“There were people complaining about searches like Payday Loans […] So we have 2 different changes that try to tackle those kind of queries in a couple different ways. We cannot give you too many details about how they work but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having general queries be a little more clean to going into some of these areas that traditionally have been a little more spammy, including for example some more pornographic queries […]”

And although Google tried to make things right by targeting some very spammy sites and queries, the overall impact was still moderate. Tactics such as Parasite Hosting, Google Bombing or Cloaking & Redirects were still standing strong.  Improvement was needed in this area as spammers will always find new ways of “cheating” the system. Therefore, Payday Loan 2.0, whose explicit purpose was to crack down on very spammy queries and sites, was launched just a few weeks ago. But it was not enough. Spam was still ranking high.

Here we are, 3 weeks forward from the Pay Day Loans 2.0, and Google’s web spam team leader announces a new update of this algorithm Payday Loans 3.0. Before asking whether this algorithm was necessary or not, I think it’s worth lingering a bit on the way the big “announcement” was made. Oh, wait… there hasn’t been a real official announcement. And, don’t get me wrong, I am not expecting an invitation to a launch party with cake and champagne. I am just saying that yesterday, at the SMX Advanced conference  Matt Cutts mentioned that a new update to the Pay Day Loans Algorithm is going to be launched in the next few days. Today, the same Matt Cutts answered to a tweet with: “it is rolling out now”.

In reality, based on the case studies we are going to present in this article, this update rolled out before the conference, meaning BEFORE Google’s representative mentioned that “is going to be rolled out in the future”. All the same, maybe we will tackle Google’s official announcements policy in some other post as for the moment we have some very interesting case studies we want to share with you.

Super Competitive Shaddy Niches

There is a very productive niche for things that people are ashamed to ask for, but need them anyway, so they will try to look for them (and will usually find them online, along with anything else they might need).
One example of such a niche is the one for male potency pills. Apparently, over 45 tons of Viagra are consumed worldwide every year. And they’re not all coming from drugstores. The name of the blue pill has become synonymous with the male potency drug, so it’s really no wonder that most websites out there that deal with such products use “Viagra” as a keyword. It also makes sense that even websites that have no connection to the drug use it as a keyword, to draw traffic. Of course, Pfizer is not happy about it, and has requested that Google shall not allow advertisers to promote any sites on this keyword.
Another such area of ashamed-but-needed products and services is the Money industry. In particular, money beyond your spending capabilities (read payday loans). While the profits are not necessarily what you would expect, with net profits usually in the 10-12% range for payday lenders, the mirage of easy money still draws quite a large competition. That’s mainly because there’s such a large demographic that can be targeted and so many ways in which you can market yourself. And if you choose to advertise online, the investment is at a minimum.
Of course, the problem with that is that everyone in the field is thinking in the same way. So how do you stand out to the myriad of desperate borrowers? Most likely by adopting shady tactics. In fact, just a couple of years ago payday loan agencies in the UK were under scrutiny for aggressive advertising practices, as they started placing ads on social networking sites . More recently, other more complex schemes surfaced, such as hacking and hijacking unconnected sites for profit. Such was the case of www.bicyclesafe.com, who just two years ago was hijacked to redirect to a payday loan agency’s website, but also to return as the main result when people searched for “payday loans” . And some examples can be found by the hundreds.

Before and After the Google Payday Loans 3.0 Google Update

Judging by the way keywords such as: “Payday loans”, “Buy Viagra”, gambling stuff ant other highly competitive keywords looked like (practically everything that makes tons of money), a Google Spammy Update was definitely imminent. And hopefully this time the update’s severity will be stronger than the spammer’s ingenuity.

Let’s take a look at two comparative screenshots for the “buy viagra” query, one taken two months ago, on April 3rd and one taken today, June 13th.

Let’s analyze the screenshot before the Payday Loan 3.0 update hit. As we can easily see, Google’s first page of results, the one that should offer the most relevant results, generated ONLY ONE “valid” result; only one webpage that isn’t a parasited website or a shady redirect.

Let’s have a closer look on what is happening at the moment, watching the right side of the screenshot above. Quite a change, isn’t it? It’s like we are looking at a whole different story now. Google’s first page of results for the query “buy viagra” is filled with almost relevant and trustworthy results. It looks like Google did the summer cleaning in a very serious and efficient manner.

For a better understanding of the matter, let’s put under the magnifying glass two sites that have been affected by this recent update, one from the “buy viagra” niche and one from the “payday loans” niche. Both analyzed websites are from the UK market, one of the most spammed markets for the mentioned queries.

With so many penalty case studies coming from UK lately, we tend to ask ourselves if Google started a crusade against webmasters coming from the British peninsula. With a market share of around 90%, it’s clear that the big G holds the monopoly in terms of search in UK. That means quite a lot of power for the search engine but also an extra responsibility in generating the most relevant results. With millions of British searchers daily, all companies want to be number one in Google’s golden list. The problem is that not all of them can be number one. So the battle begins. On one side, web sites resort to all kind of tactics to “steal” a corner from Google’s first page, on the other side, Google is continuously creating new and improved algorithms in order to decide why one site should rank in front of another. We can only hope that this algorithm will be able to adequately settle this matter.

Spammy Medical Terms Case Study – Top 1 Ranking Site (for UK)

The website that we submit to the analysis, Pharmacy2U was established in 1999, being one of UK’s first internet pharmacies. Quite a pioneer in the field we might say. Overall, the website looks good, has well written, original and relevant content and (maybe the most important for the moment) it ranks first on the SERPs for the “buy viagra”, “buy cialis” and “buy levitra” queries. The Payday Loans 3.0 Google Update gave it a really nice boost, as before the algorithm change it used to be on the 5th position, two months ago as you can see in the screenshot above.

This is the only site that was in the top 10 SERP 2 months ago and now it’s still there. So it has to have something special.

Let’s dig a bit and see what we can find about the site. Checking the link velocity of the site we can easily see that the site existed for quite some time and it’s monthly link velocity is somewhat natural. There were a few spikes in the past but the site’s overall link history looks ok.

Yet we are not dealing only with an “old” site, but also with a site that has a stable ranking in terms of SEO visibility. As it can be seen on the screenshot below, taken from 2 SEO Visibility providers we see that both of them report the approximate same trend.

At first sight we see no dramatic ups and downs, no signs of previous penalties or obvious linking schemes. On the contrary, we observed a healthy link profile that contains a lot of links from Topically Relevant sites pointing back to the analyzed site. This means that sites in the same topical category, “Health”, are linking back to the site.

Yet, are these elements enough for Pharmacy2u to rank first for such controversial and highly spammed queries? Let’s do a more in-depth analysis to see what we are really dealing with. We should start with an Unnatural Link Analysis and see how the sites stands up.

At a closer look, we see that the first appearance deceives many and things are not always what they seem. The unnatural – natural link ratio is not quite Google friendly. From our internal research, sites that have over 25% unnatural + suspect links are likely to be already penalized (or will be if they weren’t already). Yet, this is a very competitive niche and the rules might apply differently here.

As we can see in the screenshots, it is not very hard to identify the strategy Pharmacy2U has been using in the pursuit of higher ranks. We are dealing with an alarming number of links coming from Webdirectories, link networks or forums. Google explicitly mentions  that these kind of strategies may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. For all that, the same Google gave Pharmacy2U a helping hand and helped it climb to position no.1. Most unnatural linked pages are directed to the main page, sign that in the past they may have tried some heavy linking campaigns.
Yet, if we take a look at the most common unnatural anchor text, we see that the number 1 on “buy viagra” doesn’t have a commercial anchor text heavy linking strategy. Mostly, they are using brand anchor text and this might be one of the reasons they’ve entered into Google’s good graces. Because of this fact, they probably did not trigger a red flag on the Google screen.

There are lots of forum links, blog links, Webdirectory links and also some blog comments and guest posts.

Yet, let’s see some examples of one of their highly used (or abused) strategy, link dropping. Below, there are some screenshots taken from two random Pharmacy2U links, one is a blog comment and the other is an author signature. What do the two of them have in common? They are  both sprinkled with overflowing unnatural flavor. It’s true that this strategy may be just a thing of the past and the blog comments and guest posting might not be in a huge number but still, it’s hard to believe that the omniscient Google might have missed this issue.

So, how can a site with such a “going-to-be-penalized” profile can possibly rank at no.1? We are doing reverse engineering here so we cannot certainly put our finger on anything, but we assume that this may have happened for two reasons:

1. First, Google might be applying the “of all the evils we choose the least bad” principle. Meaning that this particular niche is a highly spammed one and you can hardly find any site that would closely respect the guidelines. As we mentioned in the beginning of the article, https://www.pharmacy2u.co.uk/ was the only site from Google’s first page results that wasn’t a parasite host or a redirect, 2 months ago. Not much to choose from. In this case, the big G may have chosen to boost not the site with a flawless profile (as it didn’t find any), but the one which is somewhat close to its guidelines.

2. Second, this niche is a special one from so many points of view and therefore Google might not have detected this website as having an unnatural link profile, although in other niches, similar ratios of unnatural links would penalize a site.

3. Third, this site might be affected by a negative SEO attack. It is possible but not that probable.

Payday Loans Case Study – Top 1 Ranking Site (for UK)

Let’s shift gears a little and let’s go to the Payday loans territory. Albeit “Payday Loans” is a highly used and abused area, we will look into a website that ranks first for the “payday loan” query, a well deserved position. We put under review Wizzcash , a relatively new site that provides short-term loans of up to £1,000. Is not a very large amount you may say so why all this fuzz in this niche? A lot of controversy arose in the payday loans niche as lenders are usually targeting the most vulnerable borrowers and are not doing proper affordability checks on them before granting loans. Also, costs are not always transparent and some lenders seem to encourage consumers to take on more borrowing.
But let’s go back to our analysis and let’s take a peek on what’s going on in the “payday loans niche”

Exploring this site we see that it doesn’t have a super long link velocity (2 years) so seniority in the field might not be its forte. It’s not new but it is not old from an SEO point of view. Still being such a competitive niche, usually sites with many more referring domains were battling for the 1st position in the SERPs.

Looking at the SEO visibility for this site it shows that it has a quick increase in ranks and then began to decline until it was stabilized. It was probably not affected by penalties.

Looking at the Unnatural Link Distribution, we can see that they have a super clean link profile ( just some suspect links and an overwhelming majority of natural links). The Brand versus Commercial Anchor Text distribution is great. Taking into account so many sites that we’ve analyzed in our “internal cuisine”, we must tell you that we’ve rarely seen a site with such a clean profile (97% ok links – 3% suspect links). And being a website from such a controversial niche make things even more impressive. Seems like Wizzcash.com read closely the steps to a Google-friendly site , being quite a role model for many sites from this disputed area.

Yet, for such a competitive niche, Wizzcash has just a few links coming from only 210 referring domains. So, how can a website with such few links rank first on Google’s Golden Page where everyone struggles hard to be on? All in all, we are dealing with a website that contradicts the stereotypes from this area and proves that managing a website with a good-looking link profile is “doable” in the “payday loan” niche.

Conclusion

Taking two steps back and watching the overall situation, we might say that the PayDay Loan 3.0 Google Update did a really good job compared to the Payday Loans 1.0 & 2.0 Updates. The latest update seems to have cleaned up all the parasite hosting sites from the SERPs and Google seems to provide now what it always intended. Of course, there are still issues in terms of unnatural links (as you could see from the site ranking for pharmaceutical terms) but it is much better than it used to be.
At the end of the day, Google successfully made the transition from the invasion of parasite hosting and shady redirects to relevant and accurate results on the topic. It seems to me that Google might have a specific list of keywords that are put under “special treatment” and they raise the bar for “spammy” sites detection in these particular areas.

The post Did Google Finally Kill the SPAM from the SERPS? – Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

The “Unnatural Links & Recoveries Webinar  with Razvan Gavrilas” was recorded and can be watched below. You have 1h and 38 minutes of in-depth unnatural link analysis and lots of questions answered at the end of the video. Enjoy!

Here are the main discussed topics:

• Unnatural Links & Types
  • Unnatural Links Definition
  • Organic Links Definition
  • 27 Types of Unnatural Links
• Famous Case Studies 
  • Halifax Penalty Case Study
  • Lastminute Negative SEO Case Study
• Example of a Google Recovery
• Your  Sites Case Studies
• Q&A
  • All questions can be found at https://plus.google.com/events/cnec31mu995v8g2gcsemj8flqdo

Let me know if you have any other questions. Just comment on this page and I will answer them here 😉

The post Unnatural Link Detection & Recoveries Training & Webinar appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Update: This is the complete case study of the Halifax Google Penalty. We updated it with EXTRA Juicy info and made a cool illustration also!

A breaking news has just reached our eyes and we found it so interesting and exciting that we couldn’t leave our office in a Friday afternoon until we shared this boiling piece of information with you. And before you assume we probably didn’t have any plans for this evening, read the article and we’ll talk after.

Halifax may be one of the best and prosperous cities in the world, but when it comes to the famous UK banking chain Halifax, we cannot say the same thing. At least not anymore. The only thing the city of Halifax and Halifax bank have now in common is that they are both hard to find; first one on the map and the other on Google.

Looks like Google started 2014 with its engine at a maximum revolution, setting the bar high when it comes to penalties, regardless of the size or importance of the site.

The Halifax bank is the UK’s largest provider of residential mortgages and saving accounts, founded about 150 years … before Google existed. Basically, by the time Google was working at its initial public offering, the Halifax bank established one of the first telephone and Internet based banks. And if you’re still not convinced that Halifax’s tradition and reputation has deep roots, you should know that they were founded before the invention of the cash register, electric bulb or Coca Cola.

Thereby, they deserve a front-page case study.

As famous and notorious as they are, their link building strategy might not be very “Google friendly”, as they are facing now high difficulties and big rumbles in the online world. From our analysis, it seems like they’ve been penalized and Google might add an turning point in their impressive history.

The Financial Niche in UK

The financial niche in UK has very interesting characteristics that might need a different article; not on our blog, don’t worry. Without overwhelming you with bank details, that will only give you headaches, allow me to give you a few tips about this niche. Financial competition in the UK isn’t much of a competition in the way that since 2008 until now just five big banks own 85% of market share.

Why is this piece of information so important for us?

Well, it should help us make a clear image about how significant this story is and how big the actors really are. In other words, Halifax is a very big player in the field that lost not only image points but also pounds. Thousand of pounds!

20% Google Halifax Google Drop 

Bellow we can see the Halifax visibility history over the past two years.  Looking at the following chart we can easily see a dramatically downhill that started at the beginning of February and looks like it it keeps on dropping. Google’s “red card” reflected on Halifax’s online visibility and the bank dropped in ranking about 20%.

As we look at the following chart we can easily see a dramatically downhill that started at the beginning of February and looks like it keeps on dropping.

Halifax Dropped Keywords

Only 20%, one might say; “that’s not such of a big penalty after all”. In fact, it is.

If we analyze the keywords Halifax actually “lost”, you might have a better understanding of why you wouldn’t want to step in Halifax’s shoes right now. As I was saying before about the bank established on the old continent, Halifax is synonymous with loans, saving accounts, online banking. If we take a look at the chart below what do we see?

The core of their business, their top keywords are in a serious downward trend. “Personal loans”, “saving accounts” or “home loans” are not even listed in the first 100 anymore. That’s quite a stab!

The 20% don’t seem to look so negligible any more, don’t you think?

Who is responsible for the drop?

Well, this is an interesting issue to discuss. When a problem appears, we have a natural, almost uncontrollable desire to find the scapegoat.

Who will it be this time? Halifax for not keeping an eye wide open at its online activity? The media agency responsible for Halifax’s online marketing strategies? Google itself for not making plain statements, clear regulations and changing the rules of the game as it goes?

All involved parties reacted differently to this story but the media agency that “took care” of Halifax caught our attention.

If about a year ago they proudly shared their strategy and results they had on Halifax on their blog, now that specific article is not to be found anywhere as it was deleted the day that Halifax probably got the Google penalty.

Since we are technology addicts, we were able to easily find that article using Web Archive.

In the article in question, unbeatable figures were highlighted: natural search visitors volume was with 244% higher than in the previous year, sales percentage increased and was in alignment with visitors increase and, maybe, most important asset, Google market data showed Halifax as most visible street bank for ISA (individual saving accounts) related search.

Fast forward one year later …

Google penalized Halifax for keywords such as ISA and loans. I’ll let you draw the conclusions on who should share the blame; but no matter whom you’ll find responsible for all this, Halifax’s penalty is still on.

How did everything begin?

This is exactly what we wanted to find out and what better way to investigate this story than using the cognitiveSEO tool. In the chart bellow it’s outlined the biggest Spike of new links in Halifax links’ history and, brace yourself, you will see over 460.000 links on about 190 referring domains only. Quite a baffling ratio between links and domains, don’t you think?

To better understand what really happened, we took a fast peek on the last 90 days link acquisition chart and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to notice that in mid of December something happened. While kids put the final touches on their Christmas wish list, Halifax received an earlier “present”, a huge big Spike of new links.

However, if they receive “presents” earlier, they also begin the spring cleaning earlier.

At the end of January, after all winter holidays have passed,  we can see that the number of lost links begin to increase suddenly.  Given the fact that before this time, the number of lost links had the same approximate pattern, we could say that they probably began cleaning the links, due to the Google Penalty.

The tool helped us easily identify the unnatural links and understand the unnatural to ok link ratio for the entire link profile. As the following chart suggests, the site seems to have a highly unnatural link profile and it’s likely to be penalized by Google.

From our in house case studies, sites that have over 20% unnatural links are at high risk to be flagged by the Google Algorithm for bad practices.

If you are still skeptic about the shady practices used by Halifax you should check the following screenshots.

Let me outline the top 3 shady link building strategies Halifax used.

Shady Link Building Strategy 1 – Web Directory Links.

Let’s take a look at this web directory. At a first glance, the site is looking quite good; it has high quality domain and link authority. If we look at the details we see a do follow commercial anchor text link.

The problem is that this isn’t the single webdirectoy link. There are a bunch and they were built quite fast as we see in the Unnatural reasons spotted by the tool.

Extreme Link Velocity – We might be living in the speed century but this looks very unnatural.

Shady Link Building Strategy 2 – Easily Pattern-able Links 

Trying to initiate ourselves in the “magic” link building strategy Halifax bank’s site used, we took some other snapshots from different links that are identified as being unnatural. In the image below we can see a technique, which purpose is to make Google believe that the highlighted words represent a short paragraph of text used in the content of the site but what we are actually talking about is a hidden commercial anchor posted sideways on a low quality site.

Not that magic anymore, is it?

It’s like you are driving on the highway and all the advertising banners on the roadside are trying to invade the road, standing in your way.

The following snapshot is a re-validation of the fact that a pattern was used in making commercial anchor text look like it’s an important part in the site’s content when it actually appears to be a suspect widget. And yes, I know, everything has to do with banks: cars, houses, hospitals and bars; but mentioning the great advantageous Halifax’s bank loans on a wide range of terms, such as hybrid cars, oil prices and general news? I think you all agree with me when I say that this looks quite shady.

Shady Link Building Strategy 3 – Advertorials (paid posts)

As we can see in the screenshot above they also used a paid post strategy to acquire “search engine friendly” links. As a visual trace that might indicate this is a paid post, they have an image in the footer that says:

The Halifax link is an in-content & do-follow link enriched with commercial anchor text. That is a pretty shady thing usually. The same “advertorial” technique was also used by Interflora, when they got their site penalized by Google.

Looking at the following link we can only imagine a link network of low quality sites. That is not something that a bank would naturally get a commercial anchor text link from.

Was this Negative SEO?

After all said and done, was it negative SEO? Did Halifax’s competitors pointed thousands of negative backlinks with the clear intention to influence organic search rankings in their favor? Doesn’t seem the case this time, as all the strategies listed above appear to be a part of an assumed tactic. Also, the SEO agency in charge for their online marketing campaign talked pretty clear and artless in the erased article published on their blog about the strategy they used in order to increase Halifax’s visibility online.

Halifax Current Situation

In these troubled waters, it’s important to know how Halifax sails. First of all, as we outlined in one of the charts above, it looks like the “cleaning” process has already begun. As the number of lost links increases, the more natural and reliable their profile will begin to look. Their very quick response to this matter is worth appreciating and I am not sure if you feel the same about this but I guess their chief accountant does.

The Good Stuff at Halifax

We know there is not much milk & honey at Halifax currently, but we can’t make a full analysis without taking into account the good things Halifax has. For instance, let’s take a look at their “natural” appearance. There is, indeed a high percentage of unnatural links but the natural ones come as a counterbalance. Also, let’s not forget who are we talking about: a well-known bank that came out with their head up from several crashes and severe economic crisis during the years. We are not saying that this isn’t a nasty blow but we do think that Halifax has the necessary expertise to get through this unpleasant episode and get a fast recovery.

Conclusion

Having sites like Expedia and Halifax penalized by Google sends a strong signal that not even the big “guys” have a chance in the face of Google. They might get faster recoveries than smaller sites but still they can get penalized the same way a normal site is.

As we have seen, the SEO team, that is/was working at Halifax, already started to remove the bad links that are the cause of this drop.  I am sure that the site will be back on tracks soon but this will require a better SEO strategy from their digital marketing team.

PS: My special thanks go to Martin Macdonald for spotting this drop.

The post How Google Broke the Bank – The Famous Halifax Penalty appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Oui. Ja. Si. Ja. Da. Ken. Hai. 是 [Shi]. Já. Haan. Да. Evet. Nai. Tak. Taip. Kyllä. Ja. Ya.

They are actually killing you site and business, that is if you are building a sustainable medium to long-term online business as most people do. If you are into the “trickery” business (like short term  with no brand attachments … ) then unnatural links may still do it for you. (read about it at the end of the article).

Here are a few things on what this article is/isn’t:

• This is not SEO propaganda – just a catchy title 😉
• This is a Serious SEO Case Study.
• This is about link building strategies that work/[or don’t] in 2013.
• This is about real sites with real problems.
• This is about Google.
• This is for every SEO Pro! (penalized or not)

How good is Google at spotting shady links you might ask yourself?

This case study analyzes the ranking trends on a set of sites and correlates this information with their unnatural link profiles.

We took 4 sites in the “birthday invitations, cards and more” niche that were ranking top 10 on a set of keywords representative for the niche. One of these sites stands out with a steady SEO visibility growth in the last year.

This is the SEO visibility of the CardStore.com site for the last 2 years. Looking at the SEO visibility trend, it seems that they also had SERP volatility in the past due to some Google Penalties or Algorithms updates. Even so, they recovered and are increasing their SEO visibility more and more.

Looking good! Their link profile is Green and Orange.  This means that the site is having a healthy link profile. Healthy link profiles may have a small amount of suspicious links. Nothing to worry about!

On the other hand, some of their competitors don’t have such a great SEO visibility.

Correlating the ranking data with the linking data, it is almost obvious why some sites are struggling in Google while others are winning.

Looking at the correlation between the unnatural links and SEO visibility, we can easily see that Google pushes up the sites with more natural looking link profiles. The sites with shady link profiles are steadily declining.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into the story of each individual site.

1. CardStore.com

Let’s look at what CardStore is doing, in terms of link building strategies.

By checking the competitive link analysis area we can easily spot a very low amount of commercial anchor text compared to the other sites. This usually indicates a site that is doing either smart SEO or isn’t doing SEO at all. The other sites seem to be a bit more aggressive in terms of SEO.

Another important fact that dictates a steady growth would be a consistent monthly link acquisition.

This chart only tells you that the CardStore site has a constant link acquisition trend, with numbers that are above their competitors’. This doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of the links. If we look at the link velocity we see that this is trend started in 2009 and goes on since then. This single fact increases the chances of something “good” actually going on, leading to a link profile with a much higher number of referring domains.

Trying to discover some of their major link building strategies, I noticed what link building strategies they did not use. I refer to Web Directories and Article Directories Link Building.

Looking at some of the other competitors, we see 2 of them being quite active on Webdirectory link acquisitions, while others have a similar and more natural link acquisition pattern.

Overall this site’s main characteristic is that

No External Backlink Over-optimization!

 2. Paperculture.com

Their webmaster confirmed that the site received unnatural link warnings from Google and also said that they did not see a decrease in search traffic.

In the PaperCulture case we see an increasing SEO visibility trend, even though the site has been sent unnatural link warnings. Taking a look at the naturalness of their link profile we can see that they have a small amount of unnatural links.

Their main problem seems to be the struggle to grow their SEO visibility.

It is important to know that unnatural link warnings do not necessarily mean a decrease in traffic they might also mean an SEO growth blockage. Removing the unnatural links might enable the site to grow faster, only if they increase the link acquisition trend in a natural way.

3. SimplytoImpress.com

With the high level of toxic links this site has, this only indicates the certainty of a Google Penalty or Unnatural Links Warning. This is also confirmed also by the SEO visibility trend. The latest major SEO visibility fall is on the Google Penguin 2.0 date.

At a more in-depth look, we spot the main problem in their link building strategy:

Webdirectories …

From my point of view, this “ancient” link building strategy, that once worked extremely well, slaps all the sites that abused it quite hard now. My recommendation for link profiles such as this is to start diluting them by doing “natural” link building and steadily removing the web directory links that were built in the past.

4. Finestationery.com

Their naturalness level is at the lower end limit. This means that they are on “moving ground” and that they are at risk to be hit by Google because of unnatural links.

SEO visibility has a rather big decline! My opinion is that this big decrease is not related to unnatural links but more to a Google Update in January 2013, a possible Google Panda as reported on several sites for that particular timeframe.

Having identified their biggest drop and looking at the rest of the visibility we see a linear visibility with a very small increase trend. It is important to notice that Google Penguin 2.0 did not have any impact on this site, even if they have a link profile with 19% to 25% unnatural and suspect links. I have seen these numbers on a lot of other sites that have problems with their link profile and have not been penalized yet. Looking at how Google’s algorithms have evolved in terms of spotting unnatural links, I would say that it is only a matter of time until these kind of link profiles take a big hit and loose any SEO visibility that they might still have.

In this particular case their brand vs commercial anchor text distribution is looking pretty natural. The “anchor text distribution” is also used by Google, in order to determine the overall naturalness of a site’s link profile.

Conclusion & Advice

With several in-house studies we did, similar to this one, I would “dare” to say that sites that haven’t been over SEO-ed have a very good chance of continuing with steady rankings and growth, while sites that move over the 15-20% unnatural links limit, have a very high chance of being penalized by Google for unnatural links.

Sites with Orange + Green Link Profiles are considered safe sites, in terms of unnatural link penalties. Unfortunately not many sites fit in this category and for the ones that don’t, I highly recommend starting to actively build links by not building links :).

That means forget about SEO for a moment (at least the way you did it before) and try to recover that lost authority that you once had. In order to do that you just need to prove to Google that your site is trustworthy of being top ranked in their index. You can only do this by following their guidelines and not by trying to bend the “law” in order to get a better ranking. Re-build your business model by focusing on SEO as an integrated marketing activity and not by trying to trick Google in thinking that your site is “the site” that should be ranked in the top spot.

And remember … all this makes sense, only if you care about Google’s traffic.

Good luck and I hope this case study helped you understand link naturalness, toxicity and SEO volatility better.

Unnatural Link Detection Tool Used

The unnatural link analysis was done using the automatic unnatural link detection Widget in the cognitiveSEO platform. You can try it yourself, if you have’t already, using the free 14 day trial.

A new feature that was silently added last week, is the Unnatural Link Comparison widget in the Competitive Link Analysis Area. This case study already highlights some of use cases for this chart. The major use case is the ability to compare multiple sites from a backlink profile naturalness point of view.

Always open to questions and discussions … so if you have any, ask them in the comments.

14 day Free Trial!

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.

PS: If your business model is short term, you should be reading this.

<em>Photo <a href="http://pierrecolletderby.blogspot.ro/2011_11_01_archive.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">*</a> </em>

The post [Unnatural] Links are DEAD – A Case Study appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.