SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

Evidence?

There’s an interesting article over at the onreact blog discussing potential Google algorithm changes which not only de-value exact matches in anchor links, but actually hurt your position in the SERPS.

The article describes how some blog posts which were initially ranking well, completely disappeared from the SERPS when exact match anchor links were pointed at them.

To add to the evidence, apparently the posts re-appeared in the SERPS after the links were removed.

Exact Match?

But what is classed as an “exact match anchor link” – and why may Google be using them to filter the SERPS.

The article describes exact matches as fairly generic – high value phrases, an example of which is "SEO Company UK”.   

Anchor text has been becoming increasingly popular over the last couple of years as a way of improving SERP positioning.   More and more spammy backlinks are implementing exact key phrase patterns for anchor text, so this may be why Google are taking notice.

Blackhat?

This leaves a worrying question though : can your competitors damage your position in the SERPS by “exact matching” links to your site?

Google have always been aware of the potential for Blackhat SEO’s to use the ranking algorithms against competitors, so I don’t believe it’s that straightforward.   

I expect Google must be using other factors such as link patterns, source addresses, anchor text distribution, page content etc before taking the step of removing a page from the SERPS.

Stop Using Exact Matches?

I don’t think this is evidence enough that we should stop using exact match anchor links, however the links should continue to be natural in both growth and context.    For example, exact matches can be used when the content pointed to – is indeed a match of the anchor text context.   And if the link comes from a page with related content – this will also be proof to Google that the link should be counted as good.

I’m sure additional research will be done on this and there will be other blog posts discussing the findings.   It’ll be interesting to see what correlations are found when more people start looking into these findings.

For now I’ll keep linking where linking makes sense to the user and the content..

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Tags: Google, Linkbuilding

Yes, I know it sounds too good to be true and maybe it is?   Maybe the search engines are already aware of this and are changing their algorithms to discount these links, but from what I’ve seen – the links generated from this method do work.

So how does it work?

Well the key catalyst to all this was a post by ViperChill on SEOMoz who recommended using www.flippa.com, a website auction site, as a starting point for link building.   If you’ve not seen or used Flippa before – it’s a bit like eBay, but for websites. Each website up for sale has traffic statistics along with it’s current page rank value.   The trick here is to look for recently registered sites with high PR values.   To get a high PR in such a short time – the site must have obtained many backlinks “OR” has a few highly rated (i.e. High PR) backlinks.

In effect – what flippa now become to SEOs, is an index of websites who’ve had their PR manipulated by experienced link builders!

The next step is to use tools such as www.opensiteexplorer.com (SEOMoz) or siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com (Yahoo!) to reverse engineer the link building. Using such tools, you can track down the high PR sites which are linking to the site which is up for auction.

And from what I’ve seen – these high PR links are easy to obtain – usually coming from follow comments in blog posts.  What I found surprising is how easy it is to obtain such links – and how obvious it must be to the blog owner that they’re being used? Maybe they don’t understand the importance of links, maybe they don’t care, or maybe they don’t know how to block it?

Now the next key step is to look at the other spam comments on the blog post.  Chances are there will be posts from several spammers.  Now look at the sites they’re linking to, and bingo – you now have a list of more sites which have had their PR manipulated.  So starting off from the one site from Flippa, you’ll now have a list of several “seed” sites which you can now use to follow the trail left behind by the link builders.

This list of “seed” sites quickly becomes a long list of high PR, followed, link opportunities. I’ve seen plenty of .edu and .gov sites in this list!

Now back to the ethics of link building…

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t condone comment spamming in blogs!   If you use the above to spam the web and manipulate the search engines, then you deserve the wrath of Google when it detects this and drops you from the index!

One thing I’m trying to highlight here is how easy it must be for black hatters to control PR?   This must be really frustrating to Google, and I’d love to hear what they’re doing to combat it?

From a white hat perspective though you can use the above method for legitimate purposes.   Eventually, you will come across sites related to your subject field, where you’ll have a valid comment to add.   It’ll take more effort, but in the long term, the links will count for more and last longer.

Posted in SEO | 6 Comments »
Tags: Linkbuilding, SEO