Warnings are probably not the most fun thing to read about, but you absolutely have to understand that when it comes to link building, Google has clearly stated some things are against their guidelines and if you do those things your site could get penalized or banned.
Think of it this way, if you are going to have to walk across a field that is full of dangerous exploding landmines… the first thing you should want to learn is how to recognize a landmine so that you can avoid them. That is what this lesson is all about.
The goal here is to help you understand, not just the current rules, but also the principals behind those rules. This way you will be able to make smart decisions moving forward about you link building strategies.Prior to 2005 was really the glory days. Smart SEO professionals had figured out that all you had to do was build a bunch of links to your site with optimized anchor text and it would rank #1 for any keyword in Google. But, this also caused a problem as a lot of unworthy sites began to dominate Google’s rankings. So with the 2005 “Big Daddy” update Google made it clear that buying or building links with the intent of manipulating their search results was against their guidelines, and they backed it up by introducing penalties.
Since 2005 Google has only become much more sophisticated in their ability to find links and link patterns that are in violation of their guidelines and levy penalties against those sites.
The Google algorithm that is now responsible for understanding links, is called Penguin. There are 46 different link related factors that are believed to contribute to how Google looks at links within Penguin. You can find them listed here: Backlink Factors
- Algorithmic Penalties: Algorithmic penalties are those that Google’s algorithms are able to find and very reliably make a determination that Google’s guidelines have clearly been broken and a penalty is automatically assessed.
- Manual Penalties: Manual penalties arise when Google’s algorithm raises a red flag regarding some data that may indicate Google’s guidelines have been broken. In these instances, a case is created and assigned to Google’s quality rater program where a trained Google employee with go to your site, investigate the issue and file a report. Based on the report of the Quality rater another Google employee can institute a manual penalty.
- Negative Score: A negative score against your site that makes it harder to rank highly. For instance, all Google rankings are the result of a score for a webpage as it relates to the search query. This type of penalty is applied to your total score.
- A SERP ceiling: With this type of penalty Google can decide that your site will not be able to rank above page 30 (for instance).
- Complete removal from the search engine: Sometimes a SERP ceiling penalty can seem like a complete removal. However, a complete removal actually means that your site no longer exists in the search results at all (except for perhaps a search query that is an exact match to your domain name or brand).
- Temporary Penalty: A temporary penalty means that you will be penalized until you take action to resolve the issue and submit a reconsideration request with Google. This is the fix-it ticket of Google penalties. They are related to a manual penalty and when your site receives the manual penalty you will be given an indication as to what the problem is.
- Time related penalty: Some penalties seem to indicate that there is a time element involved. Where you may take what seems to be all of the possible actions to ensure Google compliance and yet the penalty persists until one day (for instance at the one or two year mark) the penalty seems to go away and your site is back to climing the search results.
The key takeaway is that
You Don’t Want A Link Related Penalty!
Next So, in this less you learned what penalties are and how Google implements penalties… but in the next lesson you will learn WHY! If you want to avoid getting a link related penalty, make sure you follow