“Best of” and “write for us” are still working very well for established Aged sites.

IMHO, Google algorithms have never been fair to the small website owners, who no matter how much quality they put, they will always be outranked by huge and often not-so-relevant sites. This is exactly why monsters like business insider and others are nowadays relying heavily on affiliate income. It is just too easy for them. Look at theit Beat Of articles ranking 1-5 and tell me they all make sense…

Moreover, if the Write For Us was always a no-no, then all UGC-based sites wouldn’t be even indexed, but they’re there and they rank sometimes pretty well.

Again, i loved this article, but i think we are just scratching the surface here.

I don’t recommend posting the same exact blog posts on different platforms. The Panda update put an end to that strategy years ago.

Thanks for the great post and knowledge.

I want to ask. If we create accounts on many social media, does it help for our domain or does it become spam in search engines?

I think the problem is not so much advertise with us, but what is being said on the particular advertise page itself, eg that they openly sell sponsored posts. This doesn’t leave a sitewide footprint though so you need to have a pretty grumpy manual reviewer for this to happen I think. I’m not really sure if those manual reviewers just pick links themselves manually or that their system provides them with the links. Tricky one.

Your decision. I’d suggest not making it look too easy to get a link on your site though.

My guess is that it would not hurt the ‘linker’ but could hurt the ‘linkee’. However, see my comment above.

Possibly yes, but the point is that these kind of links may not be a problem unless you are trying to get out of manual action. At this point a reviewer would look at anything that looks like a paid placement and reject a reconsideration request.

Yeah you are probably right Chloe. Maybe it’s just a mixture of both.

1) green links are eye hurting, I don’t know why to use that color.

2) you have mentioned that sponsor for a guest post, can give you manual ban from Google, I have seen many websites with a guest post for sponsored post title with link. But they are ranked high in the search engine, why not Google take action against that authority site?

3) if nonrelative niche can hurt the ranking of the actual website, can my computer use that technique against me?

Cheers

I Always Do unique work, But By mistake i made Lot’s of Comment Back links from blogspot, After 2 Month Google still Penalize my website. Right now i Lost my 90% Traffic. After That i submit 900 Domain in Disavow its been a long time, my website has no recover. Kindly Give me a suggestion What can i do for recover my web.

I would like to point out just one topic here: “links from zero traffic websites”, a.k.a. directories.

If you write unique title, description of your presentation at directory that subpage of the catalogue will get indexed /unique content/ and so there is no way that this link can hurt you.

My words are coming from the fact, that penguin and other google updates helped to kill directory business in general, yet if you open your business licence google directory /google/business/ will be the very first instance to add your details into their portfolio /”directory”/ without asking…/for free for now/…

…so please…Problem is not link creation. It is level of laziness of the webmasters.

Thanks Rick for putting this across. Really helpful.

1) Rick is just talking about a pattern he noticed on the links, not your own onsite SEO.
2) Definitely possible.

1) The “best” thing: on my site pretty much all my money pages have title and h1 tags that start with “best … “. The SERP seems to be dominated by sites putting “best” in the title, h1, and URL. It feels a bit old hat and spammy, but would you recommend removing the “best” from these onsite elements?

2) If any of my links fall foul of the ‘bad link’ types you’ve noted, might this be causing an algorithmic drop but not a manual penalty, ie, my site losing rankings but no manual penalty notice?

Many thanks in advance! 🙂

Kumar

Hi Adrian, GSA might still work at lower tiers. I just don’t do it anymore. I find better ROI focusing on PBN and Guest Posts and just staying concentrated on Tier 1.

I am new to the A.M. world and niche sites …

… would you say 100% that building links with tools like GSA is colmpletely dead?

If I create great content for my Tier 1 + Tier 2 + Tier 3 … links, and I don’t abuse the anchor text, don’t abuse the amount of links created per day (1-3 for tier 1 p/d) … and so on …

Mixing as well the above with PBN links, Web 2.0, Guest posts …

Doing everything by the book as they say (I’m following Matt Woodward to do this stuff) …

…would you say it’s completely dead even if done like I mentioned above?

Thanks Matt.
Can’t wait for the next email from you!

Thanks Rick for the awesome post!?

Adrian

The Search Initiative

Thank you for the useful cases.

Could you recommend who can be strong in content penalties?

Had a huge drop down without manual action in GSC.

Thank you

Well my further review of #6 Obvious Guest Posts appears that the site was a dropped domain and therefore it was no longer owned by the same owner therefore Google did not like the fact that there was a authority link point at it which was built by previous owner.

Thank you very much for this article. I find the examples very useful. Especially the one with the redirect penalty. I have never seen one of those before. All the best and keep up the good work!

Great points, I’d love to hear Matt’s response to this.

Google doesn’t want you to create your own links. A link in an author box shows exactly that.

I mean I went through the entire list and wanted to participate my thoughts hopefully you will publish my comment. Well bit background about me, it took me 4 years to figure out SEO (at least the link building part of it not from outreach and getting content up but from which link actually works, I am sure you guys know what I am talking about). So without further ado, lets dive in.

#1: Non-relevant Niche Edits – Absolutely, first algos can determine that page was about a person and unfortunately the last name of the person was what probably made it question mark for the algo even when that was not the case plus this was a link insertion… I can clearly see from the pattern that Google isn’t liking link insertion anymore.

Now, question for you Matt or Rick,

1) Did you guys disavowed all the required websites (i won’t ask the obvious here) that were linking back to the website? I noticed the traffic of the website went from about 50k to 12k.
2) From your experience, after disavowing the required websites, did that have a negative effect on other websites that were linked by the “required websites”.

#2: Sponsored Posts – Now this one is scary. Be creative moving forward.

#3: Zero Traffic Sites – Site Rebuilds? – Well I think its how those sites are built, if you use the obvious techniques then yes Google can catch up to you, but there are better ways. And yes PBN do work, so I do agree but there are some requirements that make it maybe legitimate, but I think it is varying in different niches.

#4: Obvious Guest Posts – This was a eye opener for me! Thanks for letting everyone know.

#5: Best Top Rated Links – I did my analysis, and I think it was more to do with link insertion and network catch (that’s my opinion). But, you guys are the champs!

#6: Fake Social Profile Links – This is also a good one. Really a eye opener.

#7: Irrelevant Redirects – Another great one. But I shall ask Google how can anyone control this? this can be beyond the website owner since how it works.

Guys, I want to thank you again for putting it together, I have been learning for 4 years but I am newbie since I am just getting started after losing a lot of money. so really really appreciate the information.

#6

1. Why would links from author boxes be dangerous? Big name blogs have links from the author box.

2. Why would a link be dangerous from a site that just has a page saying they accept articles from external writers? (guest post, write for us etc) (Many big sites have guest posters)

I don’t know what your purpose would be in adding it. Free content? Is it worth it?

But after reading this post, I’m not sure whether to go ahead with it or not.

What do you suggest Matt?

Edited the post to include “etc.”

Highly doubt it. You probably have an algorithmic penalty.

We’ll never know.

40-60%, or 60-40%.

Haven’t seen it come up, but its possible.

I definitely wouldn’t take it as far as putting guest posts on tier 2. Just use the right types of guest posts on tier 1. There’s certain signals that Google doesn’t link on their links. Avoid them (by following this article) or you can work with us at Authority Builders, where we’re constantly on top of the whole situation and doing the vetting for you.

My hypothesis: the algorithm runs its filters and determines some kind of “anti-quality” or “risk” score. Once it hits a certain threshold, that site might end up on the desk of a manual reviewer.

EG: creating a network of ‘branded’ web2.0s then sending 10-20 guest posts to each web 2.0 which boosts the value of each of those tier 1 branded web2.0s. now this would be extremely expensive but may be wiser to do that than sending 50 guest posts to money site over a multiple year campaign.

Right now im ranking roofing companies and when i create separate service pages (roof repair + city) i sit here trying to decide how many guest posts links i should send to each page. It wouldnt be a problem if there were few but there are 20 different cities to target. By sending a guest post to each service page it sounds risky. but what else can i do. i need to rank the service page

Could “Write For Us” be implied guest posting or a paid link? Many “write for us” links on site don’t cost money, but it’s clearly looking for Guest Post I think? Would you stay away from “write for us” sites as well?

Surely it was dozens and not just a couple. Not implying these are good links to ever have though.

I always thought that was a coincidence and I probably still do, but still spooky to hear somebody else say that.

Thanks Kurt. As we know, things that get harder, work out better for those who understand what the deal is. We can profit while others give up 🙂

I don’t think it is to do with the linking site being an old HTML site that has been rebuilt badly (broken links, missing images). Instead if you look at the text in the reconsideration request, it looks like the issue is clearly with the use of a “best rated” anchor again.

Thanks for this summary, very good job.

Regarding the best top rated links I found very “funny” that Google doesn’t like being told what is best seeing the search results!

example: Screenshot of the first page “waterproof selfie stick”

https://ufile.io/5xinw

Any thoughts on this?
Thanks

@Matt: Question about ‘Patterns have shown that links placed on pages that also have words like “advertise”, “sponsored”, “guest post” somewhere on the page are extremely dangerous. Even if these words show up in the nav bar, sidebar, or footer, the bot doesn’t care. ‘

Are you sure the word ‘advertise’ isn’t ok? Many sites have a way to advertise and a lot of good sites would not qualify if you exclude based on the word advertise being used in the navigation.

Should i start working towards having these deleted before they create problems for my money sites?

Google wants to make SEO irrelevant and drive everyone towards adwords.

Again, thanks for putting all these things together

Should I work towards having these links delete before they land me in trouble?

This article is an eye opener for people who think by going white hat , they’re 100% safe.

Truth is these days it doesn’t matter much if you’re white hat or use PBNs. As long as you intentionally build links , you’re at risk of getting a penalty. Simple.

The good thing here is that you can avoid getting penalized if you pay attention ; down to the simplest thing.

Now back to the article , there are some statements i don’t fully agree with.

1) “To avoid getting a Manual Action you need to analyze your competitors who are ranking on page one of Google and see what they are getting away with.”

I’ve heard this statement several times and i think it is flawed because there are so many factors that determines which site ranks #1.

Sites might be ranking in the top 5 but it doesn’t mean their tactics is the acceptable norm for the niche and you should follow them blindly. They’re getting away with it today doesn’t mean they wouldn’t get caught tomorrow.

I saw this happen in one of my niches 2months ago. The top site was ranking #1 for every keyword……for 2 solid years….Only to get a manual penalty in June 2018.

The site is heavy on PBNs with < 5 guest post links , yet ranked for 2 solid years without algorithmic or manual penalty.

Now imagine i followed his tactics based on the fact that he's been ranking for 2 years with 90% PBNs. I'll probably be penalized by now.

2) "Patterns have shown that links placed on pages that also have words like “advertise”, “sponsored”, “guest post” somewhere on the page are extremely dangerous. Even if these words show up in the nav bar, sidebar, or footer, the bot doesn’t care. Avoid them at all costs.”

This is an eye opener , Matt.

But because we have no control of the site , the variables can change real quick.

A page might not have all that at the time you’re placing links but what if things change and the webmaster decides to add an “advertise with us” page at the footer , to get more $$.

How do we handle that?

The ol’ disavow tool.

That’s not cool, man.

Regards
Chris

I have no questions really except the call out for anyone that got hit (a notice) exactly on their birthday. I got mine (which wiped out 90% of my income) on 21.11.2011…exactly on my bday.

Google is a sick sick “individual” it seems…