samgooch

I haven't reviewed this manual action case but it is really interesting to me. Here's why. NSL got a manual action for unnatural links. She says she has no paid links, just a small handful of guest posts. From 2013 to 2017 or so, all I did was remove manual actions. Hundreds of them. At one point I hired 20 of my friends and we all sat in my dining room manually auditing links one by one nonstop. Our goal was to classify them so that we could make strategies and decide what it is that Google wanted removed. In 2013 the links that were causing manual actions were the type Google is good at ignoring today... Keyword anchored links in directories like 'BestLinkDirectory', and Ezine Article type sites. Remember ArticlesBase? Then eventually we saw no more manual actions with links like that because Google's systems figured out how to neutralize them. Next, we saw a wave of sites being penalized likely because of widget links. Like, here's a tool you can embed, and by the way, it links back to our site. Again, you don't see people building widget links like we used to a decade ago because the algorithms figured out how to stop valuing them. By 2020, the majority of sites we helped had in article links that at first glance look completely natural. When you see the patterns, it became obvious that there was a pattern of getting links inserted in articles to manipulate rankings. For the last few years I have seen very little talk of manual actions. Google still gave them out and occasionally people reached out to me but it wasn't like before. This week I've heard of a few cases of new manual actions. If this one truly is for guest post links (doesn't matter if they were paid, they were made to manipulate rankings), then my bet is that we are soon going to see declines in rankings for many sites that have thrived on guest post linking as Google systems get even better at learning which links truly represent recommendations. Every time I write something about guest post links, there are a ton of questions. If you Google my name plus "guest post links" I have written loads on this over the years. The arguments are usually: -They're not unnatural if not paid. Honestly, would you have made these links if not for the SEO value? -I could just point links at my competitor then and get them penalized. The thing is, it's not the links themselves that get sites penalized. It's the patterns that are consistent with building links to manipulate rankings. Google has many years of experience in identifying patterns of Link manipulation. -Isn't all link building unnatural then? It's not unnatural to tell people about your site and invite them to link. In fact, Google recommends it. Where it becomes a problem is when the motivation to link back is more for SEO purposes than because you truly thought your audience would find this helpful.