Most of us are aware of link penalties that occur if you have low-quality or spam links pointing to your site. But did you know you can also be penalized by Google for how you link to other websites from your site? Yup, you sure can. It’s called an “unnatural outbound links” penalty, and similar to the inbound link penalty, it can be applied partially or sitewide. Recently, we conducted an audit for a new client, and we flagged the spammy linking that was being done in a particular Continue Reading ...
Posts Tagged ‘ Link Week Column ’
Give Google a break: Tackling paid links is harder than you may think
Prior to the recent arrival of Penguin 4.0, it had been nearly two years since Penguin was last updated. It was expected to roll out at the end of 2015, which then became early 2016. By the summer, some in the industry had given up on Google ever releasing Penguin 4.0. But why did it take so long? I’d argue that criticism directed at Google is in many cases unjustified, as people often take too simplistic a view of the task at hand for the search engine. Detecting and dealing with paid Continue Reading ...
The immediate results of link building
In an April 2016 article on Moz by Kristina Kledzik, “How Long Does it Take for Link Building to Impact Rankings,” the author posits that new links take about 10 weeks to have an impact. Our findings show the exact opposite: High-end link building has an immediate and persistent positive impact. I’ll explain further and share our data here. Kledzik’s study was on a moderately large site with roughly 200K pages and focused on moderately difficult keyword rankings. She correctly points Continue Reading ...
Link profile analysis: How to prevent penalties by being proactive
As most SEOs know, links are still extremely important to ranking highly in the Google search results. In fact, a recent study performed by Backlinko showed that “the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.” Thus, it makes sense for most all large companies with a significant website presence to implement a regular link pruning schedule. At ymarketing, we call our process of link pruning “link remediation.” The normal way most sites Continue Reading ...