LINK REMOVALS AND AVOIDING THE WRATH OF GOOGLE

•When Should We Think About

Removing Links?

•How Can We Make It As Painless As

Possible?

•Avoiding The Wrath Of Google –

What Is The Future?

@kirsty_hulse

Kirsty Hulse

SEO Strategist – DigitasLBi

kirstyhulse.com/blog

When Should We Think About Removing Links?

If Your Site Has Any Of The Following…

A GWT Link Warning

Links on sites like this

Or This….

Or This….

Or This….

A Penalty

Removing Links Isn’t Easy Or Cheap – Make

Sure It’s The Right Choice For Your

Site

Look holistically at

the landscape

Consider ratios of good/bad

Consider anchor text

ALWAYS check onsite

first

DON’T BE A SCAREDY CATMAKE INFORMED JUDGEMENT CALLS BASED ON

YOUR USERS AND YOUR EXPERTISE

How can we make it as painless as possible?

Start with the links in GWT

Use tools to identify ‘the worst’

links

Excel is your best

mateDONE

The process: Identifying bad links

Threaten site owners/bloggers with site

disavow. Ever.

Pay?

DON’T

Lie

DO

Offer to give SEO or Social advice in exchange

‘Bad’ links can be on high quality sites (advertorials etc),

use this as an opener.Include the link in question in the email (prioritse your mail mergers)

Suggest adding no follow

PICK UP THE PHONE

Ensure the link is actually removable

AND WHEN ALL THAT FAILS….

How To Avoid The Wrath Of

Google

WE NEED TO KEEP BUILDING LINKS, AT SCALE, FOR OUR CLIENTS

Matt Cutts said in his most recent Webmaster video…

“A page with more links pointing to it has higher page rank […] and if it has higher page rank then we might think

that it’s a better match for users queries.”

How To Build Links At Scale

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF LINK BUILDING?

AUTHORSHIP

At Pubcon last week Matt Cutts confirmed that Google is going to continue moving in the direction of authorship.

We shouldn’t simply be thinking about where we can post content, but also thinking about how to build relationships

and get influential authors posting on our sites.

Should we just start no following all our links?!

MACHINE LEARNING & SEO

And Google is starting to get good at it - within three days it had created a neural network that can recognise cats and human faces.

What does this mean for SEO?

Machine learning algorithms essentially mimic processes like those occurring in the human mind.

SEOs will need to start thinking as

though Google has the capacity of a

human tester

As we saw with Panda, machine

learning algorithms are difficult to reverse

engineer – so SEO needs to be quality

from the off

SO THEN LINK BUILDING, JUST BECOMES PURE ADVERTISING

Questions?!