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Dofollow Digest #3: link building quality more important than ever

Author

Eric Carrell
April 30, 2024

Greetings, compadres -

Eric Carrell here with dofollow.com. This is issue #3 of our newsletter series on SEO for marketing leaders.

In the last issue, I talked about how Google is rolling out updates specifically targeting spammy SEO tactics. The update Google rolled out in March didn’t mention spammy link building tactics, but I have suspected they also might focus on links in the near future.

Last week, I saw the most recent evidence of a crackdown on people who engage in spammy, low-quality link building tactics.

In this newsletter, I’ll talk about what evidence I saw, what that means for the future of link building, and what you can do to prevent getting penalized by Google.

Let’s get into it.

What's in the newsletter

In 2012, Google released their “Penguin Update.” This was targeting spammy and unnatural link building tactics. I saw friends and colleagues lose 90% of their business overnight for using spammy link building tactics like PBNs, low-quality directories, link wheels, etc.

These days, mostly Google just ignores unnatural or spammy link building tactics instead of dealing out manual penalties and big algorithm updates targeting links.

However, we could be seeing signs of Google being more vigilant about shady link building tactics. What are the signs?

Google seems to be taking much more of an interest fighting spammy SEO tactics to game the algorithm. First, we saw the March update that I covered in the last issue. I predict that Google will crackdown harder on spammy link building tactics again soon.

Last week, we had a discovery call with a prospect who used a link building market place to build links to a newly established website. They received a manual penalty almost immediately, which was quite surprising to me. A manual penalty is when a member of Google’s webspam team manually reviews your website, sees that you are using tactics that are against their webmaster guidelines, and manually deindex your website.

Manual penalties used to be a big thing 10+ years ago, but you rarely hear about them anymore, which is why I was surprised to see one being issued to a brand-new website. I started poking around, and I found several cases of manual penalties recently, which leads me to believe that Google, in addition to the March update, are taking a much harsher stance against spammy link building/SEO tactics.

So, why did the links built from this marketplace lead to a manual penalty? One word: link farm. Link farms are websites that exist only to sell you links. They have no perspective, no editorial process, no business model outside of revenue from selling links on the website.

These types of websites will at best, be ignored by Google, causing you to waste a ton of time and money. At worst, they will get your site penalized, causing you to lose all your organic traffic overnight - as we saw in the discovery call we had last week.

Here are two examples of websites the marketplace used for link building:

You’ll notice these websites have no real authoritative backlinks (few or zero trusted sources), they write about anything from gaming, to cooking, to prescriptions, to casinos, to travel. They have no business model other than to sell links, they will write and link to anything. If you look at the posts, you will almost certainly find a paid, commercial link in every single post.

Link marketplaces have a big database of websites they can guarantee you links on. In our opinion, this is inherently bad. If they can guarantee links for you on all of their websites, that means these websites are likely link farms with zero editorial process, and not likely valued by Google.

At dofollow.com, not only are we always doing outreach to establish new relationships on behalf of our clients, but we can never guarantee links ahead of time. The sites we build links on are real businesses with real business models (think SaaS), they have strong editorial processes, and only link to super high-quality sources.

Recently, I was giving a refresher training to our team on how to do a quality check on websites we’re building links on. What I realized is that quality link building has really never changed. People have tried different tactics to win cheap links, but Google has also gotten much smarter. We’re constantly reviewing feedback and guidelines from Google so that we are building safe, future-proof, valuable links for our clients. Here are highlights from our internal link quality checklist we use for all links we build:

  •  > 1,000 traffic per month (Ahrefs data, but this is usually much higher)

  • Traffic location: USA, UK, Canada, Australia - top location(s) - traffic should come from the country of the target audience. One exception would be design or development businesses which we often see large amounts of traffic from India.

  • Avoid sharp declines in traffic on the prospective website, especially with no signal of recovery.

  • Keywords: the site should be ranking for relevant keywords (i.e. not things like "celebrity weight loss" if it's a site about web hosting).

  • Not a general site - the site should not have content about every topic: celebrity, fashion, arts, automobile, etc. We want specialized sites only: if it’s a tech client, then we need to build links on sites that only talk about tech - with a business model behind it.

  • contextual links on the main domain, i.e: example.com as opposed to blog.example.com - this is PREFERENCE, however, we can make exceptions depending on the subdomain. If the resource page is on the subdomain, check traffic and DR to make sure they fit our requirements since the metrics can be different than the main domain’s.

  • Relevance: domain level, article level, sentence level. We at least need the sentence where the link is going to be relevant to the target page. We prefer the article is relevant to the target page, and we really love it when the website/domain is relevant to the target page/client site.

  • Check for meta noindex or nofollow on the page level.

  • the page should be receiving internal linking from the website + not be orphaned. If a page that we have a link on is not getting linked to from the rest of the website, then that page is orphaned... it has no power.

  • Avoid sites that are only info-based - not built around a real business (no product/service).

  • We try to avoid over-optimization in anchor text. Usually, we give the editor control to link to the page how they see fit. However, it is good to look at the page you want a link from and suggest the best place where it could fit .

  • The prospective website has relevant backlinks from trusted sources.

If you’re using a link building agency (or definitely a link marketplace) I’d suggest putting their links through this quality assurance process to see if the links they are building are potentially risky to your business.

To get an assessment of your backlink profile to see if any risky backlinks may have been built by others, you can reach out to us for a free backlink assessment at the bottom of this email.

📰 Industry News & Google Updates

Interested in getting a free link building assessment? We’ll do a deep dive into your backlink profile to find any toxic links, areas of improvement, quick wins, etc. Get in touch below :)