Link requirements you personally have

[AhFreshMeat]

I was going to ask: How does google know you’ve paid for a link? But my question has warped a bit

Are there factors that google looks at that makes a link not pass much power? Heres my list i personally made:

- links from sites with traffic
- links from sites with even a small amount of new posts and new links
- relevant link in any possible way (whether thats an h2, h1, or domain level)
- links from sites that are clearly not link farms and dont have a bogus amount of out going links.

That being said, i can build the above quite easily, but how does google REALLY fight against sites that “manipulate” for links. My guess… they don’t?

How do they actually know you are part a 3 way link exchange? Or you reviewed a product in return for a link?

I’m sure the vets know this thoroughly, but most of us don’t

 

[Ryuzaki]

You're asking "How does Google know you paid for a link?" and "What makes them decide to wipe the juice from a link?" I'll comment on what you shared and then add some.

Traffic
While I prefer a link from a domain with a minimal threshold of power, if only to ensure they aren't penalized into the ground, I don't think it matters. You could make the best website in the world, attract links to the point you're a DR80 site, but you talk about a subject that nobody searches and you never optimize the posts anyways. It's just some obscure subject every .edu and .gov in the world links to. Would you not take this link because it gets no organic traffic?

New Content
This is good but just like the above example, the best site in the world may not be adding content. But it's a good test to make sure that things are kosher. But at this point they could be adding AI spam content posts. A better test is to use the Google filters for dates and check to make sure their new content is being indexed (not just whether or not they're adding it).

Relevancy
I want at least page-level relevancy if not sub-header section relevancy. I don't care as much about domain-level relevancy. I say this as someone who sees the impact of link campaigns every day. Domain-level is something people want and think they need, and that slowly gets warped into "that's the only thing that works", which is far from the truth. Relevancy is good, hyper-relevancy is better, but domain-wide relevancy isn't some force multiplier.

Outbound Link Count
It doesn't matter. The "net" is a "web" and the more intertwined it is, the more signals Google can get out of it, for crawling, for relevance, for discovery, and so forth. I think the count is irrelevant.

Here's my additiions:

Outbound Link Profile Quality
If 75% of your outbound link profile is to sites that end up no longer existing, end up penalized, end up busted for buying links, or are in shady niches, then that's a pretty big signal that your OBL's need to be neutralized by SpamBrain.

In the same vein, 75% of your OBL's are to lower authority, lower trust, spammier / dead sites, etc. And the other 25% is to the best sites ever. A bunch of .edu's, .gov's, and DR75+ sites. Pretty fishy and easy to spot. At the same time you'd be surprised how little of this they're neutralizing, too, if any (at this point). Think along the lines of automated PBNs like ALN, stuff like SAPE, hacked niche edits, and that stuff. I think that's the target of a lot of this so far.

Outbound Anchor Text Profile
It's not just who you're linking to but how you're linking to them. If 75% of your OBL profile is using exact match anchor texts, that's a very easy signal to find. Match that with the recipients of the links being as described above, and your confidence levels that these are link sellers just hit like 95%.

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More discussion:

Now flip all this around. It's pretty obvious who is selling links, algorithmically speaking. And if you know who the sellers are, you know who the buyers are.

That being said, i can build the above quite easily, but how does google REALLY fight against sites that “manipulate” for links. My guess… they don’t?

This was part of what I was hinting at above. Google is interested in two things: 1) Improving the quality of the SERPs so they can suck more money out of the ads there by getting more traffic thanks to their improved reputation, 2) not letting their reputation get smeared. That's pretty much what they care about.

That lets you know what kind of links they go after. Low-tier, voluminous spam links, manipulation on such a scale or magnitude that too much attention is being placed on how the entirety of Google is losing to someone like one of us, anything that blatantly flouts the webmaster guidelines (PBNs), etc.

You have to consider what the normal internet user thinks about sold links (they don't). Even if they know they exist, they aren't attuned to seeing them. They'd know if a blog comment had 50 OBL's in it all with exact match anchors. But they don't know if there's a really high quality guest post on a high quality site and one out of 4 links in it is a sold link. That's about where Google stops caring. And we have to stop thinking we know what a high quality site is, and we have to start thinking about an algorithm that doesn't have eyes, a taste for design or prose, or even a rudimentary brain.

How do they actually know you are part a 3 way link exchange?

They don't. My guess is the amount of processing to figure it out is prohibitive and the resulting quality improvement doesn't justify it. If you're doing really sophisticated link campaigns that require a lot of attention and care, then your website itself is probably getting that much attention and care, too. You aren't the kind of site Google is worried about.

Or you reviewed a product in return for a link?

They can't know. They aren't psychic.

 

[AhFreshMeat]

@Ryuzaki, This was incredibly helpful, I'll be bookmarking this and sharing with my community of publishers.

One thing to note: I had a guest post on a site that had a significantly amount of outbound links, some were to essay sites and other exact anchors, and they had a high Dr and minimal traffic. The site did not look spammy at all initially... I didn't notice the essay site OBLs initially.

but when the spam update hit most recently: the page I built the link to dropped to spot #5 from spot #1 immediately. So that is what fueled my OP. I also had an exact match anchor to that link - so what you said is all making sense.

It's almost an artform to determine whether a link is possible, but you managed to nail it man, thanks again.

 

[CallMeV]

If 75% of your outbound link profile is to sites that end up no longer existing, end up penalized, end up busted for buying links, or are in shady niches, then that's a pretty big signal that your OBL's need to be neutralized by SpamBrain.

@Ryuzaki I appreciated reading how you think about this. But, doesn't this pretty much disqualify almost all sites selling links? I've done a lot of custom outreach for link buys and almost everyone willing to sell links is linking out to some pretty low quality sites or gambling/CBD types. If they haven't already linked out to spammy sites it's just a matter time in my opinion... I'm finding it hard to find clean link buys. If you see CBD, gambling outbound links are you not buying them? Or if the sites have good enough traffic or other metrics do you just overlook it? Thanks again I'm just curious about your thought process.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@CallMeV, There's a huge difference between what's theoretical or what's inferred from Google's webmaster guidelines, and what's actually reality in practice.

Because, as you say, if they really could and did go after every single purchased link out there, nobody would survive. It would disqualify everyone. Every site that sells you a link also drops in a link or two to some other site that didn't pay them. Can Google really sort it out? Maybe, but is it worth the time and processing power? Probably not.

Same goes for "shady niches". If they just trashed those niches for being those niches, then who would they return for those types of queries? And if all sites get penalized then they're all penalized and Google is back to ground zero, trying to figure out which penalized site deserves to rank better. A site can be a very high quality CBD (which isn't shady any more) or gambling (which is becoming increasingly more legal in more areas) site, as well.

I agree, it's increasingly more difficult to purchase links that check off all the right boxes. Fortunately we don't need to check off all the right boxes in reality. Google acts on the most egregious links that are flagrantly against their guidelines, which are PBNs and mass spam. Those two are the ones that serve to embarrass them the most, too, which is when they tend to act. Those you absolutely want to stay away from.

The reality is that link buying works and it works in ways that most people have been propagandized into never trying. Would you imagine that the CBD guys and Casino guys are wasting their money by buying those links? If anybody knows what works, it's them. And that's the worst case scenario these days as long as you aren't doing PBNs. The scenario is you waste your money because the link is ignored, but you don't get penalized. You can get penalized algorithmically by over-optimizing anchor texts and all that, but not through buying decent links.

The question to always fall back on (which sadly was the case back in the day), is that if this will hurt me then what's to stop me from doing it to my competitors? Google really does seem to have a grip on that nowadays.

Will some links end up negated down the line that you bought yesterday? Surely. I'm sure Google's SpamBrain will get better at sorting it out, but even then they're not going to spend the resources figuring out tiered link building and sifting with a fine tooth comb over every outbound link on a domain while trying to be psychic about which link required money to be placed or not. You can get away with much more than you might think.

And really, at this point, where the modus operandi is to ignore rather than penalize, it's go time. We aren't getting any younger and the internet itself will fundamentally change over time. Get it while the getting is good and the punishment is simply a fart noise and a "womp womp" sound from Google instead of them throwing us in a cage.

One more thing to consider about an outbound link profile is that you could link to 500 sites over the course of 5 years on your site. You could be diligent about making sure those sites and URLs stay up. You can even check which ones are now 301's to new locations so you can fix those extra hops. But what you can't do is visit each of those OBL's and make sure the domain didn't drop and someone else didn't rebuild it with low quality spam content and all that. There's no escaping having some "bad" sites in your OBL profile either. No single instance is going to make or break anything, or Google would end up burning their entire search engine down.

 

[ashley]

@CallMeV, There's a huge difference between what's theoretical or what's inferred from Google's webmaster guidelines, and what's actually reality in practice.

Because, as you say, if they really could and did go after every single purchased link out there, nobody would survive. It would disqualify everyone. Every site that sells you a link also drops in a link or two to some other site that didn't pay them. Can Google really sort it out? Maybe, but is it worth the time and processing power? Probably not.

Same goes for "shady niches". If they just trashed those niches for being those niches, then who would they return for those types of queries? And if all sites get penalized then they're all penalized and Google is back to ground zero, trying to figure out which penalized site deserves to rank better.

With pbns- are the sites they link out to penalised or the links just neutralised? Because if I’m reading right they’re just neutralised?
What if the obl are removed, will the sites that were once linked to remain penalised? (If they’re penalised in the first place)
I’m talking links from pbns that the link receiver doesn’t own
Recently I’m seeing more “rent a link” ads vs “buy a link” being promoted by certain “gurus”

 

[Ryuzaki]

With pbns- are the sites they link out to penalised or the links just neutralised? Because if I’m reading right they’re just neutralised?

Both. There are still "inbound link penalties" which are manual actions. There are also "outbound link penalties" but most often those are just neutralized.

What if the obl are removed, will the sites that were once linked to remain penalised? (If they’re penalised in the first place)

If it's an algorithmic penalty then the removal of the OBL's will clear it up in time (whenever Google recrawls those pages). If it's manual, you'll still need to submit a reinclusion request and have them manually remove the penalty.