Shortly after stage 2 of the recent Google algo update began, I received an email from a panic stricken ex-client. He woke up on a Monday morning to find all of the recent gains we had made Google were gone.
I was a bit shocked to hear this because this particular project was as "white hat" as they come. And from a keyword standpoint, it wasn’t even close to being a space that any competent SEO would consider competitive.
My initial reaction was to simply ignore the email. He was no longer a paying client, so why waste the time looking into it? But then curiosity got the best of me. So I fired up some tools and started to do some digging.
What I discovered was that my ex-client had been very busy building links since our contract expired. In fact, he had managed to pickup about 7000 new links in about a month and a half. Almost all of these links were coming from a reciprocal linking network called GotLinks.
When I wrote him back and told him that developing that many links in such a short period of time probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, (especially when the top site in his space has been around since ‘95 and has only managed to collect a total of 250 inbound links) he promptly cancelled his GotLinks account and wrote the owner and asked that all his links be removed.
That led to a bunch of defensive emails from the owner which basically said that all the sites in his network were kickin’ ass and I was just an idiot who didn’t know what I was talking about.
He also sent the following email out to all his members:
We would like to thank all of our members for making GotLinks.com the most popular free link exchange directory on the Web. We now have over 5400 actives web sites in our directory which gives you a wide variety of link exchange partners to choose from.
As many of you may have noticed, the most recent Google update occurred within the last 2 weeks. We have received very positive feedback from many users about these updates with regards to increases in pagerank and rankings. This was especially true for our paid members since their links appear on the first page of all category pages.
If you are serious about increasing your pagerank and rankings, we encourage you to consider upgrading.Benefits include:
-No daily link restrictions
- Automatic link requests
- Automatic link approvals
- Unlimited categories
- First page listings for your web site.Please see http://www.gotlinks.com/free_upgrade.php for more information.
Now that doesn’t sound like an email from someone running a link network that just got torched by Google. So maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my ex-client getting the boot didn’t have anything to do with being included in the GotLinks system?
To be completely fair, I thought the best thing to do would be to spend a little time researching his network in order to get some kind of idea as to how effective it may or may not be.
So I collected a sample of 50 keyword phrases being targeted by sites in the GotLinks directory. (all of them were found on the first page) In order to get a balanced set of keywords, I randomly selected phrases from several different categories.
Here is the complete list:
| brentwood ca mortgage broker | dog training tips |
| fireplace screens | pet insurance |
| website design orange county | aquarium fish |
| window screens los angeles | search engine optimization |
| los angeles furniture | search engine services |
| wedding harpist bay area | keyword selector tool |
| internet marketing manager | librarian software |
| mold testing in new york | ireland surf videos |
| dell desktop computer | motorcycle half helmets |
| computer forums | custom golf clubs |
| data storage | egypt windsurfing |
| java resources | discount climbing equipment |
| european web site design services | recipes for kids |
| database development | food storage |
| comicbook art | free starbucks coffee |
| truck driving jobs | austin real estate guide |
| surveillance equipment | arizona office space |
| nanny services | texas roommate search |
| resume help | holiday rentals tenerife |
| custom programming | houston event phtographer |
| work overseas | work at home |
| genital piercing jewelry | bridal shower favors |
| diamond rings | san diego wedding photographer |
| replica watches | unique baby names |
| learn to play guitar | san diego website design |
As you can see, there are a few phrases that I would consider reasonably competitive. But there are also many phrases that even Doug Heil would have a chance ranking for. If the GotLinks network is a viable linking strategy worth considering, then I should certainly be able to find a good portion of my sample sites showing up in the top 10 across the three major engines.
So what did I actually find?
Ask Jeeves
- wedding harpist bay area #13
- learn to play guitar #20
MSN
- internet marketing manager #1
- dell desktop computer #1
- brentwood ca mortgage broker #4
- window screens los angeles #4
- mold testing in new york #4
- nanny services #5
- los angeles furniture #7
- computer forums #21
- data storage #22
- fireplace screens #25
Yahoo
- mold testing in new york #1
- window screens los angeles #4
- database development #7
- website design orange county #8
Now I don’t know about you, but one top 20 listing in Google certainly isn’t enough to convince me that the GotLinks network is a place I want my clients to be.
But we all already new that, right? Anyone who wasn’t asleep for the last month knows that Google’s last update was all about penalizing sites for reciprocal linking. So why on earth would I spend the time writing about this topic? Google has made it clear they don’t like reciprocal link networks. So they released an algo that identified and penalized sites participating in them. That’s not really news. We all new it was coming.
But this situation is a bit different for a couple of reasons:
1. The site ranked well in Google before the links were added to the GotLinks network.
We had already made it through a traditional "sandbox" period and the site was ranking well for all our targeted terms. That is an important distinction because it suggests that the loss of rankings wasn’t simply caused by discounting a bunch of links that were responsible for the positions. The site ranked well before Google discovered the new links. And it is clearly penalized now. (Far worse than the original sandbox).
2. My ex-client never reciprocated.
It turns out that GotLinks was selling access to their network on a popular auction site. He paid some money and was added to the network, but he never hosted a GotLinks directory on his site. To me, that is also an important distinction because it suggests that this isn’t simply a case of an algorithm calculating the percentage of inbound links that are reciprocal and then adding a penalty if
a certain threshold is exceeded.
This looks more like a penalty for
a) Exceeding a threshold for the total number of links developed in a specific time frame, or
b) Simply being included in a specific network.
Either way, it should be enough to get you to re-think your linking strategies. In the past, many webmasters (including my ex-client) have taken the position that Google applying a penalty based solely on inbound linking patterns wasn’t really possible. After all, you can’t control who links to you.
If they did that, wouldn’t that open up the door for competitive sabotage?
I’m not sure, but I’ll let you know sometime next week.!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 8 comments }
> Exceeding a threshold for the total number of links developed in a specific time frame
WG, I know we listed this as an A#1 suspect fingerprint to avoid 2 years ago but the immediate concerns were waved off as it needed so much horsepower. With the algo-processing that G has had both the time and money to develop since then I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that data-comparison-intensive algos have kicked in. I vote that this was the one that got him.
I am really torn on this issue. We have some clients doing really well who have hundreds of backlinks from link swapping and some doing poorly who don’t wish to swap links. I’ve really tried to moderate it and be very conservative about who we exchange with and how fast we add them. I do believe link swapping is still useful as part of a whole strategy and I’m not convinced it should be scrapped just yet. We simply add a very few every week or so of closely themed sites that are playing by the rules.
The problem with link networks isn’t just the risk of introducing too many links in a short period of time. There are also risks associated with having a good chunk of your inbound links sharing a common footprint.
I mean think about it. Which is easier? creating an algo that actually calculates the percentage of reciprocation each site has, or simply looking for links that all share an identical url structure like:
gotlinks.php?c=28&cn=Category+Name+Here
That common string instantly identifies every site participating.
I was impressed by your article. I was wondering if you might have any ideas about a disturbing pattern I found in my server stats today.
Our site concerns an area of medicine called functional medicine dealing with chronic disorders like fatigue syndrome, etc. I noticed that our top 50 or so referrers were all foreign PORN sites mostly italian. I have no idea why these sites would want to link to us. We certainly don’t reciprocate. Is this some kind of a scheme, vandalism …? Whatever it is I have a feeling Google does not view it approvingly, based on your article.
Thanks for any help or comment you can give
Randall
What you are seeing is referral spam. Those sites aren’t really linking to you. They just crawl the web with bots sending forged referral data. The idea is to either exploit and open stats package, or simply get you to come visit the site when you find it in your stats.
How is Google, Yahoo and MSN dealing with real estate sites that participate in link farms? These sites have huge numbers of links that are obviously from link farms. Will these sites every be penalized?
I use reciprocal linking on all my sites, but i do not use automated linking networks and such. I do it manually by searching for relavent sites and sending an email to a site i would like to have a link from. My link growth is of course small. Plus i submit to some directories, some of which ask for a reciprocal link.
My question is, does this sort of recprocal linking fall into the same category as those using link network programs?
I am an amateur at this but, using pure and basic white hat SEO, i can get decent rankings on msn (relatively quickly) and even yahoo (though it takes 6 month or more) but i cant seem to crack google’s nut at all. Sites that rank in top 10 on msn, and yahoo cannot be found in top 300 in google. Is everybody with good ranking on google for competitive terms cloaking? or most of them at least? And doing a better job than BMW at covering their tracks.
It is refreshing to see an in-depth analysis of a reciprocal linking strategy and making deductions based on that research.
Regardless of what has been said about reciprocal linking penalites on Google, I have continued to trade links with relevenant sites and have not seen any negative affect on any of my sites.
Do you think it might be more of a penalization on reciprocal links that are not relevant? In my experience, that seems to be the case.
Comments on this entry are closed.