unnatural links detected – SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies https://cognitiveseo.com/blog SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies Tue, 10 Jul 2018 09:20:36 +0300 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.3 LastMinute Recovered from 50% Traffic Drop- Negative SEO or Unnatural Link Building? https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/4110/lastminute-com-50-traffic-drop-negative-seo-or-unnatural-link-building/ https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/4110/lastminute-com-50-traffic-drop-negative-seo-or-unnatural-link-building/#comments Fri, 28 Feb 2014 14:22:06 +0000 http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/?p=4110 Quick Info This analysis was done with the cognitiveSEO toolkit, a respected & iconic tool among many SEO professionals & the entire SEO industry as a whole. Get your Free 14 day Trial Now and Enjoy one of the best tools for Link Profile Auditing, Unnatural Link Detection, Social Visibility Analysis and Rank Tracking. +Extra […]

The post LastMinute Recovered from 50% Traffic Drop- Negative SEO or Unnatural Link Building? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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Quick Info
This analysis was done with the cognitiveSEO toolkit, a respected & iconic tool among many SEO professionals & the entire SEO industry as a whole.
Get your Free 14 day Trial Now and Enjoy one of the best tools for Link Profile Auditing, Unnatural Link Detection, Social Visibility Analysis and Rank Tracking.
+Extra Topping: You’ll get a Live Demo with Razvan Gavrilas the Founder & Architect of cognitiveSEO.

Update: LastMinute Recovered its rankings in 2 days. Read about the recovery!

Although the winter is barely over, we are already thinking of pina coladas and ocean breeze. And what better way to daydream than looking up for summer holidays deals, cheap flights and convenient accommodation?

After the Halifax Penalty a few weeks back, it seems another big brand might be affected by Google.

Yesterday we noticed a mention in TheDrum about a big brand in the travel industry that was hit by Google.

The travel and leisure industry is a very dynamic market, full of companies that leave you with a bunch of holiday pictures and empty banking accounts. And as the economic crisis has already left us with empty pockets, there is not much left for the travel agencies. Therefore, companies operating in this field might turn to less orthodox methods to position themselves among the first choices in their consumer’s mind.

One of the companies that promise us a uniform tan and unforgettable experiences far away from our mother in law is Lastminute.com. If you haven’t heard of this British company, let me tell you that they have been on the market since 1998 and their aim is to position themselves as the ultimate online leisure, entertainment and travel retailer. Their communication strategy is focused on “last minute” everything, from flights to hotel rooms or dinners. If you’re wondering how their business is doing, judging from their statements they seem to be doing well. They claim to sell a holiday every 15 minutes, a spa break every 3 minutes and, brace yourself, a theater ticket every 26 seconds. So, 7 times more entertainment than relaxation. That explains a lot…

The reason we brought lastminute.com to your attention is because we have noticed a really big drop (46%) in organic search visibility this week in UK. Let’s see what it’s all about!

Every time we’re trying to figure out what happened to a certain website, the first chart we look at is the one with its visibility drop. We have the natural tendency (and I also suspect a bit of penalty phobia here) to believe that when a major visibility drop occurs, it surely has something to do with Google’s Penguins.

From the chart below, we can easily see that February wasn’t the best month for lasminute.com as their drop is, indeed, notable. (This is the visibility for the last 2 years).

 

Update: LastMinute Recovered its rankings in 2 days. Read about the recovery!

As we don’t want to be hasty and draw the wrong conclusions, we will analyze 3 possible situations that lastminute.com might be confronted with:

  • Negative SEO attack.
  • Unnatural Links Penalty.
  • Other Factors.

Negative SEO attack theory

If we take a look at the December link velocity, we can easily see some “pharmaceutical activity” on the roll. One might say that maybe “the gifts month” inspired people to ask for unexpected requirements of their holidays. Hilarious or not, we think that the situation is severe and lastminute.com is dealing with quite a negative SEO attack.

The chart shows links appearing like magic and then, disappearing like magic. As we take a look at the chart below, we observe that, starting at the end of January, a large number of links begin to be “lost” in the mists of the Internet. If by mid December they had almost 700.000 new links and only 1.500 lost, now the situation is quite paradoxical. We’re dealing with more lost links than new ones. The score is something like 165.000 to 112.000.

If I’d ask you to think of keywords that an online travel agency might use, what would you answer? I have a hunch that you would tell me terms like “cheap flight,” “holiday deal,” “cheap accommodation,” etc. Oh, well…apparently, on lasminute.com it’s fashionable to use unrelated pharmacy keywords. We’re not saying that “Viagra” or “Cialis” cannot be related to a successful holiday, but we don’t think that these are the main keywords lasminute.com wants to be associated with.

 

With 861 referring domains (only 6 of which are still live) with link anchor text containing “Viagra” and a big collection of hacked sites used as parasite hosting, we tend to think that a negative SEO attack might me going on.

 

All the Viagra related links (except 6 referring domains) are lost when we crawled the backlinks for lastminute.com on the 28th of Feb 2014.

 

For a better understanding of the issue that lasminute.com is dealing with, take a look at the image below. The snapshot is taken from a domains hosting website that has a huge number of hidden link parasite hosting. Impressive isn’t it? And not in the good way of the word.

 

Unnatural Links Theory

The next thing we think at when it comes to a link audit and a possible penalty, is the number of unnatural links. From our analysis and experience, usually, the penalized sites have an alarming number of unnatural links. As we take a look at how lastminute.com is standing, we see that the natural-unnatural link ratio is quite good. The site seems to have a good-looking profile, based on an organic link building strategy.

 

If you were breathlessly expecting for some big, unnatural profile at the anchor text distribution, I’m afraid I have to let you down. The anchor text cloud for brand and commercial keywords looks quite normal. Nothing suspicious on this side, either.

 

It’s true that 4% from the total of links are unnatural but overall, we cannot say that this could be the cause of a Google Penalty. We looked through the unnatural and suspect links and here are 3 samples that give us a glimpse of how their old link building strategy used to look like.

In the snapshot below we can see a “widget” link a low authority site, with an anchor text that looks suspicious because of its commercial nature.

 

 

Here we can easily see a suspect use of anchor text on some low authority site.

 

 

In this second sample we can identify a paid advertorial with a juicy do-follow link.

 

As I mentioned before, the site is not “unnatural link free” but could they be the cause of a Google Penalty? Is this enough in order for Google to penalize the site. Maybe Yes maybe No. I saw much worse situations with really big brands that are still ranking. Their link profile is quite balanced from a naturalness point of view.

Other Factors Theory

If we don’t take the negative SEO and the Unnatural Links Penalty theories into consideration, we must find other reasons that might have caused the drop in visibility ranking. Let’s list the most important elements that could have led to these changes in lasminute.com’s visibility:

Google Algorithm Updates – its common knowledge that Google makes systematical and periodical changes to its algorithms, leading to ranking fluctuations. This could be valid but we have to take into consideration that lasminute.com has had fluctuations before, but none as dramatic as this one. Also, the drop was mainly caused by some specific keywords.

Website changes – another thing that we can think about is the lasminute.com website. Maybe there were some massive changes in their site architecture which lead to such important changes in their traffic index.

Powerful backlinks lost – it is also possible that lasminute.com lost a number of backlinks that were sustaining those specific keywords that dropped.

Conclusions

As I was mentioning at the beginning of the article, it’s hard to tell what exactly happened with the lasminute.com website. For instance, in the picture below, we see indeed that the trend for the keywords position is descendant but the average individual drop position is not very high. This make us think that something in particular happened to those keywords or maybe Google Volatility interferes again.

 

Let’s take a closer look at what really caused the massive droop.

Is this drop so massive?

As we analyze the snapshot below, we see that some of lastminute.com’s important keywords lost a some ranking positions. Let’s take for example the keyword “laterooms”. This keyword alone messed up the lastminute.com traffic index by causing it to drop around 100 positions. The same thing has happened with the keyword “restaurants”. Thereby, only 2 high traffic keywords led to a 30.000 visibility points decrease. The drop in the visibility rank is, thus, legitimate.

The confusion here appears because of how the SEO Visibility index is calculated. They lost traffic only on same high traffic keywords, but we do not see a huge drop in positions. The keywords moved from the first page to the second or third on an average. This does not indicate usually a penalty but more a flux or a “normal” day in the land of Google.

 

After analyzing several assumptions, we cannot put the finger on the exact cause that led to the visibility rank dropping. We can say for sure that something indeed happened, and judging by their link anchor text and their link profile, we tend to believe that lasminute.com was not affected by negative SEO, nor Unnatural Links.

They are simply affected by a slight change in the algorithm maybe combined with some loss of some power links that they had and maybe some internal linking problems on the site.

LastMinute Google Recovery

Saturday morning, on the 1st of March 2014, the LastMinute site started to recover its rankings. All the dropped keywords in the image above are back to their initial rankings.

This means that the conclusion of the 50% Traffic Drop was correct. This was not a Google Penalty, but a Google Flux or a small side effect of some small on-page/off-page change.

Here are some quick snapshots from the SERPs on some of the dropped keywords.

Here is the “laterooms” keyword that was dropped from the top 100. Now it is back on the second position.

The conclusion of this analysis is excellently coined by Christopher Pike

“Nothing is as it seems. Black can appear white when the light is blinding but white loses all luster at the faintest sign of darkness.”

You should always check all possible hypothesizes, by doing an in-depth analysis and looking at all the angles. Don’t get distracted by the obvious stuff that might lead you to the wrong conclusion!

What is your opinion on the Lastminute.com drop?

Quick Info
This analysis was done with the cognitiveSEO toolkit, a respected & iconic tool among many SEO professionals & the entire SEO industry as a whole.
Get your Free 14 day Trial Now and Enjoy one of the best tools for Link Profile Auditing, Unnatural Link Detection, Social Visibility Analysis and Rank Tracking.
+Extra Topping: You’ll get a Live Demo with Razvan Gavrilas the Founder & Architect of cognitiveSEO.

The post LastMinute Recovered from 50% Traffic Drop- Negative SEO or Unnatural Link Building? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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Unnatural Links & Penguin Recovery using the Google Disavow Tool https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/3411/unntural-links-penguin-recovery-using-the-google-disavow-tool/ https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/3411/unntural-links-penguin-recovery-using-the-google-disavow-tool/#comments Thu, 19 Sep 2013 14:52:46 +0000 http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/?p=3411 This is a TRUE, SUCCESSFUL & UNREQUESTED story from Manuel Porras, one of our customers. “I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this isn’t […]

The post Unnatural Links & Penguin Recovery using the Google Disavow Tool appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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This is a TRUE, SUCCESSFUL & UNREQUESTED story from Manuel Porras, one of our customers.

“I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully.”

Read the full-disclosure at the end of the article.


 

Let me tell you my experience with CognitiveSEO and the Google Disavow Tool.

I’ll begin a few months back in time.

PENGUIN our worst enemy

Note by Razvan – You can find another traffic screenshot in the mail conversation I had with Manuel, at the bottom of this email.

 

One of the websites I manage SmartLipo.com had suffered considerable Google ranking + traffic impact with the release of PENGUIN back in April 2012. But the first releases of penguin did not kill us completely from Google’s Organic results. Google traffic kept dropping slowly over time. Until in May 22, 2013 the 4th update of PENGUIN was released. After this release we dropped and dropped and dropped in rankings for our main two keywords. Traffic from Google was almost none soon after that.

Note by Razvan – This is SmartLipo, the site that recovered from the Google Penguin Algorithmic Penalty using Google Disavow

Here is the full history of the site on the WayBackMachine

 

We had been trying everything possible

  • Removed links we could remove, and contacted webmasters to help us removing (suspicious links)
  • Recreated the whole site, with a new backend, enhanced page speed
  • Created new content (taking into account what users are and were looking for)
  • De-optimized what we considered over-optimized SEO
  • Tried to build new (clean and not black-hat) external links
  • Improved our Social sites (facebook, twitter, opened a pinterest account)
  • Corrected the errors reported in Google Webmaster Tools (as much as we could)
  • Etc, and other things

Nothing seemed to have the slightest impact in our Google rankings (hence our Google traffic)

Discovering and getting to know CognitiveSEO

One day in May my boss tells me to try the disavow tool. I was very skeptical of using it, having read that it could be harmful if used wrong. But what else did we have to loose? Google de-indexing us perhaps?  He (my boss) pointed me to use this tool he saw that featured an Unnatural link detection option. I went and played a little in Cognitiveseo. I created a new campaign for the site, the report was ready after a few minutes. I decided to import links that I exported from webmaster tools. I just felt more secure adding some extra link data.

Using the ‘Unnatural Links Detection’ option

I decided to run the link classification, it takes a few minutes. I decided to go slow, and take my time. As I mentioned I am too skeptic and cautious (that can be sometimes a problem when you need to react fast). Anyway I decided to take a look at every domain and almost every link, I was not sure to trust the unnatural link report from the beginning. I went and checked with my own eyes almost every link and every domain (no matter if suspect, unnatural or ok). I found some unnatural links that I liked and some ok links that I did not trust. But in general I ended up agreeing with the report in a considerable percentage. Apart from the few links I manually readjusted from OK to unnatural and vice-versa I did not have much work to do on the report. I took a second look (took me some time), and decided to export the domains I marked as disavowed (well actually all suspicious and unnatural ones).

Once outside Cognitive I went and took a last look at the domain entries of the disavow file, making sure no good domains were in it (at least the ones I consider vital: e.g. Facebook,  twitter accounts, trusted customer sites linking back to us, some blogspots.com domains, etc., you get the idea of which site you can trust).

Submitting the disavow file to Google

 

On July 9th submitted the disavow file to Google (made the sign of the cross). I captured a screenshot to show later my boss that I did use the disavow tool as he suggested a few days back. I continued with my life. I kept checking rankings every other day, nothing seemed to change the first days, the first weeks.

The resurrection

Close to 3 weeks passed after the disavow submission, when all of a sudden one day when I run the rank check (using a VPN tool) from different IPs and different states in the US, I saw that our site was raking #3 and #2 from many different locations. At first I thought I was doing the rank check wrong, maybe the VPN is not working and I am doing a local search? Maybe the browser cache is holding onto my Google session? Are these results personalized? I did not want to get any false hope so I did not tell my boss about the news, I decided to track ranks for the next days, every morning. The ranks were consistent, #3, #2 and even #1 in some cities. I finally accepted it to be true as I saw the increase in traffic in Google Analytics. I did not want to celebrate, maybe its temporary, maybe google is playing a prank on us, maybe it’s all a dream. Well that dream has been going on for the last 5 weeks.

 

Conclusion

Although I have done many things to my site, I am pretty f***ing sure the disavow submission was the one that helped me back in rankings. I could have done it without the help CognitiveSeo.com, yeah but it would have taken me weeks if not months to find out by myself which links are bad and which not, and webmaster tools does not give me many links that Cognitive does. Cognitive is a perfect way to complement what webmaster tools shows you (external links). And now I know that Cognitive saves a mountain of time classifying bad from ok links.

Cognitive is not paying me to write this, I just want to acknowledge and share this story with the skeptical ones like me out there. Hope it works for you as it did for me. If you do it right, I am sure it will.

Manuel Porras – Webmaster – Smart Lipo
Google+  https://plus.google.com/u/0/114452216971255669727/posts

 


Transparency Note and disclosure from Razvan Gavrilas(founder)

On September the 3rd I received the first mail from Manuel, (I did not know him until then).

 

I answered him that I would be interested in his story, but he never got back … until 17th of September, when he mailed me the story that you just read.

 

 

I don’t have any knowledge about a recovery using the Google Disavow on an algorithmic penalty. Only manual penalties have been publicly reported to work using the Disavow tool. Knowing this I wanted to be 100% sure that this  isn’t something else. I took the diligence and analyzed the situation carefully. Here is the full transcript of the mail discussion between me and Manuel (for the sake of full transparency).

 

 

 

 

As the founder of cognitiveSEO, I am extremly happy and proud when people connect with me and tell me their successful stories on how the tool made their life easier.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you all, our customers, for making this possible. It is YOU that give us the power to innovate & solve your problems faster & better.

 

The post Unnatural Links & Penguin Recovery using the Google Disavow Tool appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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Automatic Unnatural Link Detection – A Simple Tool for a Complex Problem https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/3068/automatic-unnatural-link-detection/ https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/3068/automatic-unnatural-link-detection/#comments Tue, 02 Jul 2013 16:01:53 +0000 http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/?p=3068 In the last months we have been working on an automatic unnatural links classification system. Before going into the details of this new tool, I would like to share with you the challenges that we had in implementing such a complex system. (if you are not interested in those just skip to the tool)   […]

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In the last months we have been working on an automatic unnatural links classification system. Before going into the details of this new tool, I would like to share with you the challenges that we had in implementing such a complex system. (if you are not interested in those just skip to the tool)

 

1. User Oriented Concept

The Unnatural Links subject generates a lot of confusion among website owners, webmasters and even SEO professionals. I can tell you that the unnatural link concept is a hard to grasp concept for the majority of the people. You can easily “feel” the confusion that most people have if you read the Google Product Forums, where a lot of people talk about their unnatural link warnings and Google Penguin penalties.

 

Some other techniques that classify links are based on a certain “toxicity” level or “potential” risk. We consider these techniques generate a poor user experience and are only adding complexity to an already complex formula.

 

The route we took is to simplify the unnatural link understanding and disavowing process.

We developed the system in such a way that it will split the links in

  • Unnatural Links.
  • Suspect Links.
  • OK Links.

As simple as that!

 

2. False Positive Ratio

It is important to have a really low incorrect detection ratio. To put it simple you would not want a system that detects only 10% of your unnatural backlinks or misclassifies the good links as being unnatural.

 

This was hard to achieve. No automatic detection system provides 100% certainty (Google misclassifies site links also … it is all about the final False Positive ratio).

 

We took the performance up to 97% percent well-done classifications and a false positive ratio of only 3% on our testing dataset.

 

3. Incorrect Metrics

An important factor for a well-done classification, are the metrics that are used in order to draw any valid conclusion out of it.

 

For example using external metrics such as the Google PR or the indexation status of a link in Google are flowed ways of identifying an unnatural link. That is because you simply are able to identify this link only after Google has potentially marked it as unnatural and are looking at Google as the major sign of an unnatural link. This means that using such metrics in an automatic system makes the system rely on things that have been already flagged. These might only work for sites that have already been penalized.

 

We do not use any external metrics in our algorithm in order to detect unnatural backlinks. This made the development process harder but in the end more accurate and trustworthy.

 

4. Detection Algorithm

I am not going to share the algorithm that is used in order to classify links as natural or unnatural but I can tell you that this algorithm does not use external metrics and it relies on AI, in-depth content and link profile analysis in order to segment the so called “toxic” links from the natural ones. The rule set we use is based on the official Google Quality Guidelines.

 

Let me give you a quick example considering a web-directory link. In the context of a natural looking link profile that web-directory link will not be flagged as unnatural as it simply is not. The same link put in a unnatural link profile will be looked from a different POV and will be flagged as unnatural due to the high amount of unnatural link patterns found in the suspect link profile; patterns that falls into the black hat SEO category.

And the new tool is called:

Unnatural Link Detection

The tool that simplifies the “unnatural links” complexity!

 


Some of the most important features of the tool are:

  • Automatic unnatural link classification.
  • Transparency & detail on each classified link. (why it is unnatural)
  • Google Disavow Export.
  • Fast Double-Check using the Link Snapshots.
  • Flag & Tag Links. (bulk actions available also)
  • Advanced Link profile segmentation using unnatural filters.
  • Can be used both on your site and the competitors.
  • Ignore Links that are already disavowed, or unimportant to the analysis.

The Unnatural Links Detection widget is found in the inBound Link Analysis module, on any campaign that you run in cognitiveSEO.

 

Mixed with the Visual Link Explorer, this new set of data points will instantly give you the unnatural link profile of a site.

Who should use this new tool?

Everyone really, and here is why.

 

1. Penalized Sites Owners

This is the ideal tool if you’ve received an unnatural link warning or have been penalized by the “Google Penguin Updates”/ received a manual penalty.

 

The tool helps you find every link to your website and then analyse the potential risk they carry. Even if you have a lots of links, you can easily check the inbound links to disavow or remove is a breeze now with. You can easily check the links using the already generated screenshots . If we were wrong on the classification you can easily re-classify the link.

 

After you manually checked the entire list of links and disavow links just hit the Google Disavow Export and you have the file ready for the Google Import. If you see a link that uses links schemes you have the posibility to remove the link or apply other manual actions. 

 

For the links you want to manually remove just create To-dos that you will later review.

 

Links that pass the unnatural test are marked as OK because those are natural links. Keep those links and use them as an example of high quality backlinks. 

 

2. Non-Penalized Sites Owners

For sites that haven’t been penalized by any unnatural link warning or update, the tool helps to manage the link risk by monitoring your site and competitors on a weekly basis. 

 

You will stay ahead of the game by being able to:

  • Make informed Link Building Decisions.
  • Know your risk to be penalized and monitor it weekly.
  • Monitor your competitors’ link toxicity and risk.
  • Monitor your site for Negative-SEO campaigns.

Link Risk and toxic links or harmful links, as concepts, are only useful if you know your bad links before Google takes any action against your site. If you know it before they do, you are able to manage it.

 

 

Matt Cutt has recommends using the Disavow tool even if your site wasn’t penalized:

If you are at all worried about someone trying to do negative SEO or it looks like there’s some weird bot that’s building up a bunch of links to your site and you have no idea where it came from, that’s the perfect time to use disavow as well. 

I wouldn’t worry about going ahead and disavowing links even if you don’t have a message in your webmaster console

Matt Cutts Matt Cutts
Former head of the web spam team at Google

 

Recover Your Site Now!

 

To be able to test the system we give free 14 day trials, so you might want to take advantage of that first and see if the tool is up to your expectations. You will also get the full functionality of the tool, including full backlink analysis, daily rank tracking, social visibility and a plethora of cool & useful stuff.

The post Automatic Unnatural Link Detection – A Simple Tool for a Complex Problem appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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Unnatural Links Detection – How To Guide & Case Study https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/2668/unnatural-links-detection-how-to-guide-case-study/ https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/2668/unnatural-links-detection-how-to-guide-case-study/#comments Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:38:37 +0000 http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/?p=2668 Important Update! We released the automatic unnatural link classification tool to help you in your unnatural link recovery, after this post was published. We recommend you check it for unnatural link analysis! With the latest chit chat that Google is going to release the next version of Google Penguin soon, I think it is a good time to remember how you can easily detect unnatural […]

The post Unnatural Links Detection – How To Guide & Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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Important Update!

We released the automatic unnatural link classification tool to help you in your unnatural link recovery, after this post was published.

We recommend you check it for unnatural link analysis!

With the latest chit chat that Google is going to release the next version of Google Penguin soon, I think it is a good time to remember how you can easily detect unnatural links in your sites’ profile.

This detection technique can to be used for any site, even if it did not receive a penalty or unnatural link warning. It is a good technique that you can use to understand and manage the risk that you might be exposed to when the next unnatural link update comes.

Lovely site BitsofLace – Unfortunately Bad Linking Used …

This case study presents the story of a penalized site and how an unnatural links detection process should be approached. (mention – the site was brought to our attention by one of our customers asking for help in segmenting the unnatural links pointing to this site)

The site is operating in the “Lingerie” niche (BitsofLace.com) and has received several unnatural link warnings in the past. Their rankings have dropped significantly because of the unnatural links that were built in the past by several agencies or individual SEOs.

Let’s start with the conclusion so you can quickly understand what was wrong with the links of this site.

To put it simple, this site lost rankings because of an often seen, boring and un-creative link building strategy that combines a deadly mix of:

  • Paid blog posts
  • Web Directory links
  • Forum & Article Directory links

So how did I find all this out? Here is the entire process described.  You can apply it to any site.

I started with a full link profile analysis. Looking for big distributions of links I notice the following:

  • A high density of blog, article directory and web directory links
  • A high number of commercial anchor texts versus brand related.

These signals guide me to look further at the webpage type distribution.

1. The story of the Paid Blog Links

Blog links are not unnatural usually, neither web directory or article directory links (or any other type of link … just to clear this out) … but it all comes to the distribution, volume and how they were acquired.

I check the deeper profile of these blog links.

We have them split in:

  • Blog Post links
  • Blog Comment Links
  • Blogrolls and similar link types

Let’s dig deeper. The majority of the links are coming from blog posts. This could be a natural thing.  Content Marketing, customers writing about the service etc.

This isn’t the case unfortunately.

The first unnatural links signal is the low quality of the linking pages.

If I order by link quality, the most important link looks like a paid blog post. Natural links (expos, trade shows, real reviews etc) are also found but these are a tiny fraction (max 1%).

I should have looked at the commercial anchor text distribution for the blog links segment first of all.

A 55% commercial anchor text ratio is totally unnatural for sure.

I am looking at another 3-4 links and I can profile them all based on the similar footprint.

Here are some screenshots so that you can get the idea.

Content written around commercial anchor text posted on these blogs. All of these blog post links are unnatural from Google’s point of view. They were built with the sole purpose of influencing Google’s rankings. They do not provide any value to the user!

The same can be said about the other links coming from blogrolls and blog comments.

~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.

 2. The story of the “old and dirty” Web Directory linking technique.

How natural can Web Directory links be you should ask yourself? Last year Google even started de-indexing directories.

Let’s be frank for a moment, you put those links there with the sole purpose of increasing your rankings.

Rarely we see high quality web directories sending real traffic to your site via the link posted there.

With such a high distribution of 23% links coming from web directories I should mark all as unnatural without even looking at them. But let’s be accurate and methodical and make an informed decision.

Having such a high percentage of 93% links DoFollowed, highlights the intention of the people that “optimized” this link profile to have the site rank higher with Web Directory links.

I tried inspecting these links in various forms so that I could find a quality link from a web directory.

I couldn’t!

I checked the most powerful links ordered by Domain Trustworthiness and Link Trustworthiness. All the top links are low quality web directories (from the user’s experience point of view) by any metric you choose to filter.

Here’s a quick preview on some of these low quality unnatural web directory links.

~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.

 3. The story of the Forum “Personas”

Normally you get people talking in forums about your product. They might be mentioning your brand, talking about your service etc. When you have a high distribution of forum domains sending links to your site we can only have two options:

  1. The site is a “super super” successful brand.
  2. The site is promoted by a “super” proactive forum spammer.

 

Again we have a lot of DoFollow links. Raises a red flag!

In the forum links segment I searched for the word “profile” in the title or link and this is what we got as a visual link profile.

 

Why I searched for the word “profile” you might ask?

Because this represents the fingerprint for forum profile pages or “personas” as some SEOs call them.

Fake Forum profiles created with the sole purpose of generating unnatural links to the promoted site.

We do have some natural links generated by real people on the forums but these are like 10% out of the entire dataset. The rest are “personas” generating links both on profile pages and inside forum discussions.

~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.

4. Article Directory Thin Content can Sink your site.

As a link building strategy this is an old one, that once worked and now it doesn’t anymore. As with any other link building strategy, the more it is abused by SEOs worldwide, the less it is going to work on a long term, as it is something that is generated unnaturally with the purpose of influencing the search engine’s rankings.

Here is the type of thin content linking in with commercial anchor text that was used for this site.

Natural Link?

Not at all!

Human generated content posted on a mass scale on 95 article directories. Variation of the anchor text and content is found on all of these sites. The problem is that Google can fingerprint this as it has a big proportion of the link profile and it raises a red flag for Google to check.

~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Let’s recap:

  • ~21% Unnatural Links Detected on Blogs.
  • ~23% Unnatural Links Detected on Web Directories.
  • ~17% Unnatural Links Detected on Forums.
  • ~11% Unnatural Links Detected on Article Directories.

Total 72% Unnatural Links Detected

And this is not all!

We can go even deeper and check the other type of pages, and I am sure we will find more unnatural links. I just wanted to showcase how easy it is to spot these unnatural links by segmenting the links by webpage type.

The website type segmentation gives you the macro view on the link building strategies used.

The analysis was done in 5 minutes + 10 minutes to have the cognitiveSEO system crawl and analyze the entire dataset of links so that we have fresh data on the links analyzed. It took me 5 hours to finalize this article though :). I hope you will enjoy it!

Here are some other articles that are of great help when it comes to identifying unnatural and low quality links:

What do you think about the unnatural link building strategy used by this site?

What other methods do you apply to segment unnatural links?

The post Unnatural Links Detection – How To Guide & Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

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