tool can’t be found there either. 

The Google Disavow Tool can be however directly accessed from the web by searching for it, or by accessing the Disavow Links Main Page.

In order to use the tool, you need to have a verified property in GSC. This means you can disavow backlinks only for websites that you own. The process is pretty simple once you have the proper list.

Getting that Google Disavow links list right, however, is another story. I’ll explain it soon.

When to Use the Disavow Tool

Short answer is that there are only a few isolated cases in which you should use the Google Disavow Tool. If you’re not sure you should use it, then the answer is probably don’t.

When deciding to use it, you should take into consideration a couple of things:

First of all, you need to make a quick link audit and see which are the links that are harming your site the most. You need to carefully determine the bad and the good and see which links could influence your site’s ranking drop. If you’re not careful, you might end up loosing some valid links that would otherwise pour some of that precious “link juice”.

Then, you have to take into account the fact that, before appealing to the disavow tool, you could try to remove the bad links manually by contacting the owners of the websites that point to you. Before panicking and running straight for the disavow solution, you should carefully try to clean up your mess the old fashion way. It may sound like a laborious task but you can make use of third-party tools that can help you speed up with the unnatural link detection and outreach.

You may want to use this tool if you stumble upon the following problems:

1. When there’s a dramatic drop in traffic & rankings

Obviously, a dramatic drop in traffic and rankings indicates an issue with your website. However, you should not rush in to disavow your links. First, make sure that that is the issue and try to exclude everything else before you decide on doing it.

The whole concept of disavowing unnatural links must be taken very seriously as it may also harm your ranking. This process should not be done on a haste.

You should take your time weeding out the bad and you should submit a list to be disavowed only if you’re 100% sure of the links that you send. You should also remember to try to manually remove the harmful links, not only to show Google your good intentions but also because you don’t know how long the disavow process could take.

2. When your site has been spammed with Negative SEO backlinks

If your website has been subject to a large scale Negative SEO attack, then you can consider disavowing those bad links.

But how do you know when your site was attacked? And how do you know which links are good and which links are bad?

Well, you can always use the CognitiveSEO Tool to monitor your backlinks and see if your link profile suffers major changes in a short amount of time. You can also use the tool to determine which links are natural and which links fit the patterns of spammy links by using our Unnatural Link Detection feature.

I’ll tell you more about how to exactly identify the bad links in a bit, so keep reading. First, let’s take a look at some other scenarios where you should consider using the Disavow Tool.

3.When you know your SEO Agency built spammy links to your website

Many times, webmasters hire companies to do SEO work for them. If you don’t choose your SEO agency right, you risk ending up with an SEO that will use BlackHat link building tactics to try and boost your site.

This might end up in a manual action penalty for your website, which are usually pretty hard to recover from.

If you find out that your SEO agency has been building unnatural links to your website instead of using techniques accepted by Google’s Guidelines, then you should consider using the Disavow Tool.

However, keep in mind that you should never disavow links massively if your website has not yet been penalized!

4. When you have a manual action applied on your site

Manual actions aren’t something you will often see. They are rare, isolated cases. However, they do exist and, if your website is one of them, you can consider using the disavow tool.

There are multiple types of manual actions, so make sure you start disavowing links only if you see the “Unnatural Links” warning. 

Other types of actions are related to Thin Content or User Generated Spam. These problems are fixed in other ways, without using the Disavow Tool.

To see if any manual actions have been applied to your website, go to the Google Search Console and find the Manual Actions section in the left menu.

Hopefully, you’ll see something like this:

If you see any warnings here, make sure you fix them and then submit your site for reconsideration (also done in the GSC under Manual Actions).

5. Other cases

Now of course, there are some other certain situations when you might want to Disavow some links that you’re sure provide no value, for example when the linking sites have viruses or malicious software.

However, if these links take 1% or less of your total links, then you probably shouldn’t bother (except if that 1% means thousands of links, which looks more like an attack).

John Mueller said that it’s also possible to disavow links in order to prevent future penalties and achieve ‘peace of mind’. That’s a sneaky way of threatening webmasters that they will get penalized if they don’t submit their links.

However, Gary Illyes later said that he would not bother to disavow some spammy links.

I have a site that gets 100,000 visits every two weeks. I haven’t looked at the links to it for two years, even though I’ve been told that it has some porn site links. I’m fine with that. I don’t use the disavow file. Don’t overuse it. It is a big gun. Overusing it can destroy your rankings in a matter of hours. Don’t be afraid of sites that you don’t know. There’s no way you can know them all. If they have content, and they are not spammy, why would you disavow them? Sites like this are very unlikely to hurt you, and they may help you. I personally trust Google filters.
	Gary Illyes
	Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google / @methode

Our recommendation is to ignore these links unless there’s a visible penalty on your website, such as a manual action in GSC or a massive drop in traffic/rankings which can’t be attributed to anything else (HTTPS migration, redesign or some other major modifications to the site).

If you think your site is suffering from some bad links and you really want to remove the links you suspect, start slow, by disavowing only 5-10 links at a time. Wait for a couple of weeks to spot any effects and then expand by updating the disavow file with some new spammy links.

Track your rankings carefully to spot any differences and if you see massive negative impacts, remove the disavow files and stop messing with the tool immediately.

When NOT to Use the Disavow Tool

Usually, the answer is to never use the disavow tool except for the cases mentioned above. Some people think that it’s a good idea to use the Disavow Tool from time to time to make sure they clean their link profile, but they end up messing things up very badly!

To get a better understanding, here are some specific scenarios when you should not disavow the links:

1. When there’s no drastic drop in rankings

The reasons for which you may experience a drastic Google ranking drop may vary from website to website and in generally there is a serious guideline violation. But if you don’t experience that, you shouldn’t be panicking.

You may just be outranked by a competitor. As a consequence, there is no need to rush and get the disavow tool from your link survival kit.

You should try to analyze and track your competitor and see what is their SEO and content strategy. Also, you should maybe step up and improve your own approaches.

2. When you’re not sure if it is a penalty

When you receive a manual penalty the situation is pretty clear. Especially if you make use of Google Webmaster Tools ( which we strongly recommend). You will receive a message in which they warn you about the actions taken against you.

While this is easy and straight forward, an algorithmic penalty is not that obvious. You’ll have to make a personal assessment to see if it’s a penalty or it’s just the fact that the links are low quality. And if it is indeed an algorithmic penalty, what is harming your site’s ranking?

3. When there’s a small drop in rankings

It may just be a quick road bump in the road. You may always experience a flux in ranking that is unpredictable. As a golden rule, if you don’t have an explicit message from Google that you’ve been penalized or if you know you have an unnatural link profile, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

Your ranking could just recover on its own after a day or two. Moreover, a small drop in search engine ranking may just be influenced by the fact that you have many low quality links pointing to your site.

The solution here isn’t to remove those links, but to focus on building higher quality ones.

Usually, an algorithmic penalty will take place after an algorithm update. Sure, sometimes you might get penalized much later after the update, but usually, if that’s the case, chances are that it’s rather a manual penalty than an algorithmic one.

If you’re not sure whether there’s been an update on Google’s algorithm, you can check the CognitiveSEO Signals Tool.

You also have to check what the algorithm was about. Google doesn’t say much, but sometimes it says things like “this update will affect website that are not optimized for mobile”. If you can correlate what Google says with your website, then you have an issue.

4. For testing purposes

The final advice on when not to use the Google disavow tool would be to not just use it so you can see how it works. Cyrus Shepard made such an experiment and here are his “sad” findings.

DON’T DO THIS AS HOME!!! – Just don’t toy around with this tool, you may get fried!

The saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is very much true in this case. This is one of those tools that you just don’t want to learn at your own cost. It’s too powerful and the damage it may do if misused may be irreversible.

The Disavow Tool is an advanced feature and should not be used unless one actually knows what they’re doing. It’s risky and shouldn’t be played with.

Unless it’s one of the scenarios mentioned above, which are pretty critical if you ask me, it should be avoided.

Don’t disavow links or domains with low performance. Low DA links are part of a natural link profile. In the end, disavowing them might do more harm than good.

Maybe a new, small website with low domain performance writes about your website and links to it. Should you disavow these types of links? Definitely not.

Someday, that low domain performance website might become really popular and have a great deal of domain authority. Not only this, but the link might already be contributing to your site’s well being.

How To Easily Disavow Links

As stated above, you usually have to disavow links in severe cases of web spam and negative SEO attacks or manual actions. In case your site was massively spammed or already penalized and you have no way of removing those links, then you can use the Disavow Tool without any limitations to try and fix things.

Remember that you’re doing this at your own risk. Don’t rush Disavowing links if you’re not penalized yet. 

The truth is that disavowing links is a very difficult and time consuming process. In the end, it sounds as simple as uploading a text file on the web, but generating that text file correctly can be a bummer.

You’ll have to differentiate the bad links from the good ones and Google doesn’t actually help you do that. It will just tell you that your site has been penalized for spammy links.

Luckily, there is an easy way of dealing with unnatural links. By using the CognitiveSEO Unnatural Link Detection Tool. The tool makes it very easy to identify those links using an algorithm. The links that fit spammy links patterns will be marked as unnatural.

It is not, however, 100% automated. Before the tool can actually determine which links are good and which links are bad, you’ll have to sort out your anchor texts. This is usually done quickly in the tool via the anchor text classifier.

The graphic above has been modified for privacy purposes. It is just an example.

The tool will automatically identify most branded keywords. However, the ones only containing keywords your site wants to target will be Misc by default. You can use the search filter on the left and bulk classify. The more diverse your anchor text distribution, the better for SEO, but the longer it will take to classify.

After that, you will get to see the unnatural links:

Once you have your list of unnatural links, you can mark them for disavow. You can also choose to reclassify the links as natural (OK) if you want. We highly advise you to take a look over your unnatural links (if you don’t have thousands). Mark any links that aren’t obviously spammy as Suspect and decide later if they really need to be disavowed.

After that, from the Unnatural Link Detection menu you can Export Google Disavow which will result in the Browser downloading a text file containing all the links/domains in the proper format for uploading it to the Disavow Tool.

It’s best if you try the tool yourself. You can sign up for a free trial and also get a live demo in which one of the cognitiveSEO team members will showcase the tool for you.

Remember, if there’s no penalty yet, those links might be the ones keeping your website near the top. Disavowing links can also result in a drop in rankings, so be very careful how you play with it!

It’s always a better idea to try to completely remove any spammy links to your website from the web. It’s time consuming, but it’s the more efficient way and it’s also what Google recommends.

If you want a step-by-step approach, you can take a look at this more in-depth guide on using the disavow tool.

Is the Disavow Tool Actually Helpful?

There’s a lot of controversy around the Google Disavow Tool. Is it actually useful? Will it prevent a penalty? Does it actually work?

The truth is that for each of the successful penalty recovery stories documented by us, there are indefinitely more out there that have not seen any success, even when using the Disavow Tool as recommended by Google.

In 2016, Google introduced Penguin 4.0 which supposedly made Google capable of ignoring spammy links altogether, as they were posted. In other words, the Disavow Tool worked and the spammy links database has improved the algorithm by making it able to run real-time.

But in this case, is disavowing the links needed anymore?

This question has been asked many times around different events, on social media and throughout Webmaster Hangouts. Some answers came up to help us draw some conclusions:

Gary Illyes said on social media that:

For penguin specifically there’s less need, yes, but if you see the crap, you can help us help you by using it.
	Gary Illyes
	Chief of Sunshine and Happiness at Google / @methode

Also, John Mueller said this about keeping or removing the disavow files:

If you’ve cleaned up the links & they’ve been reprocessed, you can remove those URLs from the disavow file.

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 28, 2016

The question wasn’t really about cleaning the links, but about the necessity of keeping the disavow file post Penguin 4.0. However, John’s answer instead reminds us that the spammy links should still be removed from the internet, which is something Google mentioned when they first launched the Google Disavow Tool.

Eric Kuan from Google said that “Google may not process them (disavowed links) if they don’t see you making a serious manual attempt at removing those links.” If you’ve spammed the website yourself, that makes sense. However, if you’re the victim of a negative SEO attack, it’s kind of unfair, don’t you think?

The truth is, there’s no guarantee that using the disavow tool and submitting your site for reconsideration will remove a penalty. The best way to not get penalized is to not do anything that will get you penalized. However, it’s worth a shot in critical situations.

In the end, you have to consider that the Disavow Tool:

• Takes time: If you want to do things the right way, you’ll have to spend a lot of time researching your link profile and making sure that you’re not disavowing any useful links (remember, the CognitiveSEO Tool can help you speed up this process)
• Can mess things up: Remember, the Disavow Tool is an advanced feature and should only be used in specific cases. You shouldn’t waste your time with it if you’re not 100% sure it’s the right way to go.

• Has actual guarantee it will work: Even if you know what you’re doing, there’s no guarantee it will help. Who knows, it might actually make things worse.

Conclusion

The main point that you should remember is that this tool shouldn’t be used if you’re not 100 percent sure how it works. Disavowing links is a powerful and irreversible process that may resolve your ranking drops or may throw your site into search engine oblivion.

Even though the Google Disavow Tool proves to be an invaluable asset to use in times of need, it can very well be misunderstood and easily used for the wrong purpose.

If you couldn’t prevail at removing unnatural links through traditional methods, you should obviously try disavowing them. But the tool should be used only in specific situations, such as a Manual Penalty. If you’re unsure how to use it and what it’s capable of doing, you should avoid it. However, if you think you’ve tried everything else, it’s worth a shot.

By adding smaller amounts of links at a time to the disavow file, you can avoid messing things up very badly, although this process is more time consuming.

What are your experiences with the Disavow Tool? Have you successfully recovered from a penalty? Did it not do anything at all? Have you used it to try prevent any future penalties? Let us know in the comments!

The post When You Should and Shouldn’t Use the Google Disavow Tool appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

“There were people complaining about searches like Payday Loans […] So we have 2 different changes that try to tackle those kind of queries in a couple different ways. We cannot give you too many details about how they work but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having general queries be a little more clean to going into some of these areas that traditionally have been a little more spammy, including for example some more pornographic queries […]”

And although Google tried to make things right by targeting some very spammy sites and queries, the overall impact was still moderate. Tactics such as Parasite Hosting, Google Bombing or Cloaking & Redirects were still standing strong.  Improvement was needed in this area as spammers will always find new ways of “cheating” the system. Therefore, Payday Loan 2.0, whose explicit purpose was to crack down on very spammy queries and sites, was launched just a few weeks ago. But it was not enough. Spam was still ranking high.

Here we are, 3 weeks forward from the Pay Day Loans 2.0, and Google’s web spam team leader announces a new update of this algorithm Payday Loans 3.0. Before asking whether this algorithm was necessary or not, I think it’s worth lingering a bit on the way the big “announcement” was made. Oh, wait… there hasn’t been a real official announcement. And, don’t get me wrong, I am not expecting an invitation to a launch party with cake and champagne. I am just saying that yesterday, at the SMX Advanced conference  Matt Cutts mentioned that a new update to the Pay Day Loans Algorithm is going to be launched in the next few days. Today, the same Matt Cutts answered to a tweet with: “it is rolling out now”.

In reality, based on the case studies we are going to present in this article, this update rolled out before the conference, meaning BEFORE Google’s representative mentioned that “is going to be rolled out in the future”. All the same, maybe we will tackle Google’s official announcements policy in some other post as for the moment we have some very interesting case studies we want to share with you.

Super Competitive Shaddy Niches

There is a very productive niche for things that people are ashamed to ask for, but need them anyway, so they will try to look for them (and will usually find them online, along with anything else they might need).
One example of such a niche is the one for male potency pills. Apparently, over 45 tons of Viagra are consumed worldwide every year. And they’re not all coming from drugstores. The name of the blue pill has become synonymous with the male potency drug, so it’s really no wonder that most websites out there that deal with such products use “Viagra” as a keyword. It also makes sense that even websites that have no connection to the drug use it as a keyword, to draw traffic. Of course, Pfizer is not happy about it, and has requested that Google shall not allow advertisers to promote any sites on this keyword.
Another such area of ashamed-but-needed products and services is the Money industry. In particular, money beyond your spending capabilities (read payday loans). While the profits are not necessarily what you would expect, with net profits usually in the 10-12% range for payday lenders, the mirage of easy money still draws quite a large competition. That’s mainly because there’s such a large demographic that can be targeted and so many ways in which you can market yourself. And if you choose to advertise online, the investment is at a minimum.
Of course, the problem with that is that everyone in the field is thinking in the same way. So how do you stand out to the myriad of desperate borrowers? Most likely by adopting shady tactics. In fact, just a couple of years ago payday loan agencies in the UK were under scrutiny for aggressive advertising practices, as they started placing ads on social networking sites . More recently, other more complex schemes surfaced, such as hacking and hijacking unconnected sites for profit. Such was the case of www.bicyclesafe.com, who just two years ago was hijacked to redirect to a payday loan agency’s website, but also to return as the main result when people searched for “payday loans” . And some examples can be found by the hundreds.

Before and After the Google Payday Loans 3.0 Google Update

Judging by the way keywords such as: “Payday loans”, “Buy Viagra”, gambling stuff ant other highly competitive keywords looked like (practically everything that makes tons of money), a Google Spammy Update was definitely imminent. And hopefully this time the update’s severity will be stronger than the spammer’s ingenuity.

Let’s take a look at two comparative screenshots for the “buy viagra” query, one taken two months ago, on April 3rd and one taken today, June 13th.

Let’s analyze the screenshot before the Payday Loan 3.0 update hit. As we can easily see, Google’s first page of results, the one that should offer the most relevant results, generated ONLY ONE “valid” result; only one webpage that isn’t a parasited website or a shady redirect.

Let’s have a closer look on what is happening at the moment, watching the right side of the screenshot above. Quite a change, isn’t it? It’s like we are looking at a whole different story now. Google’s first page of results for the query “buy viagra” is filled with almost relevant and trustworthy results. It looks like Google did the summer cleaning in a very serious and efficient manner.

For a better understanding of the matter, let’s put under the magnifying glass two sites that have been affected by this recent update, one from the “buy viagra” niche and one from the “payday loans” niche. Both analyzed websites are from the UK market, one of the most spammed markets for the mentioned queries.

With so many penalty case studies coming from UK lately, we tend to ask ourselves if Google started a crusade against webmasters coming from the British peninsula. With a market share of around 90%, it’s clear that the big G holds the monopoly in terms of search in UK. That means quite a lot of power for the search engine but also an extra responsibility in generating the most relevant results. With millions of British searchers daily, all companies want to be number one in Google’s golden list. The problem is that not all of them can be number one. So the battle begins. On one side, web sites resort to all kind of tactics to “steal” a corner from Google’s first page, on the other side, Google is continuously creating new and improved algorithms in order to decide why one site should rank in front of another. We can only hope that this algorithm will be able to adequately settle this matter.

Spammy Medical Terms Case Study – Top 1 Ranking Site (for UK)

The website that we submit to the analysis, Pharmacy2U was established in 1999, being one of UK’s first internet pharmacies. Quite a pioneer in the field we might say. Overall, the website looks good, has well written, original and relevant content and (maybe the most important for the moment) it ranks first on the SERPs for the “buy viagra”, “buy cialis” and “buy levitra” queries. The Payday Loans 3.0 Google Update gave it a really nice boost, as before the algorithm change it used to be on the 5th position, two months ago as you can see in the screenshot above.

This is the only site that was in the top 10 SERP 2 months ago and now it’s still there. So it has to have something special.

Let’s dig a bit and see what we can find about the site. Checking the link velocity of the site we can easily see that the site existed for quite some time and it’s monthly link velocity is somewhat natural. There were a few spikes in the past but the site’s overall link history looks ok.

Yet we are not dealing only with an “old” site, but also with a site that has a stable ranking in terms of SEO visibility. As it can be seen on the screenshot below, taken from 2 SEO Visibility providers we see that both of them report the approximate same trend.

At first sight we see no dramatic ups and downs, no signs of previous penalties or obvious linking schemes. On the contrary, we observed a healthy link profile that contains a lot of links from Topically Relevant sites pointing back to the analyzed site. This means that sites in the same topical category, “Health”, are linking back to the site.

Yet, are these elements enough for Pharmacy2u to rank first for such controversial and highly spammed queries? Let’s do a more in-depth analysis to see what we are really dealing with. We should start with an Unnatural Link Analysis and see how the sites stands up.

At a closer look, we see that the first appearance deceives many and things are not always what they seem. The unnatural – natural link ratio is not quite Google friendly. From our internal research, sites that have over 25% unnatural + suspect links are likely to be already penalized (or will be if they weren’t already). Yet, this is a very competitive niche and the rules might apply differently here.

As we can see in the screenshots, it is not very hard to identify the strategy Pharmacy2U has been using in the pursuit of higher ranks. We are dealing with an alarming number of links coming from Webdirectories, link networks or forums. Google explicitly mentions  that these kind of strategies may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. For all that, the same Google gave Pharmacy2U a helping hand and helped it climb to position no.1. Most unnatural linked pages are directed to the main page, sign that in the past they may have tried some heavy linking campaigns.
Yet, if we take a look at the most common unnatural anchor text, we see that the number 1 on “buy viagra” doesn’t have a commercial anchor text heavy linking strategy. Mostly, they are using brand anchor text and this might be one of the reasons they’ve entered into Google’s good graces. Because of this fact, they probably did not trigger a red flag on the Google screen.

There are lots of forum links, blog links, Webdirectory links and also some blog comments and guest posts.

Yet, let’s see some examples of one of their highly used (or abused) strategy, link dropping. Below, there are some screenshots taken from two random Pharmacy2U links, one is a blog comment and the other is an author signature. What do the two of them have in common? They are  both sprinkled with overflowing unnatural flavor. It’s true that this strategy may be just a thing of the past and the blog comments and guest posting might not be in a huge number but still, it’s hard to believe that the omniscient Google might have missed this issue.

So, how can a site with such a “going-to-be-penalized” profile can possibly rank at no.1? We are doing reverse engineering here so we cannot certainly put our finger on anything, but we assume that this may have happened for two reasons:

1. First, Google might be applying the “of all the evils we choose the least bad” principle. Meaning that this particular niche is a highly spammed one and you can hardly find any site that would closely respect the guidelines. As we mentioned in the beginning of the article, https://www.pharmacy2u.co.uk/ was the only site from Google’s first page results that wasn’t a parasite host or a redirect, 2 months ago. Not much to choose from. In this case, the big G may have chosen to boost not the site with a flawless profile (as it didn’t find any), but the one which is somewhat close to its guidelines.

2. Second, this niche is a special one from so many points of view and therefore Google might not have detected this website as having an unnatural link profile, although in other niches, similar ratios of unnatural links would penalize a site.

3. Third, this site might be affected by a negative SEO attack. It is possible but not that probable.

Payday Loans Case Study – Top 1 Ranking Site (for UK)

Let’s shift gears a little and let’s go to the Payday loans territory. Albeit “Payday Loans” is a highly used and abused area, we will look into a website that ranks first for the “payday loan” query, a well deserved position. We put under review Wizzcash , a relatively new site that provides short-term loans of up to £1,000. Is not a very large amount you may say so why all this fuzz in this niche? A lot of controversy arose in the payday loans niche as lenders are usually targeting the most vulnerable borrowers and are not doing proper affordability checks on them before granting loans. Also, costs are not always transparent and some lenders seem to encourage consumers to take on more borrowing.
But let’s go back to our analysis and let’s take a peek on what’s going on in the “payday loans niche”

Exploring this site we see that it doesn’t have a super long link velocity (2 years) so seniority in the field might not be its forte. It’s not new but it is not old from an SEO point of view. Still being such a competitive niche, usually sites with many more referring domains were battling for the 1st position in the SERPs.

Looking at the SEO visibility for this site it shows that it has a quick increase in ranks and then began to decline until it was stabilized. It was probably not affected by penalties.

Looking at the Unnatural Link Distribution, we can see that they have a super clean link profile ( just some suspect links and an overwhelming majority of natural links). The Brand versus Commercial Anchor Text distribution is great. Taking into account so many sites that we’ve analyzed in our “internal cuisine”, we must tell you that we’ve rarely seen a site with such a clean profile (97% ok links – 3% suspect links). And being a website from such a controversial niche make things even more impressive. Seems like Wizzcash.com read closely the steps to a Google-friendly site , being quite a role model for many sites from this disputed area.

Yet, for such a competitive niche, Wizzcash has just a few links coming from only 210 referring domains. So, how can a website with such few links rank first on Google’s Golden Page where everyone struggles hard to be on? All in all, we are dealing with a website that contradicts the stereotypes from this area and proves that managing a website with a good-looking link profile is “doable” in the “payday loan” niche.

Conclusion

Taking two steps back and watching the overall situation, we might say that the PayDay Loan 3.0 Google Update did a really good job compared to the Payday Loans 1.0 & 2.0 Updates. The latest update seems to have cleaned up all the parasite hosting sites from the SERPs and Google seems to provide now what it always intended. Of course, there are still issues in terms of unnatural links (as you could see from the site ranking for pharmaceutical terms) but it is much better than it used to be.
At the end of the day, Google successfully made the transition from the invasion of parasite hosting and shady redirects to relevant and accurate results on the topic. It seems to me that Google might have a specific list of keywords that are put under “special treatment” and they raise the bar for “spammy” sites detection in these particular areas.

The post Did Google Finally Kill the SPAM from the SERPS? – Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Unnatural links are a big issue. A lot of sites were already penalized by Google for excessive unnatural linking. More will follow probably. Webmasters struggle to find the best means to identify the rotten apples in their garden while Google sharpens its weapons to catch “the enemy”. With Google Penguin 3.0 (based on the Matt Cutts’ numerotation … others would call it Google Penguin 6.0 )  lurking around the corner and the well-known search engine’s volatility, we are trying to always be one step ahead. We think that it is better to prevent than to treat and this is why we want to proudly announce some major improvements that we’ve made to our tool.

1. Simpler. Yet More In-Depth Unnatural Link Detection

The interface was simplified and all the functionality that could be found previously here is found in the Link Navigator, the tool that allows you to review all of the links and prepare the disavow of link removal campaign as quickly as possible.

2. The Most Common Unnatural Link Issues

Identifying the unnatural links is great but wouldn’t be greater if you had the means to see in a well-organized list what are the most common issues of those unnatural links? Now, you have this possibility. We’ve created a great chart that indicates what are the most common unnatural link issues of yours or your competitor’s site. This great list give you the possibility to make an overall idea about a site’s main issues but also comes in hand when trying to find a “clean-up” strategy for your site.

3. The Most Common Unnatural Anchor Text

Over-optimization of targeted anchor text has been given a lot of importance, specially in a bid to avoid getting slapped by Google’s Penguin update. The Penguin update’s effects have been visible on many websites that have unnatural anchor text distribution. In a competitive market it is crucial to know what unnatural anchor text a site has. This is why we’ve created for you a chart of the Most Common Unnatural Anchor Text. This list offers you great hints about what your next moves should be and gives you a great overview of your site’s main issues.

4. Top Unnatural Linked Pages

It’s never been easier to find out what are the top pages on a site the are most linked by unnatural or suspect links. We’ve created the Top Unnatural Linked Pages chart that helps you to find out in a flash the main domains or pages that might cause you the dreaded Google Penalty.

5. Unnatural Links History

Any site has, in different ratios, unnatural, suspect and ok links. It’s highly important to know which one are which but it is as important to have an overview about the historical evolution of the unnatural, suspect and ok links. Now, you can check this out in a blink, just by getting a glimpse of the weekly historical evolution of the unnatural, suspect and ok links.

6. Quickly Setup Unnatural Links E-mail Alerts

A highly recommended feature is the Unnatural Links E-mail Alerts, which sends you e-mail the moment it finds new unnatural links for your site ( or competitors’ site). This feature allows you to stay up to date with the evolution of the Google Penalty Risk without the needs to constantly check your cognitiveSEO account. You will receive only the most important mails that matter to your business.

7. PDF Report to Pitch New Clients and Amaze The Current Ones

Whether you want to present the data and statistics to your clients or you want to present amazing pitches in order to get new clients, you can create a very comprehensive unnatural links PDF report with the most important information. The generated report can be white labeled with your own logo, if you need it.

8. In-Depth Documentation Guide on How to Best Use the Unnatural Link Detection Tool.

Even if the tool is simple to use, there are a few things that you should know before using it in order to have the best experience and recover your site faster. We have wrote a very in-depth guide that includes both video tutorials and written documentation of each of the functionalities of the tool. You can access the unnatural links guide documentation here. You can also find a full documentation for the entire cognitiveSEO toolset on the support.cognitiveseo.com site.

Conclusion

Even though you may see yourself as a true white hat SEO and you do everything by the book, you never know when you’re going to be under a negative SEO campaign siege or get hit by the dreaded Google Penguin 3.0 (or another unnatural links update). As Google constantly improves its algorithm you may never know when you end up on the wrong side of its Guidelines. That’s why you always have to be prepared by monitoring your link profile constantly. As the scout motto says “Be Prepared”, which means to always stay in a state of readiness so you can better react in troublesome situations. The Unnatural Link Detection Tool transforms the  assiduous workload of monitoring link profiles and identifying unnatural links into a simple task.

The post Google Penguin 3.0 – Prevent / Protect / Recover Your Ranks Before it Hits appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Will this technique of removing a page that has toxic links pointing to it solve a problem that would otherwise lead to a penalty ? In a nutshell, if you’re keen on getting rid of those unnatural links, you might as well remove the linked page. As a result, it will return a 404 HTTP response code.

How to Spot the Pages With the Most Unnatural Links?

When you run an unnatural link detection report, in cognitiveSEO, you have the very cool Visual Link Explorer visualization that will plot all the detected unnatural links based on the pages of the site.

Each cluster represents a page on the site and the red and yellow dots represent the distribution of the unnatural and suspect links.

So it is as simple as looking at the chart and spotting the pages that have the most unnatural links.

When Should You Apply This Unnatural Link Removal Strategy?

While this tactic can be used for any page on your website at any time, you won’t be able to do so with the homepage. You need to take this fact into consideration. The pages from your site that have a great deal of toxic links can be removed and declared 404 in order to quickly recover from a Google penalty. You’ll also have to think at all the natural links and at the content that you’re going to get rid off. So you’ll need to figure out if you want to keep the page and try to handpick and remove every unnatural link from the page or just solve the problem right from the start.

You should also know, that in order for this strategy to work, you need to delete the page that has the toxic links and that might have triggered the Unnatural Links Penalty. You won’t be able to dodge that bullet in any kind of way. The following will not solve your problem:

• Generating a robots. txt file that blocks that page from being indexed. This method won’t solve your problem as Google will simply not crawl the page but it will still be taken into consideration for your site.
• Using redirect to another page. You will still have those unnatural links pointing to your site.
• Using the same content on a newly created and canonicalized page – After GoogleBot crawls your site it will find the duplicate content. The toxic links that were assigned to the deleted page will now be assigned to the canonicalized page.
• Tagging the page as nofollow or noindex. The same as the case with robots.txt. Rendering a page with nofollow won’t make it’s links obsolete.

Does Google Recommend to 404 the Target Page in case of an Unnatural Links Penalty?

This also hides another question that comes into mind “Do 404 pages hurt my site’s ranking ?”. You shouldn’t be scared if one day you stumble upon a couple of these errors reported in Webmaster Tools. Google is aware that the Internet is very volatile and changes happen on a daily basis. Everyone deals with broken pages that return 404 as a status code. It’s also the decent way to deal with a page that was removed from the site. You should be aware that Google’s crawlers can’t see the updated 404 HTTP response code if you block it with robots.txt. But overall, the fact that you have a page that shows a 404 message doesn’t affect other pages from your site and their links.

It’s something that many people pondered upon and finally John Muller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google responded during a Webmaster Central Hangout. He was asked:

“Does removing a page that has unnatural links pointing to it accomplish the same thing when it comes to removing a link when it comes to the Penguin algorithm? If a site has all of its links pointing to one page and removes the page is the issue solved?”

He  responded “Yes, essentially that’s pretty much the same thing”. All the links that are pointing to a 404 page are dropped because there’s nothing to be linked anymore. But there might still be some differences between removing the links and removing the page that has those links. Some of them may be picked up faster by Google than the other, but he didn’t mentioned something specific.

How Should I do it?

To make sure this strategy serves it’s purpose you have to be careful on how you approach this. Only if you create the 404 page and then remove the page that has links pointing to it, you’re going to make Google disregard those links from your profile. Google’s John Muller also stated that you should make absolutely sure that accessing the URL should give you a 404 (Not Found) or a 410 ( Gone ) HTTP response code. Google reads into those messages and ignores the links.

The main flaw of this strategy is that you can’t use it when all those unnatural links are pointing to your homepage. You clearly can’t delete this general page of your site. In this situation you’re only option is to change the address of your site, but only if you’re sure those unnatural links are causing your site to lose ranking. You also need to make sure you have an informative 404 page ready to replace the deleted one.

Should I Disavow the Unnatural Links pointing to a 404 page?

Taking in consideration every advantage and disadvantage of using both these methods of dissolving unnatural links, there are some similarities and differences worth taking into consideration They share the same fate as an ultimate resort and both are irreversible processes. And, last but not least, 404ing the page has the same results as using the disavow tool. But given all the drama and uncertainty that surrounds the disavow tool, removing the linked page and replacing it with one that offers a 404 HTTP code becomes a pretty viable option.

What is the Difference Between HTTP Status Code 404 and 410?

Google reacts differently depending on the different response codes you assign to your pages. While there may be cut from the same fabric, Google’s Matt Cutts decided to explain the difference between these two shades of “page not found”.

• 200 means everything went totally fine
• 404 means page not found
• 410 typically means gone, as in the page is not found and we do not expect it to come back

He explained that 410 is basically more than a 404, it just means that the page is gone forever. He further says that you shouldn’t worry for the most part – if a page is temporarily removed you should 404 it. If the page was deleted and there are no plans of getting it back, then you should serve a 410! Regardless of the 404 or 410 HTTP response code, GoogleBot will still come back and recrawl the site to see if those pages are really gone from your site. More details in the video below.

Conclusion

Most certainly, you can remove the unnatural links by removing the linked page from your site and then 404ing it. It’s an approved method that works just as well as using the Disavow Tool. As a result, Google will proceed to de-index and remove those pages and disavow their links. But again, you need to remember one golden rule of applying this strategy – the page you want to 404 shouldn’t be an important page from your website like the homepage. For those situations you need to do a Google Disavow.

What are your thoughts on using a 404/410 HTTP response code to remove pages that have lots of unnatural links ? Have you used this strategy or are you planning to use it in the future ?

The post Unnatural Links Penalty? 404 The Bad Pages and Recover! appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

The “Unnatural Links & Recoveries Webinar  with Razvan Gavrilas” was recorded and can be watched below. You have 1h and 38 minutes of in-depth unnatural link analysis and lots of questions answered at the end of the video. Enjoy!

Here are the main discussed topics:

• Unnatural Links & Types
  • Unnatural Links Definition
  • Organic Links Definition
  • 27 Types of Unnatural Links
• Famous Case Studies 
  • Halifax Penalty Case Study
  • Lastminute Negative SEO Case Study
• Example of a Google Recovery
• Your  Sites Case Studies
• Q&A
  • All questions can be found at https://plus.google.com/events/cnec31mu995v8g2gcsemj8flqdo

Let me know if you have any other questions. Just comment on this page and I will answer them here 😉

The post Unnatural Link Detection & Recoveries Training & Webinar appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

A natural/organic link is not necessarily “the opposite of the unnatural link”. It is much more than that.

And although unnatural links are in fashion, maybe its time to put the spotlight on the organic links.

What is a Natural Link?

Natural links refer to those links that are put on websites without a direct intention of influencing the rankings of Google (at least from the POV of Google). These are called natural links because they haven’t been elicited in any way. As mentioned in the Webmaster Tools Help, Google considers to be a vote of confidence a link that page A makes to page B. These “votes”, usually,  help your site rank higher in the search engine. The thing is that this vote, the link, has to be made naturally, meaning that you don’t have to influence in any way someone’s decision to link to you. Shortly, natural link building means that no explicit agreement to exchange or place links was done.

Natural Links are an investment that will pay dividends on the long term!

You might be stuffed with it, but let me illustrate the natural/unnatural dilemma with an example from politics. Elections are in full swing and you, the citizen, have to decide which mayor would be the best for your city. Your vote will be considered sincere and also legal only if your choice will be made solely because you agree with someone’s political agenda or you think that a certain person fits best the role of the mayor of your city. If a candidate or someone from his staff try to “buy” your vote with money or by offering you goods or services, that vote won’t be based on that candidate’s political qualities anymore, will it? That vote will not be relevant and might also bring some legal consequences. The same things apply when it comes to natural links. They need to be obtained organically, without anyone trying to manipulate the situation.

Natural Link Synonyms

Natural links may be found “in the wild” under the following names:

• organic links
• good links
• ok links
• high quality links
• Google friendly links

Why “Natural” & “Link” in the same phrase?

Talking about a “natural” link building strategy might sound like an oxymoron. As they first appear, links were all natural and even now, links are supposed to be natural, right? Yes, I feel the hand of reality slapping me, so allow me to rephrase that.

As the digital world got bigger and bigger, webmasters began to feel smaller and smaller. Site owners started to feel insignificant if not lost in the incredibly large web. The need to create link strategies that will speed up the process and put webmasters in their dream place, the search engines’ first page, increased proportionally with the digital world.

For someone to naturally click on the most relevant site for his search query would mean that he would know all the content from all the sites that exist.

Pretty utopian, isn’t it? How the “natural” process really goes is that users link to the most relevant sites they find from a predefined list of webpages. They don’t really give their vote of confidence to the site with the best content that there is but to the one that is most relevant to him from “the short list” of webpages which is available. With almost 80% of users clicking on links that they find on the very first page of a search engine’s responses, everybody wants to be on that list. Who designs those “short lists”? Algorithms do. The people behind those algorithms are continually seeking to improve their ability in identifying which sites are to be trusted and which not. The sites that appear on the “short list” may be the ones that know how to “dance” along with the ranking factors and not necessary the ones with the most relevant content for a certain matter.

Google’s algorithm job is to spot signals of naturalness. The webmaster’s job is to act as natural as possible. But what happens when the algorithm changes? An action that was considered natural until then can pass as unnatural now. Huge amounts of money are being lost or won based on the algorithm’s rules. It’s a cycle that repeats every day, week, month, year. I think the Ralph Tegtmeier (aka @fantomaster) puts the finger on the problem in the following video:

Link Earning

The concept of link earning puts together all the qualitative efforts that a webmaster does in order to gain organic links. The key to this strategy might be crafting your content for your readership and not for Google. The new SEO context might oblige us to forget about link building and start focusing more and more on link earning.

Here are some methods of earning links:

• Generate original information

A good place where you can put your effort into is original analysis and research. Netizens are more than glad to find out new, interesting things. If you really dig in to find something and you generate interesting facts, you are more likely to get links. We’re doing this a lot at cognitiveSEO, so, let the links come to us! 🙂 The good part with generating original research is that it is not just about linking, it is about sticking in someone’s mind or making a really big difference in a specific area.

You must create content that you yourself would go out of your way and read.

• Be active in social media

Think of where people spend most of their time. That’s right; on Facebook, Tweeter, Google+, etc. If your users spend 4 hours a day on facebook, maybe you should start spending some time there too. You don’t have to just wait for your possible customers to come to you, you may need to pay them a visit. Being active in social media can pay off in lots of ways, not just links. You get to know your target and you can also find new opportunities for your business.

• Share your knowledge

Yes, “how to’s” and tutorials is what I am talking about. If you’ve managed to do something or you discovered how to make something faster or easier, you could help other people by making a tutorial about it. It will be highly appreciated in the online world. Even if you don’t get the pile of links you were hoping for, but you will bring exposure to your brand.

Content for the “Long tail ” only needs a couple of link to rank high.

As I mentioned before, sometimes it’s not just about the links; it’s about having a resource that no one else has. In the long run it will pay off.

• Community Building

Community building is a long term investment that will pay off on the long term.

You can obtain natural links from creating content that is not only relevant and useful but that will have the power to attract links from bloggers, people from forums, blog comments, etc.

• Answer Questions Online

I am talking about answering the many questions people have in the online world. On a forum, for instance, you can answer to a question about how to get rid of some spyware. If your answer will bring the solution or any added value, the community will appreciate. It is likely that they remember that you “saved” them in some situation and most likely they will reword you with a link. So, helping other people can be a big way to do it. Don’t expect to win the Nobel Peace Prize but you may expect an investment that will pay dividends on the long term.

• Offer a Free Service to Your Community

Run a service that people find really useful or something that improves others’ experience in the digital world. For instance, you can create a browser extension. I am sure that you are familiar with the AdBlock extension. This extension is an open source that generated millions of downloads and a pretty nice amount of money made from donations. As you can see, people are grateful and willing to pay off as long as their experience as a user is improved. What is great about offering a service is that you can do the work once and on the long term lots of people will pay you off in links.

Techniques that Don’t Involve Great Content

It is hard to say that there are techniques that won’t rely great content. Let’s see, though, what we can find in this field:

• Controversy

You don’t have to be a tabloid to obtain buzz and links. You don’t have to make a profession out of gossiping or hating everybody either but some controversy might give you a boost of traffic now and then.

Done with measure, some controversy generates a lot of links but is not a long term strategy.

There will be a boost in the beginning but at some point, people will pay less and less attention to you. You don’t want to be like the boy that cried “wolf” and afterwards, no one believed him anymore. If you always get busy with saying “look at me, I am being loud, you have to pay a lot of attention to me”, you may irreparably lose your authority and credibility.

• Site Architecture

I know it may sound common but sometimes we tend to take for granted the little things. You have to make sure that your site has a good site architecture. What is the easiest way to find out? Answer to these questions: Can your site be crawled? Can your site be bookmarked? Can Google or the user get to all the pages on your site? If the answer to these questions is “no” or “I don’t know for sure”, you need to take a look at your site before doing anything else. If your site is broken your changes of being linked at are almost Zero.

• Offline Activities and Branding

Being hooked in the online world we often forget about the great opportunities that the offline world brings. If you forgot about outdoor and smart unconventional advertising and brand building, it’s a good time you bring them back into your playground.

• Newsletters

Another way in which you can drive traffic, conversions and ultimately links are  Newsletters. They might look a bit out of fashion but they still work. This way you make it easier for your public to have your information show up in their inbox and, therefore, easier to click on it.

Common Mistakes

You did everything by the book, but the results don’t look as you expected. So, what could have possible happened? I’ll list three common mistakes that may occur in the “link zone”.

1. You were too busy creating a link building strategy

Your job is not just creating a link building strategy. If your main activity will be focused on building links for search engines, you are cutting off a lot of avenues.

Before being preoccupied with how to get links, you have to build something really attractive, a reason why people would want to link to you.

After you managed that, don’t forget that there is more than the online world. There is a broader area of offline marketing out there that can bring you the links you wish for. You need to get rid of the tunnel vision focused on just links and start marketing your website without thinking about search engines but about your consumer instead.

You use the wrong keywords on your site.

For instance, you’ve just opened a great sushi restaurant in Manhattan. You don’t want to just say “sushi” but you want to include words like “where do I find the best sushi in Manhattan” etc, because it is very likely for people to search for “sushi manhattan”. Think about what the user is going to type and include those words on your page. You need to do a proper keyword research for your own site. Also, let’s say you have a car service shop. Post a list with all the services you have to offer on your site but not in a jpg or pdf format, but in plain text. Put your business hours on your page. It is very likely for people to look for a car service open till late and you might be the one who offers this service;

That piece of information can generate a link and, further on, a client.

You’ve messed up the title or the description of your page

You want to have something that people will actually click on when they see it on the search results.

What is your home page title? If, for instance, I am going to bookmark it, will I easily understand later what was really about or is the title not very suggestive? Also, your description will show up in the snippet and that synopsis can be a link generator or, on the contrary, a turn off for the user.

Conclusion

It is hard to tell whether a 100% natural link building strategy will get you on the first pages of the search engine in a favorable period of time. But one thing is for sure: while techniques and strategies come and go, organic links will always remain.

Everything you are doing is first of all for the audience and not for the search engines.

There is no (or shouldn’t be) such a thing as a manual on how to build links organically, or how to create the exact type of content that results in valuable links. There are some guidelines you need to follow and some directions you can track that can help you have a natural, worry- free link profile.

Photo credits: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The post Organic Links – What they are and How to get them? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

With all the changes happening in Google’s algorithms on unnatural links, spammy content, un-optimized mobile websites, it may be a bit overwhelming to keep track of all the Google Guideline violations. Some of them are an obvious violation of Google’s Quality Guidelines and some of them are not that easy to spot. The process of link development is already hard enough without Google’s representatives (like John Mueller or Gary Illyes) breathing heavily down your neck.

Google’s link analysis has become increasingly complex and sophisticated. There are lots of SEO factors that dictate your website’s rankings, and link building might be the most used technique to improve your website’s rankings. You should know that not all backlinks are good. There are quite a few types of unnatural links you need to be aware so that your link building efforts won’t be considered useless by Google.

1. Link for Link
2. Money for Links
3. Goods or Services for Links
4. Guest Posting
5. Automatically Generated Links
6. Widget Links
7. Advertorials
8. Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
9. Articles & Commercial Anchor Text
10. Web-Directory Links
11. Footer Links
12. Sitewide Links
13. Blogroll Links
14. Forum & Blog Comments
15. 100% Do-Follow Links
16. Anchor Text Over-Optimization
17. Geographically Irrelevant Links
18. Contextually Irrelevant Links
19. Link Velocity Spikes
20. Article Directories
21. Shady Redirects
22. Press Releases
23. Bookmark Sites
24. Resource Pages
25. Sites that Sell Links
26. Social Profile Links
27. Mass Ping Sites

1. Link for Link

I’m referring here at exchange methods of link building. For example, if you’re a car sales rep and you have links to several car service centers and insurance brokers around your area and they link back to you, it will probably won’t raise any suspicions. But if you have hundreds of such links, not only from your area but from all over the world, you’re going to raise some flags back at Google.

Getting links using this method of link exchange is discouraged by Google and can trigger penalties. Even though exchanging links is an old practice, it still exists. With a quick search on Google. you’ll find lots of websites that offer link exchange services. Registering on such website doesn’t bring any real value to your website, not to mention visitors and traffic. Not only your efforts will be useless for the users, but you can risk getting links penalty, too.

2. Money for Links

Offering money in exchange for links or content that incorporate links is one of the most obvious methods to acquire unnatural links. One form of practice that is not that pronounced is obtaining links to your site after offering a donation. In a small number, it’s accepted, but if you keep doing this, Google will consider it an unnatural tactic and you might get in trouble.

The concept of buying or selling links started in the mid-2000s and until 2009, the craze faded away and people move along. Paid links will often time have dofollow links are located out of context in the page which could be easily detected. Google has lots of algorithms that could catch the websites sooner or later and penalize them. 

3. Goods or Services for Links

If the method of exchanging money for links is straight forwarded, there’s a thin line regarding bartering between services or goods and links. Matt Cutts created a video explaining the silver lining to this method. If a person receives a laptop from a company and then he writes an article with a link pointing to the company’s website, it’s considered link buying. If that company lends the laptop and the person then gives it back, and ends up writing a review with a link to the company’s website, it’s nothing unnatural there. So the difference lies between giving and borrowing.

4. Guest Posting

According to Google, guest posting or guest blogging is a method used by blog or site owners to increase traffic to their sites and generate backlinks. If done correctly, guest bloggers offer to write content for other, similar blogs in their industry as guest bloggers. But it can easily turn into an unnatural link building strategy if the blog post has a high number of outbound links, or it asks for a dofollow link to their website in return or any type of “free content” scheme with keyword rich anchor texts.

Latterly, added in the not-so-select group of unnatural link tactics, guest posting may be harmful for your website if it’s done improperly. To understand the fine print on this quality guideline violation, you’ll need to differentiate between polished guest posts (where the author poured his knowledge to publish a high-quality article ) and spammy guest posting (where the author may be sending the same article to whoever is willing to publish it ). You need to tread cautiously, because it may transform from an opportunity into a problem.

5. Automatically Generated Links

It sounds like a sweet deal when someone offers to build bulks of links overnight on certain targeted keywords. In any case, those people are using automated programs that post links in the form of comments, forum posts, wiki posts and so on. This is one of the most harmful link building techniques, it terms of “internet pollution” as it adds literally no value to the users and it is very annoying for everyone. Basically, you’ll get a bunch of artificial links. 

6. Widget Links

A form of link building technique that uses “WordPress like” plugins. The person that created the plugin has the possibility to inject links on all the sites that have that respective plugin installed. If the plugin adds real value to the user, and if the webmasters have the choice to link or not back to the website, Google might consider them natural. 

7. Advertorials

Advertorials are articles that are published by sites as a form of advertisement in digital marketing. Google may consider this as a form of paid link tactic IF the links that point back to your site are tagged as dofollow. Advertorials are essentially paid “content” forms, whether we talk about news, articles, reviews. 

Google’s Matt Cutts explains very well in a video the warning on advertorials and paid content.

Search engine wise, if links are paid, it shouldn’t pass value (that means placing a nofollow tag). Likewise, if you make it clear, if you’re doing disclosure, you need to make sure it’s clear to the people such as “Advertisements” or “Sponsored”.
	Matt cutts
	Former Head of Spam at Google

You can even find information about these types of links in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Any of the following situations that violate the guidelines are considered to be bad links:

• Text advertisements that pass PageRank;
• Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank

8. Private Blog Networks (PBNs)

After guest posting became “obsolete”, spammers quickly came up with another idea. Basically, if no one wanted to post their guest articles, they decide to create other websites and post them with links to the other site owned by them. That’s how private blog networks took birth. 

Private blog networks (in general) are sites that are using different IP addresses which are owned by the same person, who controls them and posts articles with do-follow links at his own discretion. This type of black hat SEO tactic was created in order to simulate a natural appearance of links, and it’s against Google’s quality guidelines.

The moment Google find out about this, it was the dead end of PBNs and the websites suffered a hard manual penalty. That happened because the websites were public and anyone could buy them.

9. Articles & Commercial Anchor Text

Brand anchor text is one of the signals that Google takes in consideration when deciding if a site should be “trusted” or not, while the commercial anchor text tells Google what keywords might the site be interested in ranking. Commercial anchor texts are money keywords. 

It’s a good thing that people write about your product or service and link back to your website. As long as a person creates links in a natural way, using brand keywords or navigational phrasing like “click here” or “visit this”, you won’t have any problem. But instead, if you have links with optimized anchor. You’re gonna feel Google’s wrath if they catch you stacking links with commercial keywords.

Too many commercial anchor texts might trigger some spammy filters and it is an abusive tactic used to manipulate search engine algorithms and gain high rankings. 

10. Web-Directory Links

Before search engines, web directories were the internet. People used them to search for information because search engines didn’t exist. As time passed, things changed and the use of directories changed also. Even though web directories dropped dramatically in popularity, people still used them. But not for what they were supposed to use them. Instead, they are using them for backlinks. 

People used to abuse these type of sites by placing links on hundreds of web directories. If your site’s link portfolio has mostly these kinds of links you might get the unwanted attention of the Webspam Team. There are still high-quality web directories on the internet where you can post your links, that filter the submitted entries manually. If you’re still wondering if web directories are still relevant in 2019, then you should check out this article. Usually, high-quality web directories must be relevant to the business, so it can differ to one niche to another. 

11. Footer Links

A tactic popularized by web design agencies & used by them to increases their site’s visibility in the search engines was to put links in the footer of their client’s pages with the wording such as “Designed by” or even commercial keywords such as “Web Design Agency Melbourne”. When you have a couple of those type of links and you don’t use over-optimized anchor texts you won’t have any problems. They will surely be categorized as unnatural if you’re using this linking tactic in excess.

Website builders used this practice by injecting links to every website created. It is not a natural link, it is an automated link placed in the footer after you install the website theme. Look at the example below:

12. Sitewide Links

When you create sitewide links GoogleBot is going to see the link on almost every page of the website. One or two site-wide links won’t raise any suspicion but if you’re going to abuse this feature, most likely Google will place it under the unnatural links category. This type of link building is not recommended for new sites; it may be seen as a way to rank quickly … but it really isn’t.

13. Blogroll Links

Usually, lots of people that had a blog, create a blogroll, which included a set of links placed on the Dashboard that redirected to other blogs related to the niche and preferences of the blogger. Creating blogrolls is a technique that’s been around and abused just as long as the one with the web-directory links. There’s nothing harmful if you have 1-2 links and they are placed on relevant blogs. When it represents a huge chunk from the backlink profile it becomes clear to Google that those links are unnatural.

14. Forum & Blog Comments

Often times spammy comments are intended to create free backlinks. Usually, these types of links have no value, and they are created manually. Spam comments don’t work anymore, even though there are lots of people that are still using this unnatural link building strategy. Most of the website have spam filtering options and lots of these comments don’t get approved and don’t get to show up live on the page. In the end, nobody wins from this.

Comments on forums and blogs are often used as a way to get yourself known in the community. You relate to other people’s content and you create a conversation. When you’re overusing links with commercial anchor text in these comments ( posted manually or with the help of automated software ) they are going to be surely considered unnatural by the Google.

It rarely happens that someone links using a commercial anchor text in an informal conversation.

Make sure you delete all the spammy comments and chose to manually approve comments to have the chance to review them. Having spammy comments can make your website look neglective and send a wrong message to your readers. Don’t discourage them from leaving any valuable comments.

15. 100% Do-Follow Links

It’s not likely for a site to have 100% do-follow links. Usually, a natural backlink profile has a homogenous mix of do-follow and nofollow. People often create comments on do-follow blogs as a way of link building. When a site has an almost 100% amount of do-follow links it raises a red flag. If you take a look at the chart below you can see the website has 88% dofollow links. That is way to much for a natural backlink profile. 

16. Anchor Text Over-Optimization

When your keyword cloud doesn’t have a proportionate distribution and you have 70% commercial keywords like “payday loans” and 30% brand keywords it’s a strong signal of unnaturalness. The anchor text keyword cloud must be diverse in order to look natural. If you don’t want Google to penalize your website we suggest staying as far away as possible from over-optimized anchor text structures.

17. Geographically Irrelevant Links

Let’s say you have a local business that sells ice cream in Miami. It’s highly doubtable that you’re being naturally linked to web-directories localized in Croatia. When Google encounters a lot of links that have this discrepancy, they will consider them unnatural as they can be easily “fingerprinted”.

Irrelevant links are often times unnatural links because they don’t provide any value and are not related at all with the niche or business of the linked website. The main problem with irrelevant links is that they actively deceive both Internet users and search engines.

18. Contextually Irrelevant Links

Same as the above, if you’re selling ice cream you shouldn’t have links from sites that are on mechanical or traveling topics. These types of irrelevant links cause the user to have an inneficient experience and could increase the bounce rate, which is another problem. Consequently, Google, and other search engines, are working in finding these type of sites and penalize those type of links. 

You need to make sure that you don’t have these types of inconsistencies that occur too often.

19. Link Velocity Spikes

When you have big velocity spikes, either daily or monthly, compared with your overall website history averages, it means either something important happened in that period, or your site is trying to manipulate the site’s ranking in the search engines. The usual negative SEO campaigns may also generate a high amount of links in a short amount of time.

As you can see in the print screen below, the website used for this example has a spike of links, which can be translated into an unnatural growth. 

A website that has a natural backlink profile it will have a natural growth of links and referring domains. Basically, from a referring domain a website could receive more links. If the number of links is very high then it’s not good. Below you can see a natural growth of referring domains. 

20. Article Directories

Article directories such as EzineArticles are a source of low-quality articles. Their only purpose on the internet is to generate pages with do-follow links in their content. Because this type of link building strategies can be automated, a lot of people abused this technique and raised Google’s interest regarding this problem.

Same as web directories, article directories don’t bring any value to the user and pollute the internet with loads of links and irrelevant content. 

21. Shady Redirects

There are a lot of white hat SEO practices that are turned into black hat. And redirects is one of these cases. The theory says that using 301 redirects will send the user from an URL to another one if the original page has moved or changed.

Sadly, some “creative” black spammers use it to gain links. Webmasters take advantage of expired domains to keep the link juice. They are redirecting the old site to their site. You could easily fall into the dark area of SEO if the expired domain is not relevant. All of these that use this practice are penalized by Google sooner or later, though. So all that shady work is useless. 

22. Press Releases

An abused strategy which gives webmasters the opportunity to use sites like PRWeb to publish press releases (with the same content) on hundreds of sites, in order to create do-follow links back to them. By doing so, you not only create a lot of links with targeted commercial anchor texts in a short amount of time, but you also create duplicate content. Not all press releases are bad. Just those where you use do-follow links and/or commercial anchor text in order to influence the Google Ranking.

Press Releases are still relevant and probably will be for a long time. They are useful not only for SEO purposes but for marketing, as well. However, many webmasters don’t really understand the concept and often end up doing things that eventually harm their websites.

23. Bookmark Sites

These type of sites allow users to place personal bookmarks. If you have an abundance of links coming from this area, it means you’re using these sites as a link building strategy and you want to influence your site’s rankings in the search engines.

There are lots of websites that offer backlinks from social bookmarking directories and promise to bring an influx of new quality backlinks very quickly. 

24. Resource Pages

Similar to web directories, resource pages are some sort of Yellow Pages. It is an ancient form of link building strategy, which refers to certain pages from the site that look like “/links.html”, filled with links to a variety of non-related pages.

25. Sites that Sell Links

Sites that sell links have a recurring policy, practically you pay to keep your backlinks on those sites. If you stop paying, your link will be removed from the site, and in its place will be another one.

Google looks at sites that are constantly creating and deleting links from their site and may figure out if someone is selling links. After it figured this out, if you are being linked from such a site you risk being penalized.

26. Social Profile Links

If you create 100 accounts on different social networks, and they all link to your website, it’s may be a sign of unnatural link tactics. From what Google declares, these links are used only for indexing, so they won’t have a direct influence over the results order in the search engine.

Getting penalized for your website’s link profile can have quite a negative impact on your website and reflect a bad reputation. 

27. Mass Ping Sites

Pinging your website exists since blogs were introduced. The method was used to tell search engines whenever you add or make major updates to the content on your site and index it. But now, search engines evolved and this practice isn’t available anymore. People are now using it as a black hat SEO technique by pining their website to receive backlinks each time they post a blog post or publish a video. Pinging too much is not such a good idea. 

There are specific websites that promise to offer lots of backlinks if you ping your website. pinged them with pingfarm. Look at the example below:

Lots of people still use this technique and still ask why their content disappeared from the Google search … Google must probably penalize them because the algorithm found something suspicious. 

It’s best to use known and relevant content marketing tactics that are natural and let people link back to your site. Or use promotion, social sharing, email marketing, outreach and so on for creating buzz around your content. Don’t inflate it with backlinks that are not good. It would be even harder to make any penalty recoveries.

Conclusion

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Google saying in the quality guidelines that any links can be unnatural. If you’ll read the Google guidelines regarding link schemes, you’re going to see the following quote:

Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

If you emphasize “any links” and “may be considered” and you’re going to look at the above examples you’re going to see there’s a big gray area enveloping this hole unnatural link idea. Basically, any link building technique may be considered an intent to manipulate if you abuse it.

Diamonds are forever, unnatural links aren’t!

It’s almost certain that, with Google’s constant focus on link schemes and website ranking manipulation, more and more tactics of creating unnatural links will end up obsolete. And because of that, you may never know when you’re going to end up on the other side of their guidelines. You’ll end up wondering why your site’s ranking is tanking all of a sudden.

This information is essential even if you don’t have any issues with your link profiles. You should try to build links as naturally as you can because search engine algorithms are getting smart and better, and you’ll eventually end up with nothing if you’re not careful. As a conclusion, it’s better to have worked once by the guideline than try a thousand times to create unnatural link profiles.

The post 27 Types of Unnatural Links & Link Building Strategies appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

What is an Unnatural Link about?

In a few words, as it is presented in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, any link that intends to manipulate the PageRank, or the search engine results, no matter if there is a link to your site or an outgoing link from your site, is considered an unnatural link. Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of the Google Guidelines.

From their statements, we deduce that Google’s main concern is to keep users away from bad search experiences, providing them with the most relevant results.

The “naturalness” of a link can be seen as an editorial choice.

The “naturalness” of a link is, up to a point, an editorial choice. It all boils down to your ability to link to a site from your site based on usefulness. For instance, you are a fan of British Airways and you choose to talk about this company on your blog, your site or on forums because you really had a good experience with this brand. You really want to tell the world what a great company they are and how their services helped you a lot in a certain situation. Doing this is not considered to be a violation of Google’s Guidelines. However, if you write about British Airways because this company promises you free flight tickets or saves you from paying taxes for your extra luggage, then this is an unnatural link we are talking about.(unless you mark the link with the rel=nofollow HTML attribute)

Unnatural Link Synonyms

Some people refer to unnatural links with the following synonyms:

• inorganic links
• toxic links
• low quality links
• artificial links
• manually created links
• deceptive links
• manipulative links
• impact links

Where is the end of “natural” and the beginning of “unnatural” ?

If you find it hard to make a delimitation between natural and unnatural in terms of links, here is a thing that you can do. You need to ask yourself:

“Would I still be linking to that site if the SERPs didn’t exist?

Would I still be recommending this site/blog/company/etc. if search engines didn’t exist? If the answer to this question is yes, then it is an organic or natural link we are talking about. If the answer to this question is no, then that link is most likely a violation of Google’s guidelines and, therefore, is considered to be unnatural.

Long story short, unnatural links comes down to link selling. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about money, gifts, a massage :), a 6 Pack or any sort of material compensation. It is still a sort of transaction. The same situation applies when we’re talking about excessive link exchange. It is still a sort of unnatural transaction that does not occur naturally but is artificially generated with the purpose to influence the ranking in Google.

The war against link selling is meant to maintain the competition on a level playing field, offering equal chances to all websites. You wouldn’t want somebody who just has more money to automatically be able to rank better on the search engines.

I know that as nice as this “equal chance” story may sound , AdWords still exists and, like it or not, is a kind of link selling with the distinction that you get an invoice for the transaction. Without getting into ethical issues, at the end of the day, AdWords remains a Google accepted form of selling links that often brings results for those with deep pockets.

The most common unnatural link examples

Much like the law, the “naturalness” of a link can be can be interpreted in our favor. For instance, excessive link exchanges or linking to low quality sites are practices that are in disagreement with Google’s guidelines. But how much is excessive? How low should the quality of a site be? In order to avoid these kind of ambiguities, we will give some examples of common links that have an unnatural flavor, according to Google’s Guidelines:

• Any link that is generated due to a payment in money

On the surface, things seem pretty clear here: if you offer money in exchange for placing your link on a site, that link will be considered unnatural. However, things are a little more complicated than this. Let’s say you organize a charity event and you want to link to a company that donated an amount of money to help you out with the event. Is it considered to be an unnatural link? Well, it depends. If that company gives donations in exchange for links and uses these actions as a link building strategy, then it is surely a violation of the “Guidelines”. If the donor company has just a couple of links thanks to some sponsorship campaign it did, then is very likely they are organically generated.

• Any link that is generated due to an exchange of goods and services

If you receive or give any good or service in return for a link, then that link is considered to be unnatural. Let’s say that a company that is selling frying pans sends one of their products to 100 cooking bloggers, encouraging them to write about the frying pan received as a gift. Will Google consider the links that the bloggers will generate as being unnatural? It will surely do. But, if the frying pans company wants to stay on Google’s good side, they have to prove that they didn’t have the intention of manipulating the PageRank. Thereby, they should ask the bloggers to mark the links as nofollow so they cannot pass PageRank.

• Links that are widely distributed in the Footer of a page or on the Blogroll

If for blogrolls things are pretty clear, when it comes to links that appear in footers, things get a bit complicated. Let’s start with blogrolls: If in your blogroll you are linking to pages relevant for your content, then those links are considered to be natural. But if you are having 100 links on your page and more than half of them can be found in the blogroll, then it is clear that the situation is not “natural”.

When in comes to links distributed in footers, Google is being a bit ambivalent. Let’s say you are a web design company and you place in the footer of the designed sites a link to your webpage. Google might consider this action as ok but might also considered it as unnatural, claiming that it is a self-made link or it’s a link that is generated due to an exchange of service. How does Google decide whether these kind of links are natural or unnatural? Depending on the intent. It should be clear for Google that the webmaster is linking to a site on purpose and not because it was required to. Ok, you’ll say. And how can Google accurately identify the intent? Well, I think that’s a thing that only Google knows.

• Any link that is a result of a “link to me and I’ll link to you” campaign

Let’s say that you are the webmaster of a financial audit site. On your page you have a section where you recommend several accounts, attorneys and tax experts. Maybe some of the ones you recommended also linked to our page. Is this considered “excessive link exchanges”? Most likely no. But if on your website you have a list with hundreds of recommendation from a wide geographical area, and most of your “recommendations” also link to your page, then it is very likely that you’ll receive an penalty from the “Google Penguin”.

• Links on Low-Quality Web-directories or Bookmark sites

This looks quite clear also, doesn’t it? If you have many links on low-quality webdirectories, they are most likely to be considered as unnatural. But then again, the question arises:

Who draws the line between low and high quality? Google, of course. We are playing in its yard.

And how does the big “G” decide the quality of a web directory? Most likely, a web directory is considered to have a high quality if it has some sort of human interaction, such as an editorial process. In this case not all sites can auto-submit their links and there is a whole process whereby the web-directory decides the relevancy of a certain site in list with links.

• Links with optimized anchor text (articles, press releases etc)

These kinds of links are very common, and the digital world is full of articles stuffed with anchor text. I’ll go back to the frying pan company to give an example on this line. Let’s say that our company writes an article on a cooking blog and it contains passages such as the following:

It is great to cook using good frying pans. Depending on the frying pan you are using, you can prepare tasty food in no time. Frying pans add value to the quality of your food and make cooking a pleasant experience.

Doesn’t look very natural, does it? I bet Google agrees on this one too.

You’ve got mail! The mail…

The story is clear: if you’re selling links to influence page rank or you violate in some way the “guidelines”, you may get the unwanted Google Penalty message. After you update your Facebook status with sad faces and get out in the street screaming that life is unfair, you have to put yourself together and find the way to get back on track.

Now, you need to remove just the unnatural links. You can walk blindly through the lawn of unnatural links trying to correctly identify the ones you’ve been penalized for or you could use a smart tool that outlines the links that may have caused the penalty.

Let’s say you’ve come clean and you ask Google to take a look at your site to see that your redemption is real. When checking the situation, what the big “G” wants to see is that the issue is fixed and that this violation won’t be happening again. So, how can you convince the search engine that the situation is indeed like this? After removing the unnatural links you should do a well documented reconsideration request. Do you know the saying “ a sin confessed is half forgiven?” Surely Google does. In the request you are sending you don’t have to speak only about the improved current situation and about how you are going to do things from now on. You have to give details about the “dirty job” that you’ve done and how you got rid of it.

Other Unnatural Link Resources you should read

• Matt Cutts about  Paid Links
• How to Detect Unnatural Links
• An Unnatural Link Recovery Story
• Unnatural Links – The NO.BS. Guide [preso]
• Various “Unnatural” Problems reported on the Google Product Forums
• How Google Broke the Bank – The Famous Halifax Penalty [case study]

Conclusion

Can we dance waltz on a minefield?

With all the guidelines and restrictions, it feels like Google is asking us to dance waltz on a minefield. Some restrictions are needed in order to maintain a healthy climate among the link building strategies.

The question that’s probably on your lips now is: are there chances to follow Google’s guidelines religiously and still rank high for the keywords you want to rank?

With the hope that I brought some light in the dark world of unnatural links, I’d be more than pleased to hear your opinion on this matter.

The post Unnatural Links – Quick & Dirty Definition + Examples appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Update: LastMinute Recovered its rankings in 2 days. Read about the recovery!

Although the winter is barely over, we are already thinking of pina coladas and ocean breeze. And what better way to daydream than looking up for summer holidays deals, cheap flights and convenient accommodation?

After the Halifax Penalty a few weeks back, it seems another big brand might be affected by Google.

Yesterday we noticed a mention in TheDrum about a big brand in the travel industry that was hit by Google.

The travel and leisure industry is a very dynamic market, full of companies that leave you with a bunch of holiday pictures and empty banking accounts. And as the economic crisis has already left us with empty pockets, there is not much left for the travel agencies. Therefore, companies operating in this field might turn to less orthodox methods to position themselves among the first choices in their consumer’s mind.

One of the companies that promise us a uniform tan and unforgettable experiences far away from our mother in law is Lastminute.com. If you haven’t heard of this British company, let me tell you that they have been on the market since 1998 and their aim is to position themselves as the ultimate online leisure, entertainment and travel retailer. Their communication strategy is focused on “last minute” everything, from flights to hotel rooms or dinners. If you’re wondering how their business is doing, judging from their statements they seem to be doing well. They claim to sell a holiday every 15 minutes, a spa break every 3 minutes and, brace yourself, a theater ticket every 26 seconds. So, 7 times more entertainment than relaxation. That explains a lot…

The reason we brought lastminute.com to your attention is because we have noticed a really big drop (46%) in organic search visibility this week in UK. Let’s see what it’s all about!

Every time we’re trying to figure out what happened to a certain website, the first chart we look at is the one with its visibility drop. We have the natural tendency (and I also suspect a bit of penalty phobia here) to believe that when a major visibility drop occurs, it surely has something to do with Google’s Penguins.

From the chart below, we can easily see that February wasn’t the best month for lasminute.com as their drop is, indeed, notable. (This is the visibility for the last 2 years).

Update: LastMinute Recovered its rankings in 2 days. Read about the recovery!

As we don’t want to be hasty and draw the wrong conclusions, we will analyze 3 possible situations that lastminute.com might be confronted with:

• Negative SEO attack.
• Unnatural Links Penalty.
• Other Factors.

Negative SEO attack theory

If we take a look at the December link velocity, we can easily see some “pharmaceutical activity” on the roll. One might say that maybe “the gifts month” inspired people to ask for unexpected requirements of their holidays. Hilarious or not, we think that the situation is severe and lastminute.com is dealing with quite a negative SEO attack.

The chart shows links appearing like magic and then, disappearing like magic. As we take a look at the chart below, we observe that, starting at the end of January, a large number of links begin to be “lost” in the mists of the Internet. If by mid December they had almost 700.000 new links and only 1.500 lost, now the situation is quite paradoxical. We’re dealing with more lost links than new ones. The score is something like 165.000 to 112.000.

If I’d ask you to think of keywords that an online travel agency might use, what would you answer? I have a hunch that you would tell me terms like “cheap flight,” “holiday deal,” “cheap accommodation,” etc. Oh, well…apparently, on lasminute.com it’s fashionable to use unrelated pharmacy keywords. We’re not saying that “Viagra” or “Cialis” cannot be related to a successful holiday, but we don’t think that these are the main keywords lasminute.com wants to be associated with.

With 861 referring domains (only 6 of which are still live) with link anchor text containing “Viagra” and a big collection of hacked sites used as parasite hosting, we tend to think that a negative SEO attack might me going on.

All the Viagra related links (except 6 referring domains) are lost when we crawled the backlinks for lastminute.com on the 28th of Feb 2014.

For a better understanding of the issue that lasminute.com is dealing with, take a look at the image below. The snapshot is taken from a domains hosting website that has a huge number of hidden link parasite hosting. Impressive isn’t it? And not in the good way of the word.

Unnatural Links Theory

The next thing we think at when it comes to a link audit and a possible penalty, is the number of unnatural links. From our analysis and experience, usually, the penalized sites have an alarming number of unnatural links. As we take a look at how lastminute.com is standing, we see that the natural-unnatural link ratio is quite good. The site seems to have a good-looking profile, based on an organic link building strategy.

If you were breathlessly expecting for some big, unnatural profile at the anchor text distribution, I’m afraid I have to let you down. The anchor text cloud for brand and commercial keywords looks quite normal. Nothing suspicious on this side, either.

It’s true that 4% from the total of links are unnatural but overall, we cannot say that this could be the cause of a Google Penalty. We looked through the unnatural and suspect links and here are 3 samples that give us a glimpse of how their old link building strategy used to look like.

In the snapshot below we can see a “widget” link a low authority site, with an anchor text that looks suspicious because of its commercial nature.

Here we can easily see a suspect use of anchor text on some low authority site.

In this second sample we can identify a paid advertorial with a juicy do-follow link.

As I mentioned before, the site is not “unnatural link free” but could they be the cause of a Google Penalty? Is this enough in order for Google to penalize the site. Maybe Yes maybe No. I saw much worse situations with really big brands that are still ranking. Their link profile is quite balanced from a naturalness point of view.

Other Factors Theory

If we don’t take the negative SEO and the Unnatural Links Penalty theories into consideration, we must find other reasons that might have caused the drop in visibility ranking. Let’s list the most important elements that could have led to these changes in lasminute.com’s visibility:

Google Algorithm Updates – its common knowledge that Google makes systematical and periodical changes to its algorithms, leading to ranking fluctuations. This could be valid but we have to take into consideration that lasminute.com has had fluctuations before, but none as dramatic as this one. Also, the drop was mainly caused by some specific keywords.

Website changes – another thing that we can think about is the lasminute.com website. Maybe there were some massive changes in their site architecture which lead to such important changes in their traffic index.

Powerful backlinks lost – it is also possible that lasminute.com lost a number of backlinks that were sustaining those specific keywords that dropped.

Conclusions

As I was mentioning at the beginning of the article, it’s hard to tell what exactly happened with the lasminute.com website. For instance, in the picture below, we see indeed that the trend for the keywords position is descendant but the average individual drop position is not very high. This make us think that something in particular happened to those keywords or maybe Google Volatility interferes again.

Let’s take a closer look at what really caused the massive droop.

Is this drop so massive?

As we analyze the snapshot below, we see that some of lastminute.com’s important keywords lost a some ranking positions. Let’s take for example the keyword “laterooms”. This keyword alone messed up the lastminute.com traffic index by causing it to drop around 100 positions. The same thing has happened with the keyword “restaurants”. Thereby, only 2 high traffic keywords led to a 30.000 visibility points decrease. The drop in the visibility rank is, thus, legitimate.

The confusion here appears because of how the SEO Visibility index is calculated. They lost traffic only on same high traffic keywords, but we do not see a huge drop in positions. The keywords moved from the first page to the second or third on an average. This does not indicate usually a penalty but more a flux or a “normal” day in the land of Google.

After analyzing several assumptions, we cannot put the finger on the exact cause that led to the visibility rank dropping. We can say for sure that something indeed happened, and judging by their link anchor text and their link profile, we tend to believe that lasminute.com was not affected by negative SEO, nor Unnatural Links.

They are simply affected by a slight change in the algorithm maybe combined with some loss of some power links that they had and maybe some internal linking problems on the site.

LastMinute Google Recovery

Saturday morning, on the 1st of March 2014, the LastMinute site started to recover its rankings. All the dropped keywords in the image above are back to their initial rankings.

This means that the conclusion of the 50% Traffic Drop was correct. This was not a Google Penalty, but a Google Flux or a small side effect of some small on-page/off-page change.

Here are some quick snapshots from the SERPs on some of the dropped keywords.

Here is the “laterooms” keyword that was dropped from the top 100. Now it is back on the second position.

The conclusion of this analysis is excellently coined by Christopher Pike

“Nothing is as it seems. Black can appear white when the light is blinding but white loses all luster at the faintest sign of darkness.”

You should always check all possible hypothesizes, by doing an in-depth analysis and looking at all the angles. Don’t get distracted by the obvious stuff that might lead you to the wrong conclusion!

What is your opinion on the Lastminute.com drop?

The post LastMinute Recovered from 50% Traffic Drop- Negative SEO or Unnatural Link Building? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Update: This is the complete case study of the Halifax Google Penalty. We updated it with EXTRA Juicy info and made a cool illustration also!

A breaking news has just reached our eyes and we found it so interesting and exciting that we couldn’t leave our office in a Friday afternoon until we shared this boiling piece of information with you. And before you assume we probably didn’t have any plans for this evening, read the article and we’ll talk after.

Halifax may be one of the best and prosperous cities in the world, but when it comes to the famous UK banking chain Halifax, we cannot say the same thing. At least not anymore. The only thing the city of Halifax and Halifax bank have now in common is that they are both hard to find; first one on the map and the other on Google.

Looks like Google started 2014 with its engine at a maximum revolution, setting the bar high when it comes to penalties, regardless of the size or importance of the site.

The Halifax bank is the UK’s largest provider of residential mortgages and saving accounts, founded about 150 years … before Google existed. Basically, by the time Google was working at its initial public offering, the Halifax bank established one of the first telephone and Internet based banks. And if you’re still not convinced that Halifax’s tradition and reputation has deep roots, you should know that they were founded before the invention of the cash register, electric bulb or Coca Cola.

Thereby, they deserve a front-page case study.

As famous and notorious as they are, their link building strategy might not be very “Google friendly”, as they are facing now high difficulties and big rumbles in the online world. From our analysis, it seems like they’ve been penalized and Google might add an turning point in their impressive history.

The Financial Niche in UK

The financial niche in UK has very interesting characteristics that might need a different article; not on our blog, don’t worry. Without overwhelming you with bank details, that will only give you headaches, allow me to give you a few tips about this niche. Financial competition in the UK isn’t much of a competition in the way that since 2008 until now just five big banks own 85% of market share.

Why is this piece of information so important for us?

Well, it should help us make a clear image about how significant this story is and how big the actors really are. In other words, Halifax is a very big player in the field that lost not only image points but also pounds. Thousand of pounds!

20% Google Halifax Google Drop 

Bellow we can see the Halifax visibility history over the past two years.  Looking at the following chart we can easily see a dramatically downhill that started at the beginning of February and looks like it it keeps on dropping. Google’s “red card” reflected on Halifax’s online visibility and the bank dropped in ranking about 20%.

As we look at the following chart we can easily see a dramatically downhill that started at the beginning of February and looks like it keeps on dropping.

Halifax Dropped Keywords

Only 20%, one might say; “that’s not such of a big penalty after all”. In fact, it is.

If we analyze the keywords Halifax actually “lost”, you might have a better understanding of why you wouldn’t want to step in Halifax’s shoes right now. As I was saying before about the bank established on the old continent, Halifax is synonymous with loans, saving accounts, online banking. If we take a look at the chart below what do we see?

The core of their business, their top keywords are in a serious downward trend. “Personal loans”, “saving accounts” or “home loans” are not even listed in the first 100 anymore. That’s quite a stab!

The 20% don’t seem to look so negligible any more, don’t you think?

Who is responsible for the drop?

Well, this is an interesting issue to discuss. When a problem appears, we have a natural, almost uncontrollable desire to find the scapegoat.

Who will it be this time? Halifax for not keeping an eye wide open at its online activity? The media agency responsible for Halifax’s online marketing strategies? Google itself for not making plain statements, clear regulations and changing the rules of the game as it goes?

All involved parties reacted differently to this story but the media agency that “took care” of Halifax caught our attention.

If about a year ago they proudly shared their strategy and results they had on Halifax on their blog, now that specific article is not to be found anywhere as it was deleted the day that Halifax probably got the Google penalty.

Since we are technology addicts, we were able to easily find that article using Web Archive.

In the article in question, unbeatable figures were highlighted: natural search visitors volume was with 244% higher than in the previous year, sales percentage increased and was in alignment with visitors increase and, maybe, most important asset, Google market data showed Halifax as most visible street bank for ISA (individual saving accounts) related search.

Fast forward one year later …

Google penalized Halifax for keywords such as ISA and loans. I’ll let you draw the conclusions on who should share the blame; but no matter whom you’ll find responsible for all this, Halifax’s penalty is still on.

How did everything begin?

This is exactly what we wanted to find out and what better way to investigate this story than using the cognitiveSEO tool. In the chart bellow it’s outlined the biggest Spike of new links in Halifax links’ history and, brace yourself, you will see over 460.000 links on about 190 referring domains only. Quite a baffling ratio between links and domains, don’t you think?

To better understand what really happened, we took a fast peek on the last 90 days link acquisition chart and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to notice that in mid of December something happened. While kids put the final touches on their Christmas wish list, Halifax received an earlier “present”, a huge big Spike of new links.

However, if they receive “presents” earlier, they also begin the spring cleaning earlier.

At the end of January, after all winter holidays have passed,  we can see that the number of lost links begin to increase suddenly.  Given the fact that before this time, the number of lost links had the same approximate pattern, we could say that they probably began cleaning the links, due to the Google Penalty.

The tool helped us easily identify the unnatural links and understand the unnatural to ok link ratio for the entire link profile. As the following chart suggests, the site seems to have a highly unnatural link profile and it’s likely to be penalized by Google.

From our in house case studies, sites that have over 20% unnatural links are at high risk to be flagged by the Google Algorithm for bad practices.

If you are still skeptic about the shady practices used by Halifax you should check the following screenshots.

Let me outline the top 3 shady link building strategies Halifax used.

Shady Link Building Strategy 1 – Web Directory Links.

Let’s take a look at this web directory. At a first glance, the site is looking quite good; it has high quality domain and link authority. If we look at the details we see a do follow commercial anchor text link.

The problem is that this isn’t the single webdirectoy link. There are a bunch and they were built quite fast as we see in the Unnatural reasons spotted by the tool.

Extreme Link Velocity – We might be living in the speed century but this looks very unnatural.

Shady Link Building Strategy 2 – Easily Pattern-able Links 

Trying to initiate ourselves in the “magic” link building strategy Halifax bank’s site used, we took some other snapshots from different links that are identified as being unnatural. In the image below we can see a technique, which purpose is to make Google believe that the highlighted words represent a short paragraph of text used in the content of the site but what we are actually talking about is a hidden commercial anchor posted sideways on a low quality site.

Not that magic anymore, is it?

It’s like you are driving on the highway and all the advertising banners on the roadside are trying to invade the road, standing in your way.

The following snapshot is a re-validation of the fact that a pattern was used in making commercial anchor text look like it’s an important part in the site’s content when it actually appears to be a suspect widget. And yes, I know, everything has to do with banks: cars, houses, hospitals and bars; but mentioning the great advantageous Halifax’s bank loans on a wide range of terms, such as hybrid cars, oil prices and general news? I think you all agree with me when I say that this looks quite shady.

Shady Link Building Strategy 3 – Advertorials (paid posts)

As we can see in the screenshot above they also used a paid post strategy to acquire “search engine friendly” links. As a visual trace that might indicate this is a paid post, they have an image in the footer that says:

The Halifax link is an in-content & do-follow link enriched with commercial anchor text. That is a pretty shady thing usually. The same “advertorial” technique was also used by Interflora, when they got their site penalized by Google.

Looking at the following link we can only imagine a link network of low quality sites. That is not something that a bank would naturally get a commercial anchor text link from.

Was this Negative SEO?

After all said and done, was it negative SEO? Did Halifax’s competitors pointed thousands of negative backlinks with the clear intention to influence organic search rankings in their favor? Doesn’t seem the case this time, as all the strategies listed above appear to be a part of an assumed tactic. Also, the SEO agency in charge for their online marketing campaign talked pretty clear and artless in the erased article published on their blog about the strategy they used in order to increase Halifax’s visibility online.

Halifax Current Situation

In these troubled waters, it’s important to know how Halifax sails. First of all, as we outlined in one of the charts above, it looks like the “cleaning” process has already begun. As the number of lost links increases, the more natural and reliable their profile will begin to look. Their very quick response to this matter is worth appreciating and I am not sure if you feel the same about this but I guess their chief accountant does.

The Good Stuff at Halifax

We know there is not much milk & honey at Halifax currently, but we can’t make a full analysis without taking into account the good things Halifax has. For instance, let’s take a look at their “natural” appearance. There is, indeed a high percentage of unnatural links but the natural ones come as a counterbalance. Also, let’s not forget who are we talking about: a well-known bank that came out with their head up from several crashes and severe economic crisis during the years. We are not saying that this isn’t a nasty blow but we do think that Halifax has the necessary expertise to get through this unpleasant episode and get a fast recovery.

Conclusion

Having sites like Expedia and Halifax penalized by Google sends a strong signal that not even the big “guys” have a chance in the face of Google. They might get faster recoveries than smaller sites but still they can get penalized the same way a normal site is.

As we have seen, the SEO team, that is/was working at Halifax, already started to remove the bad links that are the cause of this drop.  I am sure that the site will be back on tracks soon but this will require a better SEO strategy from their digital marketing team.

PS: My special thanks go to Martin Macdonald for spotting this drop.

The post How Google Broke the Bank – The Famous Halifax Penalty appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.