News of Google deindexing blog networks erupted throughout the SEO community, with the white hats cheering and the black hats jeering. Then a bit later Google started issuing Webmaster Tool Warnings like they were going out of style and the news cycle started all over again. During this I’ve seen a lot of speculation repeated as fact, leading to some misconceptions about what’s happening — especially among the truly white hat crowd that doesn’t have any first hand experience (or darker-hatted friends or clients).
From an agency perspective — an agency that does not use these tactics for our clients, but whose clients sometimes go the fast route on their own — here is what we have directly observed:
- Tons of link networks are getting de-indexed, not just the big ones. Very few of these are getting 100% de-indexed. There are usually many sites in the network that are missed.
- All link networks that we’ve seen be de-indexed are public ones where anyone can pay for their links.
- The Webmaster Tool warnings appear to be associated with unnatural anchor text profiles combined with links from paid link networks. It appears to require both to trigger a warning.
- We have not seen a single site actually penalized after getting the Webmaster Tools warning about unnatural links.
- The evidence we see seems to indicate that Google is targeting these link networks manually, not algorithmically.
That’s the broad overview — now let’s get into the specifics of these observations.
The Link Buyers: Test Cases
As I mentioned earlier, we do not use paid links for any of our clients, except to occasionally recommend industry-specific directories that send legitimate traffic that converts. We do, however, have a small handful of clients that buy links on their own, against our advice and sometimes without our knowledge (until it all hits the fan, then we get the panicked call).
Here are our anonymized test cases that we examined in depth. These are actual clients (though not always SEO clients) who we know used paid link tactics, and what tactics they used:
- Red, Inc: Purchased links via BuildMyRank, targeting both deep pages and the home page, with a good mix of anchor text. Also have a very large number of legitimate organic links, far in excess of what they were buying.
- Yellow, Inc: Purchased links via BuildMyRank, targeting home page and deep pages with a good mix of anchor text. The vast majority of all links going to their site (90%+) were from BuildMyRank.
- Blue, Inc: Purchased links via a couple of smaller link networks (but still public), targeting deep pages with a very unnatural anchor text profile. They would not tell us the name of the companies they were buying links from, but described the process and it’s pretty much BuildMyRank’s model on a smaller scale. Blue owns several ecommerce sites (targeting different niches and different products) with a good amount of legitimate links as well. They built links to several of their sites.
- Green, Inc: Purchased links via Linkworth, including blogroll links, to the home page and deep pages, with an incredibly unnatural anchor text profile. They are a site in a very competitive industry filled with spam and shady tactics.
- Purple, Inc: Built their own mini link network of sites spread across different hosts and posted links to their several industrial sites using the exact requirements of BuildMyRank (150 word unique articles, 1 links per article). They maintained fairly natural-looking anchor text profiles, and their sites had far more legitimate links than artificially built ones.
So these are our link buying players — let’s take a look at what happened when Google started taking down the link networks and sending out the Webmaster Tool warnings.
Deindexing, Warnings, and No Penalties
Red, Inc
No warnings, no penalties
Red targeted two specific pages with their link buying, and we have good records of their progress showing they managed to improve the rankings for one competitive keyword by 40 rankings, making it to page 1. A week after BuildMyRank was deindexed, they lost those rankings, dropping back to exactly where they were before. They received no Webmaster Tool warnings and no penalties.
Yellow, Inc
No warnings, no penalties
This was a very interesting example. We know that over 90% of all their backlinks came only from BuildMyRank, though they maintained a more natural anchor text distribution, including lots of junk anchor text as well. They too lost rankings as nearly all of their links were deindexed, eliminating all benefit of that money spent overnight. However, they received no Webmaster Tool warnings at all, despite that Google knew almost all of their links were from a link network. They were not penalized — though they certainly lost nearly all of their rankings from losing nearly all of their links. Their rankings are back to where they were (actually a bit better due to a some legitimate links gained while they had SERP visibility).
Blue, Inc
Unnatural link warning, no penalties
Blue slipped in many rankings as the link networks were deindexed: about 50% of the network sites were deindexed. However, several of their competitors also lost rankings, so the net loss wasn’t too bad (yet — they still have more link network links out there). Several large brands surged ahead in the rankings. They received an unnatural link warning in Google Webmaster Tools, asking them to fix it and fill out a reconsideration request; however, their site was not penalized at all — other than losing many of their link network links, their rankings remain where they should be two weeks after the warning. Interestingly when they informed their link network of the warning, he told them it was their fault for having multiple sites on the same class C IP block, and it had nothing to do with the link network. It wasn’t until they came to us that we were able to show that half of their paid links had been deindexed.
Green, Inc
Unnatural link warning, no penalties
With their piles and piles of exact match anchor text, Green received a Google Webmaster Tools warning. However, none of the sites that their paid links are on have been deindexed and their rankings have not dropped at all, despite receiving the warning. So not just no penalty, but no apparent indication that their links have lost any value yet.
Purple, Inc
No warning, no penalties
Purple has not received any warning, has not been penalized, and has not had any of their sites deindexed. Despite the fact that they’re using sites pretty exactly identical in footprint to BuildMyRank only with shallower sites, they keep chugging away.
Conclusions
It seems likely that Google is deindexing link networks manually, not algorithmically. While almost all of BuildMyRank was deindexed, many other networks experienced only partial deinexation even though the entire indexed network has the identical footprint. Other private link networks with seemingly similar footprints — but where outsiders weren’t able to step up and pay for placement on the network to prove they were paid links — were not touched. It seems exactly like the kind of effect you’d see if an employee were given a modest link-buying budget, a fake site, and instructions to track down the link networks and nuke the ones that you were 100% certain were paid networks.
Furthermore, I suspect the Webmaster Tool Warnings are designed to try to prompt website owners into revealing more link networks that Google can sign up for, verify, and manually shut down. It makes sense that none of the sites that received these warnings were actually penalized; after all, if building links to the site from a paid link network penalized the site, you would absolutely see many cases of people using the networks to buy links to their competitors to get their competitors penalized. This would be particularly rampant in certain very competitive niches that are already filled with shady tactics.
Our advice to the clients who received the warnings is always the same: stop paying for the links, remove whatever paid links you possibly can, and pursue legitimate link building and brand building techniques. But don’t submit a reconsideration request. Instead clean up your act, treat it as a wake-up call, but if you aren’t penalized, don’t spend time asking not to be penalized. Spend that time doing things right instead.
The Eloquence of the Algorithm
As an aside, we actually met with Blue, Inc just a couple weeks before the deindexing started to try to sell them on having us do link building for them. We pointed out all the great work we’d done on some of their sites, improving their conversion rates and their site structure to help in rankings. But we could not penetrate the owner’s primary argument:
“This guy has a network of sites he controls, and when I buy a link from him I know exactly what it’s going to cost me for a link, what the PageRank of the homepage is, and how long the link will be on the homepage. Unless you can give me a firm price per link, how can I compare the two?”
We tried to explain about possible dangers of buying links, that a PR 4 link and a PR 4 link can bring very different SEO values based on other factors, all of the arguments for the admittedly more expensive, slower, and less certain brand building, content creation, and social presence. But ultimately our eloquence wasn’t enough. And to be fair to Blue, Inc: their paid strategy was working. They were getting lots of great rankings going their route, and we were trying to throw prophecies of future doom at them to convince them to change. Why would you change a winning strategy?
We got the panicked call when they go the Webmaster Tools warning and their rankings dropped as the network started to be deindexed. What odds would you give that they sign on with us now?
