TRAFFIC
Interviewer: And people are disavowing links like this, it’ s kind of crazy.
Gary Illyes: So, if you know what you are doing, sure, do it. The good thing is that you can also experiment with it. Basically, you can disavow a whole domain, for example, and see if it causes anything, then you can just remove the domain and when we crawl your pages that link from that domain you’ ll just get back all of your— what is it called?— link authority or shit.
[ Author comment: Yes, Disavow does work. And if you want to remove certain domains or links from your Disavow file then the‘ link authority’ will flow again.]
Interviewer: The link-selling market has exploded, obviously, since Penguin came out. There’ s a lot of people saying,“ Yeah, we’ ll get you all these links from forums and all these various publications, some better than others. And we don’ t have to worry about Google, because Google’ s just going to ignore the bad ones and we keep all the good ones.” What do you say about that?
Gary Illyes: If you are thinking about link building by buying links then, yeah, go ahead and buy links from forums, for example. That would be great for your business because you lose like $ 3,000 or something like that and you will not benefit. Another thing you have to keep in mind is that we still have manual actions for links and I’ m actually very happy when I see that some bigger site has been hit with a manual action for buying links. We are really clear about a lot of this in our guidelines and, if you go against that and you actively try to manipulate our search results, you deserve that manual action.
“ When a link seller comes to you and says,‘ I got good links, you wanna buy?’, then apart from the remote possibility of a manual action, your risk is the amount of money you burn”
And, unfortunately, it’ s very easy to get rid of that manual action because we have the Disavow Tool, for example, which I don’ t necessarily like. But then I’ m not in a position to make or, for example, remove this tool. I would do it, but maybe because I’ m an ass.
[ Author comment: Here, Gary is saying go ahead and buy‘ junk links’, all you’ re going to do is burn money. You won’ t benefit. Important: he doesn’ t say if you buy lots of junk links that you will de-rank because these links are toxic. Remember, with Google and Googlers it’ s what they don’ t say that’ s important. Instead of talking about links pulling rankings down, he goes on about manual penalties.]
Interviewer: Is there still any value in doing link audits? There’ s some people who say you need to do full link audits every month. Other people are like:“ Meh, let Google handle it.” What do you think?
Gary Illyes: I was chatting a lot with some SEOs from big companies, in-house SEOs, about what they are doing and it varies by company. They have different views about why they are disavowing things. Personally, I don’ t think that doing the audits very often makes sense because, as you said, we are pretty good at ignoring links and if we see that the links are coming in organically, it’ s extremely unlikely that we would hit a site with a manual action. And if your links are ignored by Penguin, again you don’ t need to care about that. I run my own site, which gets about perhaps 100,000 visits per week. It’ s been up for four years maybe and I don’ t have a Disavow file, I don’ t even know who links to me.
[ Author comment: The highlight from Gary:“ we are pretty good at ignoring links”. He then talks about manual actions etc and the killer point: he himself doesn’ t do Disavow. He doesn’ t even know who links to him. He doesn’ t care because he knows there is no such thing as a bad link. Links are either‘ zero or plus’. Google is telling us that Penguin is now so good at identifying‘ junk’ links, it just zeroes out any value from links it doesn’ t trust.]
So, when a link seller comes to you and says,“ I got good links, you wanna buy?”, then apart from the remote possibility of a manual action, your risk is the amount of money you burn.
A number of my spammer friends have told me that comment spam and forum spam etc are now working again. Today, out of an infinite number of junk links to a site, 99.8 % might be‘ zero’, but that 0.2 % could be enough to push your site up the rankings.
Of course, there is an on / off switch for the effect of links and it is trust. If Google does not trust your website / webpage, you can point as many good links at it as you like, Google’ s not going to rank that site / page.
26 iGB Affiliate Issue 66 DEC 2017 / JAN 2018