Google’s recent updates reshaped the way SEO (search engine optimization) is perceived and executed in many ways, from keyword placement to link acquisition. This is already well known.
Today’s article is about how online tool providers are dealing with updates such as the Penguin and how they are concentrating in identifying URLs with too many inbound links with exact match anchor texts pointing to them. This is now considered an unnatural profile and gets Google’s “special treatment”.
I invited Ahrefs (a well known back link tracking tool) to discuss how messy these Google updates can be and how such changes impact the SEO tool business.
We kick off about how clients are seeing those updates and how the company addresses such questions.
“Google update increases interest to the backlink deep analysis. Maybe that makes a contribution to the positive growth trend of serious package sales”, says Ahrefs’ Iana whose surname I`m yet to know.
So, according to Iana, the back link business is actually profiting with the unnatural link hunt. “That’s why the actuality of backlinks analysis services do not fall depending on what links are in search engines’ priority”.
Makes sense. If you think your ranking may be hurt by excessive low quality links, you want to check which links are those and an online tool can be very helpful at this time.
This Google Update takes no prisoners
Lying on the link-high battlefield many innocent corpses turn the link hunt into a blood bath. “With Penguin, Google threw a bomb”, says Iana.
The scenario seems more complicated then it was during the first days of Panda Update back in 2011 when some innocent victims were made including the New York Times. The Manhattan-based news monster suffered some drops in the ranking because of a byline displayed in many pages triggering the duplicate content filter. Tough such a terrifying collateral effect can be eliminated rapidly, the same cannot be told concerning link penalties.
“I believe innocent URLs may be hurt, as millions sites over the world are pecked by released raging Penguin”, says Iana over email. Many backlinks are created intentionally, it is obvious. That’s why it’s hard to sort them into strictly natural or not. Irrelevant links are visible, but paid links are relevant to the topic and often look natural and all of them take a lot of work”.
In my latest interview about Google’s link hunt, Alliance Link’s CEO Debra Mastaler says that maybe Google is taking manual action to discover spammy links.
To Iana this may be more than an option. It may be absolutely necessary to prevent more and more URLs leaving the SERP in a bag. “If the task cannot be always perfectly solved even manually it’s hard to believe it will be done perfectly by an algorithm”, writes Hrefs’ professional Iana.
Good faith?
“Google tries to determine link types, to detect “unnatural”, but wouldn’t consider SEO’s interests in this work. Is there a mistake or is it intentional work of Google specialists?” asks Ahrefs Iana.
To Iana, it is important to keep an open mind when it comes to determine whether Google’s actions towards a certain link is honest and not for a particular link. Further on, Iana defines the link examination as an “egg-dance”.
“People say, for example, they never did any unethical work or black hat seo but their rankings decreased”, so it kind of takes a honest person to look at what may have caused a SERP drop.
Partly just, partly wrong – it will always characterize Penguin according to it’s mission.
About Ahrefs:
A company providing tools for backlink and SERP analysis. Starting these days ‘Ahrefs index 3.0′ showing the most fresh data on backlinks, regardless of Google’s tendency of changing it’s link preferences.
