What is Google Targeting with Its Link Spam Update
With its latest update, Google is attempting to improve its detection of link spam. This is something Google has implemented to improve its user satisfaction. As Google’s main aim is to help you find the best response to your search query, low quality websites that use link spam to get high on the search engine ranking are not helpful.
This update can cause some issues for certain web masters, including a reduction in your search engine ranking or a link penalisation.
If you want to avoid this, read on to find out what the update is and what it will affect on your website.
What is This Update About?
For many years now, Google has been slightly altering its algorithm. These updates were made to help Google give users better results. A part of this is the attempt to reduce link spam. Link spam is when a website makes low quality links in high numbers to manipulate Google’s algorithm and improve the search engine ranking quickly.
This Google update will give a penalty to websites who use link spam tactics such as blog comment spam, forum spam and link farms. As a result this update really impacted many websites who fell down the search engine rankings or were completely removed from search engines overall as a result.
In order to reduce the ramifications of this update, you need to know the types of link spam, so you can then remove them from your website.
What Are The Types of Link Spam?
There are three different types of link spam.
Spammy Links In Content
A spammy link in content is when you can clearly see a high volume of links in a body of content that doesn’t contribute to the discussion or benefit the person reading. They can be found by looking for random unrelated keywords or anchor text that have been included for only SEO purposes. Remove these links from your content right away and focus on natural links in content.
Links In Your Comment Box
This is when you leave comments that contain links that have no bearing or usefulness for the reader and don’t have anything to do with other comments. You can find them and remove them by looking for any random comments containing links that have nothing to do with the subject matter at hand.
Spammy Backlinks
These are links to your website that come from other websites that don’t relate to your industry or really benefit the people visiting your website. These are often just there for SEO reasons, and if you have these backlinks linking you to unrelated websites, you should remove them as well, because this goes both ways.
One Last Thing
Now that you understand the intricacies of link spam, you can now undertake a link audit to see what the status of your website’s link portfolio is. This does take a little bit of expertise, so consider calling the experts to help you get started on your journey to algorithm safe links.