Reciprocal links

If a site links to you, and you give it a link back, that’s a reciprocal link. Doing this may limit the value of the link in either direction. Google usually, but not always, rates those links as having no value. The reasoning is that Google can’t possibly judge the intent of every reciprocal relationship. Google doesn’t know whether your intent is good or if you’re trying to trick its search engine. Reciprocal links are bartered exchanges, so they might be treated just like an ad from a search engine perspective.

If you have a reciprocal link, don’t expect it to carry any value, especially if you have a small site. If you are linking out, link to a noncompetitive relative expert. However, if you want to provide some reciprocal links that would be valuable to your visitors, by all means do so. Just be aware that they may not count toward your link equity.

Incestuous links

Incestuous links occur when people link to their own properties or among a group of friends' sites and then try to pass the links off as legitimate links from outside sources. If you have several sites, and they all link to each other, and you’re trying to pretend that you don’t own half of those sites, that’s some incestuous linking going on.

Some large networks exist that do link between their properties, such as the Gawker Media Network, which has links between all its sites (www.gawker.com, www.jezebel.com, www.io9.com, www.lifehacker.com, www.gizmodo.com, among many others). This is not incestuous linking by definition. The company is linking within its network, yes. But it is, first, a large company and, second, not trying to hide the fact that it owns the sites in the networks. Generally, linking within networks happens for user experience or for branding purposes. Large companies know that linking within their own networks doesn’t mean that they gain any link equity from it. In most cases, these links are for commercial value and perhaps credibility, but not for link equity or PageRank. And most important, they’re not trying to hide the fact that they do it. It’s a general rule of thumb: If people are trying to hide something that they did, they’re probably doing something wrong.

We call these types of links incestuous links because they are no good and should make you feel icky. Smaller sites caught using them are punished. When you are caught using incestuous links, not only do you run the risk of having those links devalued, but your site could also be marked as spam, and you may have all your links devalued. And that’s not even the worst that can happen.

When you get penalized for this type of spam, your site can vanish from the index altogether. We know of one site (that shall remain nameless) using incestuous links and ranking really, really well, with a ton of link equity. Then Google made some tweaks to its algorithm and discovered that this particular site was using incestuous links. So Google punished that site. The site’s rankings dropped down to the thousandth place on every one of its keywords, and it couldn’t even rank for its own name. Trust us when we say dishonesty doesn’t pay.

Link farms

We discuss link farms in Book I, Chapter 6 when we talk about search engine spam. Spam includes any sneaky, devious, or underhanded technique used to trick search engines into giving websites higher rankings. Link farms are literally pages of hundreds (or even thousands) of links on many sites that all link together. This is slightly different than incestuous linking because you might not own the properties involved. In general, you should be very suspicious if someone asks for a link from your site and offers you a link from a totally different site in exchange. That's a classic warning sign for a link farm.

Link farms are sites that have many different links to multiple different sites, all for the express purpose of passing link equity and giving those sites a higher rating in the search engines. Sometimes, you can’t help it if a link farm links to you. If you discover that your site is part of one, politely ask for it to be removed as soon as possible. Being caught as part of a link farm could lead to all your links losing their link equity or even harsher penalties.

Web rings

Web rings are not necessarily spam. Web rings are any collection of websites from around the Internet that join together through interlinking in a circular structure. When you join a web ring, you become part of a circle of related websites. One way to get caught up in a web ring is by including a third-party widget (an interactive piece of HTML coding) on your site or by making a widget available for others to include on their sites. Figure 4-1 shows an example of a web ring widget.

We don’t recommend joining a web ring, because all those links do not give you any link equity. On top of that, it probably isn’t worth the traffic you’ll be receiving.

You want natural links. You want people to link to you because they feel that your site is worthwhile. Web rings aren’t natural links. And although they’ve fallen out of favor in recent years, they do still exist. But quite honestly, they’re not worth the trouble.

Bad neighborhoods

Say you have a site that wants to link to you. You take a quick look at the site and check to see whether it’s in the search engine’s index by entering it into Google. But this site does not show up anywhere in the search results. Do you want a link from this site? Chances are, probably not.

Sometimes, a website isn’t part of a search engine’s index. It could be that the website is too newly created. But it’s more likely that the website comes from a bad neighborhood. This is a website that got yanked from a search engine index, and probably for a good reason. Either it was spamming or it was using other sneaky methods to try and fool the search engines, and it got caught.

Being part of a bad neighborhood or accepting links from a site that has been banished from the index is about the same as if you had suddenly associated with the bad kids at your high school. Your site gets flagged, and you come under suspicion of using spam techniques yourself.

You can’t help it if someone chooses to link to your site. But it’s a good idea to avoid actively attracting unsavory attention. Try to avoid poor links whenever you can, and focus on attracting quality links that will add to your PageRank and grant you link equity. If you do get an unsavory link, the search engines give you a way to publicly distance yourself from it, as we explain later in this chapter.

Identifying inbound link spam

This minibook tells you how to find out all the pages and sites linking to you. It also familiarizes you with the characteristics of a link that can harm you if the search engines recognize it as spam. So how can you find out whether any of your inbound links are seen as spam by the search engines?

Webmasters with all the best intentions may find themselves suffering from a link spam penalty as a result of Google’s having suddenly changed its guidelines. For instance, you may have used guest posting or press releases as an inbound link strategy, but then found yourself at risk of a penalty when Google announced in 2013 that links from press releases are unnatural, and then, in 2014, that guest post links are unnatural (read Chapter 3 of this minibook for the types of links that Google considers unnatural). Whether inbound link spam happened before you managed the website, or because the search engines changed their rules, or because you trusted someone to do SEO on your website and that person went about it in a risky way, you can deal with it — don’t lose hope.

The first thing to know about how search engines handle inbound link spam is that a website can be penalized for spam in two ways. An algorithmic penalty is built into the search engines’ ranking algorithms. The search engines have identified attributes unique to link spam and can match that pattern to any site’s inbound links in order to filter them from the results. The other approach that a search engine may take to combat spam is a manual penalty. True to its name, a manual penalty can happen when a site gets a serious search by a human instead of by using the search engine’s normal algorithms. When a human investigates the site, anything hidden from the search engines in images or with any other kind of technology is visible. It’s a little bit like being audited. If the person doing the inspection catches you doing something against the search engine guidelines, you are penalized. A penalty can range in severity from having your whole site removed from the search index altogether to keeping individual pages on your site from ranking for key terms.

Manual action penalties

Determining whether Google has placed a manual penalty against you is as easy as checking your free Google Search Console account. When you’re signed in to Google Search Console, go to Search Traffic and then Manual Actions. Figure 4-2 shows an example of a manual action notification for unnatural links reported in Google Search Console. Here are the types of spam Google will alert webmasters of:

• Unnatural links to your site
• Unnatural links from your site
• Hacked site
• User-generated spam
• Thin content with little or no added value
• Hidden text or keyword stuffing
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Spammy freehosts
• Pure spam (defined by Google as “aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or other repeated or egregious violations of Google’s quality guidelines”)

The Bing Webmaster Tools site also has an area that’s used to alert webmasters of suspected spam, but in our experience, Bing is not as forthcoming with its messages to webmasters. You can check the Index Summary chart in the Bing Webmaster Tools Dashboard for how many pages of your site are indexed, and if the number of pages indexed is zero, then it’s safe to assume your site has been severely penalized.

Algorithmic penalties

Determining whether your site got caught in an algorithmic update targeting link spam requires a little more legwork than simply checking Webmaster Tools for a message. Basically, you check to see whether your search traffic dropped on the same day as any known algorithm updates.

In Chapter 3 of this minibook, we introduce you to Google’s Penguin penalty targeting link spam. This algorithmic penalty was first released in April 2012, but a number of updates have refined Penguin since then. Google doesn’t always announce or confirm changes to its algorithm, so the search engine marketing community has attempted to record the dates of all Penguin updates in order to help webmasters in their efforts to pinpoint any negative effects by Penguin on their websites. Visit https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change for the most complete list of Penguin (and all other) updates. Then, compare your search traffic reported in your analytics tool and see whether traffic drops align with any of the Penguin updates.

A tool can do this comparison for you if you use Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/) as your analytics software. Digital marketing agency Barracuda released a free tool called Panguin (http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/) that marks up your search traffic graph with the known dates of algorithmic penalty updates, including for Penguin and Panda (see Book V, Chapter 2 for more on how Google Panda penalizes websites for content-based spam). The example of the Panguin tool in action in Figure 4-3 shows that this site probably benefitted from the January 2013 Panda update, gaining a significant spike in traffic following the update.

Removing unwanted links

With luck, your research will show that you aren’t being penalized for unnatural links. But if you think you are, you have recourse! Unfortunately, the process for cleaning up spammy inbound links is laborious and time intensive. On the upside, it has been shown to work! The process of inbound link cleanup has three parts: Link pruning to get spam links removed; link disavowal to tell the search engines that you know a link is spam but you can’t get it removed; and then (in the case of manual penalties) asking the search engine to reevaluate your site and lift any penalties.

Figure 4-4 shows a flowchart for removing unwanted links. Apply this flowchart to every one of your inbound links. We discuss getting a listing of your inbound links in Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, and Majestic earlier in this chapter, in the “Identifying Inbound Links” section. If you suspect that you have a link penalty against you, you should get the full, historic link report available from Majestic so that you can vet all your links as the flowchart describes.

Keep meticulous records of your inbound link cleanup process because in the end, you’ll ask the search engine to reconsider your site in its newly cleaned form and explain what you did to get there. The last step in getting an unnatural link penalty lifted is to tell the search engine everything you did, or even tried to do, to get rid of bad inbound links. Google expects you to tell it if you asked for changed anchor text, added nofollows, and performed link removal. Google doesn’t make the process easy, and that’s intentional. The search engines hate spam and will make a site pay for a chance at forgiveness.