Which Links Get Google’s Penalty And Which Don’t?
But beware, before starting with the methods to “get links”, some advance warnings, not to “get penalties” instead of links. WARNING:
Getting a lot of links at once can cause you to go up on Google and then be penalized because Google identifies that as unnatural and penalizes it. It is important to go little by little and be consistent.
Before, it worked very well to receive many links with the same link text (anchor text). The famous Google bombing that I explained here 6 years ago. Now it doesn’t work anymore, since the Google Penguin update. Adequate distribution of the linking texts is important, as explained in points 23 and 24 of this article.
Links on websites with many outgoing links are not of interest, because the authority of the linking page is distributed equally in all of them and very little authority comes to each one. The ideal is to have links on websites with less than 10 external links. Furthermore, Google can detect them as link farms and penalize them.
Links are not interested in pages blocked with robots.txt, with noindex, nofollow in meta robots, because Google does not count them.
They penalize links on pages with spam, porn or content penalized by Google. Also links to websites that link to spam websites. This is one of the reasons why it is bad to buy links: they can be put on penalized pages or next to penalized links. And with that, you buy your own penalty.
Before Google only looked at the text of the received link ( anchor text ), now it is also set in the context of that link, in the title of the news where the link is and in the name of the web where the link is. It is important that the website where the link is has a theme similar to ours or, at least, the news has a title related to our website.
It does not matter the number of links received. What counts is the quality of the links received. A single quality link is worth more than 5,000 links on pages with little authority.
Before, the links in the footer (footer) or in the sidebars of blogs (blogroll) and web pages (sidebar) worked well, but today they do not help, but rather harm. It is preferable to receive only one or two links from each domain. The links in the footer generate hundreds of links (one from each of the internal pages of a web page) and all of them with the same link text.
This can be fixed by putting a code in the footer or in the sidebar so that the links are only shown on the front page of the web, which is the page with the most authority and not on the internal pages.
Links within the news are more helpful for positioning than in the footer or in lateral columns.
Google identifies as “unnatural”, and therefore penalized, that all the links received are dofollow and none are nofollow, so some must be nofollow (here you have it explained).
Google’s rules on received links change frequently. Google has an average of 500 algorithm changes every year, which would be equivalent to a change in Google’s algorithm every 17 hours. So it is advisable to leave SEO in the hands of professionals, who are always up to date with Google’s changes. What today helps to be # 1, in two weeks can penalize you in Google.
Also Read: What Does SEO Mean And Why Should I Care?
How To Measure The Quality Of A Link?
Before you could look at the Google Page Rank to know the authority of the page where the link was, now it is no longer, because Google no longer publishes the updates of the Page Rank of the pages, although Google keeps counting it and updates it internally.
There are several alternatives to Page Rank. The best ones I think are Moz Rank (MR), Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA).
- Moz Rank: is the famous Google PageRank. It goes from 0 to 10 with a logarithmic scale. Since Google updates it every several months or every year, MOZ updates it every few days. It only depends on the number of links received and the PageRank of the pages from which you are linked.
- Page Authority: A value from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale that indicates the probability that a certain page has of being above in Google. It depends on many factors. They are adding new factors so that this value predicts more and more accurately the positioning of a website in Google.
- Domain Authority: A value from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale that indicates the probability that a given domain has of being on top in Google. It is like the previous one, but this shows the strength of the entire domain, not just a specific page of that domain.
Each page within your website has a different authority: different Google Page Rank or Moz Page Authority. Moz PA is updated frequently, Google Page Rank too. Although Google has stopped publishing updates for a long time, it is a factor that it uses to determine the authority of each page within a website.
The most authoritative pages rank higher on Google.
To measure the PA, DA and MR of your website you can install the MozBar in Chrome (it’s the one I use) or the Seo Toolbar in Firefox.
A PA of less than 10 is pretty bad. 10 to 20 cannot be considered a quality link. From 20 you can start serving. A PA from 30 is fine. It is not suspense, like a 3 out of 10 on an exam. And from 40 it is very good.
Authority is earned with inbound links. And authority is transmitted with outgoing links (with links without the nofollow tag ).
Authority is shared equally among all links. If a page has an authority of 10 and has 5 external links, each link will transmit an authority of 2 to the landing page.
Therefore, links from authority pages with few outgoing links are of interest.
Also Read: SEO Tips For Your eCommerce Content Strategy