Google Spam Update Just Released Hell. Here’s what it did…
– Google just released
a Google spam update that had a huge impact
on the search results, and in this video I'm
gonna tell you exactly what this update did, plus
what changes you need to make to your SEO strategy in response to it. Lots of websites have
already been decimated. Let's take a look at why. My name is Matt Diggity. I've been doing SEO since 2009 and being an ex-Silicon Valley engineer, I like to approach SEO
scientifically, in other words, like a freaking nerd.
This involves creating test
sites that solely exist to try out emerging SEO tactics, such as AI content and various
link building strategies. Then when an update hits, I can monitor these
test sites to determine if Google went after said strategies. And let me tell you, these
test sites revealed a lot about this recent spam update. So let's start by first explaining what in the living hell
is a Google Spam update. The first spam update
released in June 2021.
What we're experiencing right
now is another evolution of it, or should I say the evolution of the AI known as SpamBrain. SpamBrain is Google's AI-based
spam prevention system. It came online in 2018, has
been fighting the good fight against the forces of spam ever since. What does it fight against? A lot of stuff. Hack site spam, black hat
cloaking, but more importantly, stuff like unnatural links, which definitely affects you
even if you think it doesn't. Even if you've never
built a link in your life, if Google adjusts how it looks
at the overall link graph of the internet, this affects everyone. Let's take a deep dive into Google's spam policy document to see what they're up to. They're going after cloaking:
when people get traffic for certain keywords
like Taylor Swift chords, and instead serve up a porn site. Or doorway pages: when a page just exists to
funnel users somewhere else. Then we have hacked content: when you suddenly find
10,000 new Japanese URLs on your site that are ranking
for tentacle porn keywords. Serious question, why is it always porn? (screen beeping) Then we have hidden text and
links when you put white text on a white background to try
to ninja sneak some content onto your site.
There's keyword stuffing
where they have a fine example of someone who went (beep) with keywords in their content. Unlimited app store credit. There are so many sites that
claim to offer app store credit for $0, but they're all
fake and always mess up with users looking for
unlimited app store credit. (Matt grunting) And now we get to the first
section that definitely applies to you: link spam. And the problem is these
release notes are too brief. You need to read between the lines. You also need real-life data
to make true sense of it. Same for these important sections on spammy automatically-generated content or thin affiliate pages. So that's what I got for you today. Let's make sense of all this stuff so we can adjust our SEO
strategies so we can recover from or even benefit from
these algorithm updates.
But real quick, I wanted
to toss you an invite to my free SEO training masterclass, recently updated for 2023. It goes over all my SEO strategies for getting websites to the top of Google. Sign up by using the link
in the pinned comment. Let's start by taking a hard look at how the Google spam update is so intertwined to link building. Not sure if you knew
this, but in July 2021, they actually released a
specific link spam update that was just focused on backlinks. And in fact, this latest update is again another link spam update. Let's break down the links section and the spam policy line by line.
Starting off with any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google search results
may be considered link spam. Wait a second, isn't that the entire
point of building links because we want higher rankings in Google? I'm not building these things for fun. Anyhow. Buying or selling links is a no-no, whether that be exchanging money for links or exchanging a service
for links such as content, which is basically what guest posting is. Okay, well, the chances of you
getting a completely passive and natural link are exactly 0.0. On top of that, excessive
link exchanges are bad news. Using automated programs to
generate links, obviously bad. Link building from terms of
service page, textual ads, advertorial link placements, low-quality directory or
bookmark sites, clearly. Widget and plugin links, footer links, informed comments and signatures. This covers a wide range of backlinks. And even if you didn't
build any of these links, guess what, I guarantee that some of the sites linking to you did.
And because of that, they're now sending
less power to your site. When Google releases a
new spam algorithm update, they refine their system. Imagine that there's a paid
backlink that for years snuck by under Google's radar,
the algorithm has improved. So now that paid link is identified for what it is and what they
do is they start to ignore it. This Search Engine Land
article puts it clearly.
Since 2016, Google has been devaluing or ignoring most spammy links and Google states it clearly as well in their December link
spam update release notes. Quote, "Ranking may change as
spammy links are neutralized and any credit passed by these
unnatural links are lost." Likewise, this type of linked
evaluation could also happen to a scraper site that was
once linking to your images. Now it's identified as
spammy and now it's ignored. Or some blog comment that
was once providing you value, now completely useless. And this happens up the
entire chain of links, which has a trickle down effect, eventually driving less
power to your website. In fact, that's exactly what
happened to this site here in the October spam update. It wasn't doing any
cloaking, it wasn't hacked, it just got hit by linked evaluation. So how do you future
proof your link building with links that'll never get ignored? That's the question at hand, isn't it? Especially 'cause these
days, 90% of the links that are built are done
via value exchange.
You're either trading
money, guest post content or your own links in exchange
for links, and these are all on Google's radar as no-nos. Let me explain how I
approach link building, and if you reframe your
strategy to look like mine, you'll be set for years to come. Links feed three main signals
to Google's ranking algorithm: power, relevance, and trust. You need all three of these
things to succeed on Google. For power and relevance, you wanna focus on getting
guest posts and link insertions and highly relevant
articles to your website, and you want a high volume of these. Most of your link
building profile will come from this bucket. But Matt, how do you pay for these links because most websites
want you to pay for them. You need to understand how an algorithm might identify a paid link. If you get a link from a website with a high amount of outbound
links versus inbound links, there's a high chance that
they're selling links.
I like to make sure that the amount of incoming
referring domains divided by the amount of outbound link
domains is greater than 0.12. Also, avoid getting links from sites that are selling
links to anyone that wants 'em. Before you get a placement, run a site: domain name
casino command to see if they're linking to a
bunch of gambling sites. Another way to think about clean link building
is the following. According to this study from Ahrefs, 90% of the internet gets
no traffic from Google. Another way of saying that is only 10% of the internet gets traffic. Google's algorithm is
extremely stingy about traffic. If you get a link from one of
these rare sites with traffic, there's a high chance
it's not gonna be ignored. In fact, I single variable tested this with 100 backlinks and found that if you focus on links from quality websites with traffic, there's an 87% chance
you'll get a ranking boost.
What about guest posting? After all, Google doesn't
want you to trade services for links, and this includes content. According to the survey from
the homies at Authority Hacker, guest posting is by far the most popular link building tactic with 64.9% of webmasters doing it. To work around this, this
is so obvious, it's dumb. You wanna make sure that in
every article you get a link, it just doesn't look like a guest post. It should look like the
owner of the blog wrote it. If the article says
something like guest post or sponsored content at the
top, that's a dead giveaway. If there's an author box
that says, hey, everyone, this is a guest post from Matt Diggity, that's a dead giveaway too. Now, of course, there's exceptions. I'm not gonna turn down
a guest post opportunity from inc.com, but don't go ham and make a big footprint
in your link profile. Now let's get back to the Holy Trinity, the Deathly Hollows, Three Amigos of link building: power,
relevance, and trust.
We got power and relevance covered. Now how about trust? Power and relevance
help get your rankings. Trust helps to keep your rankings. For the trust category, you wanna focus on two main link sources: reactive PR and proactive PR. Reactive PR is when you're
reacting to high-quality, high-trust link opportunities from places like Help
a Reporter Out, HARO, or one of my favorites, Qwoted. Both of these platforms allow you to supply quotes to journalists. In turn, your quotes end
up in high-trust websites, like Namecheap, DR 92 or
msn.com, another DR 92. Proactive PR is when… What am I talking about? You're not an idiot. It's the opposite of reactive PR. Check this out. It's kind of embarrassing. I ran a survey to find
out what people thought were the most influential
tech companies of the year. Not surprising, PornHub
made third on the list. This study got picked up by none other than the New York Times about some pretty dark
stuff, but nonetheless, that's a DR 94 backlink.
What you probably notice is
that for the trust category I don't care about relevance. New York Times, MSN,
they have nothing to do with my site diggitymarking.com. The relevance is taken care of with the guest posts and link insertions. This simple framework allows me to think about link building clearly with the ultimate goal
of protecting my site from giving any spammy signals to Google. Actually, it gives signals
of trust and authority to Google instead.
Make sure to subscribe for more videos just like this one..
