There are two forms of “penalties” that SEOs think about when they refer to a Google penalty.

One is a manual action penalty, which is site-specific and intentionally applied. The other type of “penalty” is really more of a consequence. It happens when a site loses rankings as a result of the Google algorithm.

Google reports that manual actions occur less and less frequently as the algorithm gets smarter. For example, Google applied 2.9 million manual actions in 2020, which is far fewer than the 4 million sent in 2018 and the 6 million in 2017.

Since algorithmic hits account for ranking drops more and more, calling them search engine penalties sounds fair to me.

Below I’ll give more details about both types and why penalties exist. Feel free to jump ahead:

• How webmaster guidelines and penalties work
• What is a Google manual action penalty
• What is an algorithmic penalty
• FAQ: How can websites avoid Google penalties and improve their search engine rankings?

How Webmaster Guidelines and Penalties Work

Google’s “Webmaster Guidelines” help website publishers understand what can cause a penalty or poor rankings.

These guidelines are centered on quality. A quality website will provide a good user experience. Websites that offer a good user experience have a better chance of competing in the search results.

Websites that create a bad user experience and violate Google’s guidelines can either receive a manual penalty from Google, or just not rank — or both.

The webmaster guidelines are driven by basic quality principles that include the following:

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don’t deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

So how do you avoid deceiving your users and create a high-quality site? Google gives a list of things not to do in its “quality guidelines,” which should be a roadmap for your website. For example, don’t use automated tools to build your webpages. And avoid duplicate content as much as possible.

The guidelines also include some pretty basic lessons on spam.

But even if you consider your website and business to be on the up and up, you can still unknowingly get yourself into trouble.

Why? Perhaps you didn’t study the webmaster guidelines closely enough and accidentally got yourself into a link scheme. Maybe it was the guest posting service you hired that got you a penalty. Or, it could be that you hired a cheap SEO service that put your website on a bad trajectory.

Even the savviest of businesses have been caught up in bad SEO practices. So if you do happen to get a drop in rankings or even a manual penalty, don’t feel bad. Just make sure you hire the right SEO professional to fix it.

What Is a Google Manual Penalty?

A manual penalty is reserved for those sites that are violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. This is a very specific action that an employee of Google applies to your site in particular. (This contrasts with an algorithm, which might impact or “penalize” many sites.)

Google explains why manual actions exist:

Ever since there have been search engines, there have been people dedicated to tricking their way to the top of the results page. This is bad for searchers because more relevant pages get buried under irrelevant results, and it’s bad for legitimate websites because these sites become harder to find. For these reasons, we’ve been working since the earliest days of Google to fight spammers, helping people find the answers they’re looking for, and helping legitimate websites get traffic from search. …

Our algorithms are extremely good at detecting spam, and in most cases we automatically discover it and remove it from our search results. However, to protect the quality of our index, we’re also willing to take manual action to remove spam from our search results.

When Google doles out a manual action against your site, you will receive a message from Google.

Of course, you can check the Manual Actions report at any time in Google Search Console. If you’re in the clear, it looks like this:

And Google gives some helpful information on that here:

Manual actions can be detrimental to your website. Just listen to former Googler Fili Wiese talk about how having one stops the growth of your website:

So it’s important to address these manual action notices right away. You can find more information from Google on how to address those here.

How Google’s Algorithm Updates “Penalize”

Recently, I wrote about why sites lose rankings. Algorithm changes are one of those reasons. Keep in mind that Google makes more than 3,000 improvements to Search each year, including frequent algorithm updates. And the ranking algorithms consider hundreds of different factors.

Changes to the ranking algorithm can include new factors being added, factors being reorganized, or factors being increased or weakened in strength. For example, the Page Experience update takes several preexisting ranking factors and combines them with new “core web vitals” to create a new ranking signal.

Then you throw Google’s AI into the mix — RankBrain, which helps deliver what it believes to be the most relevant results — and your rankings could change in an instant.

As a result, any websites that are not weathering the changes that Google is making may experience lost rankings and traffic. This may feel like a penalty. And, of course, you want to avoid Google penalties of all kinds. However, keep in mind that an algorithmic penalty is just Google trying to serve the highest quality sites on Page 1 of the search results.

If you’ve experienced this, the smart thing to do is to understand how your website can improve so that it’s more like the websites that are now ranking in your place. As I’ve always said: SEO should beat the competition, not the algorithm. So get up, dust yourself off, and start analyzing the top results.

If you need an expert SEO to help you address a Google ranking penalty or otherwise improve your website’s visibility, contact us for a free quote and consultation today.

FAQ: How can websites avoid Google penalties and improve their search engine rankings?

Avoiding Google penalties and optimizing search engine rankings are paramount for website success. As the dominant search engine, Google has established rigorous guidelines and algorithms to assess websites’ quality and relevance. Falling afoul of these guidelines can lead to penalties that drastically hamper visibility and traffic.

Understanding Google’s Algorithms and Guidelines

At the heart of Google’s ranking system lie complex algorithms that evaluate websites’ credibility, relevance, and user experience. Staying informed about these algorithms, such as Panda, Penguin, and Core Updates, is essential. Regularly monitoring Google’s official webmaster guidelines is crucial for staying aligned with their expectations.

Crafting High-Quality, Engaging Content

Content remains king, and websites must prioritize creating valuable, informative, and engaging content. Strive to address users’ queries comprehensively, utilizing relevant keywords naturally. Diversifying content formats, from articles and infographics to videos and podcasts, can enhance user engagement, signaling quality to search engines.

Nurturing a Healthy Backlink Profile

Building a robust backlink profile is a cornerstone of SEO success. However, the emphasis should be on quality over quantity. Acquiring authoritative, relevant backlinks from reputable sources can bolster a website’s credibility. Avoid dubious practices like link farms, as they can trigger severe penalties.

Prioritizing User Experience and Technical Excellence

User experience (UX) plays a pivotal role in ranking. Ensure your website is responsive, easy to navigate, and quick to load. Google’s Core Web Vitals have gained prominence, measuring page loading speed and interactivity. Optimizing these aspects not only prevents penalties but also enhances user satisfaction.

Monitoring, Analyzing, and Adapting

Regularly monitor your website’s performance using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These platforms offer valuable insights into user behavior, search queries, and technical issues. Analyze this data to identify areas for improvement and adjust your strategies accordingly.

Step-by-Step Procedure: Navigating Google Penalties and Enhancing Rankings

1. Familiarize yourself with Google’s algorithms, including Panda, Penguin, and Core Updates.
2. Stay updated on Google’s webmaster guidelines to meet their expectations.
3. Create high-quality, informative, engaging content addressing user queries.
4. Utilize relevant keywords naturally within your content.
5. Diversify content formats to cater to different audience preferences.
6. Build a strong backlink profile with authoritative, relevant sources.
7. Avoid unethical practices like link farms or paid link schemes.
8. Prioritize user experience by ensuring a responsive and navigable website.
9. Optimize page loading speed and interactivity for better Core Web Vitals scores.
10. Regularly monitor your website’s performance using Google Analytics and Search Console.
11. Analyze user behavior, search queries, and technical issues from the collected data.
12. Identify areas for improvement in content, user experience, and technical aspects.
13. Make necessary adjustments to your strategies based on the insights gained.
14. Continuously update and refresh your content to maintain relevance.
15. Engage with your audience through social media and other platforms.
16. Address negative user experiences and feedback promptly.
17. Implement structured data markup to enhance search result appearance.
18. Collaborate with reputable websites for guest posting and mutual backlinking.
19. Regularly audit your website for broken links, technical errors, and outdated content.
20. Stay informed about industry trends and algorithm updates to adapt your strategies.

The post What Is a Google Penalty and How Do I Avoid It? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Search engines play the role of referee in the search engine optimization game. For business owners, this means that ethical SEO conduct can pay off. Google has a manual actions team whose job is to help keep the search results clean. They back up the algorithms (which do most of the work filtering out webspam) and review individual cases by hand. These people have the power to blow a whistle to stop misbehavior and even to bench a player who refuses to play by the rules. I like to picture them in black and white striped shirts (though I’m sure jeans and t-shirts would be closer to the truth).

While referees can be very unpopular, their words carry a lot of weight. This week Google published a report titled “How we fought webspam in 2015” chronicling what they discovered and accomplished last year. Impressively, the manual actions team sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters last year. That means webmasters were notified personally not only of a yellow flag being thrown, but also about what caused the penalty action.

From a searcher’s perspective, all of this refereeing is fantastic news. It means that if I search for “referee clothing,” I will actually see striped shirts and not spammy, unwanted junk. Touchdown!

From a business’s perspective, however, Google penalties can be livelihood-threatening realities. Since the introduction of the Panda Update in 2011 and the subsequent waves of algorithmic and manual action Google penalties, we’ve seen a rise in SEO services clients requiring penalty assessments and removals. This latest report from Google is important for online businesses to be aware of because it points to trends in webspam and identifies red-flag digital marketing tactics to avoid.

In BCI’s 20-year history, our digital marketing company has been a pioneering voice for ethical search engine optimization. Due to our methodology founded on SEO ethics, we’ve helped countless clients recover from manual and algorithmic penalties, and now eagerly await the next Penguin update to see additional penalty recovery resolutions. (Read a testimonial.)

To partner with a top-tier technical SEO agency and grow your website’s revenue-driving potential, fill out our request form or call us today.

Below I’ll explain more about how webmasters can deal with Google penalty situations. But first, here is the state of webspam, according to Google’s report.

Webspam-Fighting Highlights

It bears repeating that Google’s manual actions team sent more than 4.3 million messages to webmasters last year. Many “penalties” occur algorithmically and can blindside webmasters with a sudden, unexplained loss of search traffic to their sites. You’ve got to appreciate the fact that the search engine takes the time to notify this many people directly to communicate that a problem and/or penalty has occurred.

SEO Tip: You’ll find any messages sent by the manual actions team if you look in your Google Search Console account messages. So if you haven’t set up Google Search Console yet, do it now!

Hacked Sites Up by 180 Percent

Compared to the previous year, the number of sites being hacked was up by 180 percent! Google’s report identified site hacking as a top webspam trend of 2015. Here’s what being hacked means: One day, you wake up to find your nice, clean website covered with the graffiti of someone else’s spammy content. (Jump down for what to do about hacked sites.)

Thin Content Is Trending Up

Google’s manual actions team reports that “sites with thin, low quality content” are the second most commonly increasing form of webspam.

“We saw an increase in the number of sites with thin, low quality content. Such content contains little or no added value and is often scraped from other sites.”

Businesses should know that we’ve been living in the age of Google’s Panda algorithm update for several years now. What is Google Panda? Panda eats low-quality content for lunch. And Google told us earlier this year that Panda is now part of its core ranking algorithm.

SEO Advice for Businesses Facing Google Penalties

A Google manual action notice is usually terrible news for business owners. A penalized site drops in the search engine rankings, losing untold revenue from website traffic that’s no longer coming from search.

If this happens, site owners may not understand how to recover. Sometimes the issues are straightforward and, after a bit of housecleaning, the site owner can submit a Reconsideration Request to Google and be restored to good standing.

However, many sites have long-standing issues or layered penalties that require more expertise. We’ve had a number of clients come to us after struggling for a year or more to fix their own sites without regaining much ground in the SERPs. (If that’s your situation, read about our SEO penalty assessment service and let’s talk.)

But can a notification by the manual actions team be GOOD NEWS? It can be if it alerts you to a problem.

If you receive a manual action message, stay calm. It might be a penalty, but it might just be a warning. When you read the notification, here’s what you’re going to want to understand ASAP:

• What problem caused the manual action?
• What will it mean for my site (i.e., in terms of ranking and revenue)?
• How can I fix the problem as fast as possible?

Recognizing a Hacked Site

If your website is hacked, Google’s manual actions team may be the first to notice it. Google’s webspam fighters have gotten pretty good at identifying when a site is the victim of hacking, rather than purposely trying to spam through deceptive SEO conduct. And that’s great news for webmasters.

Juan Felipe Rincon, a lead of Google’s Webmaster Outreach team, spoke on manual actions at SMX West. He explained: “Content that wasn’t put there by the legitimate site owner and website hacks account for 45 percent of manual actions.” Forty-five percent of 4.3 million manual action notices represents a HUGE number of sites victimized by hacked content.

SEO tip: If your site has been hacked and you get the news directly from Google, be thankful. It’s a diagnosis you need to hear so you can work on curing the problem. For all webmasters, Google’s recommended preventative measures can help you protect your content and keep your site safe from hackers.

Solving for Thin Content

Sites scraping content from other sites to fill their own pages is apparently happening more and more.

This is a bad practice from an ethical perspective (because it’s stealing) and also from a business perspective. The search engines can identify where content comes from, including its original source, because they know the date and location they first discovered that content. So the reward just isn’t there for the crime of scraping! But since I’m pretty sure scrapers are not reading the Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog, I’ll end my rant. ;-)

There are plenty of other reasons, besides outright scraping, that your site might appear to have “thin, low-quality content” to a search engine. Some of the most common scenarios are:

• Boilerplate pages by location
• Filtered ecommerce pages (such as category pages)
• Product pages (which often reuse manufacturer-canned descriptions)
• “Me too” SEO posts (just repeating what others have said with no added value)

If you have received this type of Google manual action, here’s SEO advice for what you can do about thin content.

The Good News about Ethical SEO Conduct

There’s light on the horizon of this whole Google penalties/manual actions world. A lot of light, actually, especially for people practicing SEO ethics.

1. Many webmasters have cleaned up spam on their sites. There were 33 percent more sites last year that went through Google’s reconsideration process successfully, compared to the previous year.

2. Google is getting better and better at the referee business, identifying improper SEO conduct and rewarding sites that behave right. Not only are the algorithms constantly learning and improving their spam-detecting skills, but also the people in the manual actions team are go-getters. In fact:

Google’s webspam team acted on 65 percent of the more than 400,000 spam reports that users submitted globally last year, and considered 80 percent of those to be spam.

3. Spam doesn’t pay. A business hurts itself if it stoops to scraping or other manipulative tactics to influence the search results. The web is a much fairer playing field for ethical SEOs and site owners who focus on creating quality sites with high-value content.

A Story of SEO Redemption

Have you seen a drop in traffic to your website over the last several years? If you have been wondering why, know that if it’s due to a penalty, you’re not alone. Here’s the story of one client we helped recover from the depressed traffic of a penalty.

A niche ecommerce company named Groomsmen.com suffered Penguin penalties that all but wiped out their organic traffic from Google. Trying to recover on their own, they cleaned up their SEO conduct as best as they could and ended their paid links program. However, for two years their rankings did not improve.

On a friend’s recommendation, they came to BCI for help. We gave them a hyper-focused, three-month SEO project that combined our Penalty Assessment and Link Pruning services. During the six months following our project period end date, the site’s organic traffic from Google grew five-fold compared to the previous year, yielding a 513 percent increase in ecommerce revenue from search.

Competition is fierce among organic search results. But compromising on ethics is a sure road to disaster!

Want an experienced, ethical SEO agency to grow your website’s revenue-driving potential? Reach out using our form or call us today.

The post Google’s Report on SEO Conduct & Webspam: Ethical SEO Help for Businesses appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

“Please share a post about how to classify good and bad quality links.”
–blog commenter Mike Jone, July 25, 2015

Backlink analysis is a much-needed skill today. Our SEO analysts spend hours analyzing backlinks for clients — whether they come to us specifically for help removing a Google penalty or not.

Let’s dive into the details of effective SEO link building and analysis. Here’s a handy Backlink Evaluation Flowchart you can refer to when doing backlink analysis and cleanup. (Click to open it full size.)

Share this infographic on your site

<p><strong>Please include attribution to Bruceclay.com with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p><a href=’http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/backlink-analysis/’><img src=’http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Backlink-Evaluation-Flowchart-452×1024.png’ alt=’Backlink Evaluation Flowchart’ width=’600px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <p>

Overview of the Backlink Eval Process

These days, all webmasters need to keep an eye on their backlink profiles to identify good links to count as wins and bad ones to target for link pruning. Here we’ve outlined our internal process for analyzing SEO client backlinks to judge which links to keep and which to get rid of.

1. Understand your goal. Approach backlink cleanup differently when working to remove a penalty vs. performing regular backlink maintenance.
2. Create your master list. A spreadsheet is your tool for keeping track of your research and backlink analysis activities.
3. Check your site’s backlinks against any previously submitted disavow files. If you’re inheriting a website that has had search engine optimization management, you may find that a Google disavow file has been submitted. It’s always a good idea to confirm that the previously created disavow file was accurate and did not prune links unnecessarily. Once you’ve confirmed that the disavowed links are low quality, you can continue to include them on future disavow files.
4. Score backlinks (keep, request removal, disavow) with tools. Tools including DisavowFiles, Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz can indicate quality of backlinks.
5. Visit the pages linking to your site. While you can get some idea of backlink quality with tools, nothing can evaluate topical relevance and overall appropriateness like a human visitor.
6. Choose to keep, request removal or nofollow, or disavow each link. Then take action.

At the end of the article you’ll find additional backlink cleanup resources:

• Criteria for judging backlink quality
• How to nofollow links

Backlink Analysis

Analyzing backlinks is a messy and time-consuming business. When we perform SEO penalty assessments and link pruning services for our clients, the most tedious part is manually evaluating the individual backlinks. It’s like sorting laundry, or weeding a lawn, or separating trash into recyclables and, well, garbage. But all of these tasks must be done.

Have the Right Attitude for Your Goal

Keep in mind that backlinks are necessary and good to help a website rank. Don’t go waving your machete around too wildly or you might hurt your website more than help it. Still, as Bruce Clay says, every site has its weakest link — and depending on the site, you may have a lot of spammy links that need removing.

Have a penalty? If your site has been penalized for unnatural links, then you should be harsher in your backlink analysis. Your site is already bleeding traffic and revenue. Find the bad links and cut them off! Websites not in a penalty situation can be more lenient in their backlink analysis. Adjust how strict you are in your attitude towards backlink cleanup based on your site’s situation.

Create a Spreadsheet to Track Your Findings and Decisions

Backlink analysis is a process that has many steps that may not be happening linearly or along the same timeline. Every one of your thousands of backlinks could be in a different stage of the process. Use a master list to combine the data from several different sources in whatever spreadsheet program you’re using (Excel or Google Sheets). Basically, you want to take the different spreadsheets you created doing the various downloads and combine them into one.

We recommend downloading your backlinks in bulk from Google Search Console and at least one of these additional sources:

• Bing Webmaster Tools (free)
• SEOToolSet Link Analysis (free, limited)
• SEOToolSet Pro Link Reports (fee-based)
• Majestic Site Explorer (fee-based)
• Moz’s Open Site Explorer (fee-based)
• Ahrefs Site Explorer (fee-based)

In your spreadsheet, use the linking URL as your key identifier in one column, the root domain in an adjacent one, and get the various other data fields lining up. Merge and delete your duplicates to create a workable list of backlinks.

Your spreadsheet may have hundreds or thousands of web pages that link to yours. Here’s an example of how you might set up the combined list, with columns for Source, URL, Root Domain, Action, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Nofollowed, Not Found, Notes, and Whois.

Check for Disavowed Links First

Save yourself some work and find out right away whether the website has ever submitted a disavow file to Google, which is the list of links a website asks the search engine to ignore. Get a copy of the most recent disavow file that was submitted (because each new disavow file submitted to the search engine supersedes any previously submitted versions for that site).

If either the specific URL or the domain of the linking site (which is the main site name, such as badsite.com) have been disavowed, consider the link disavowed also. The good news is that, once you are satisfied with the disavow file’s accuracy, you won’t need to do any more backlink analysis on those links! You’ve already asked the search engine to ignore them, so you can, too.

Find Out More about the Linking Sites

With the remaining (non-disavowed) backlinks, you need a way to tell the good from the bad. Can you tell just by looking at the URL? With practice, sometimes you may be able to. But usually, you’ll need some extra information in order to evaluate them.

The tools below provide quick intel for backlink analysis. They can help you judge the quality of websites linking to yours. Which ones you choose depends on your budget, time and tool preferences.

• Majestic: Trust Flow and Citation Flow
  Majestic’s metrics top our list because our SEO analysts think this tool gives the most accurate, up-to-date link information available. In fact, we integrate our SEOToolSet Pro software with link data pulled from Majestic to provide link reports for subscribers. So if you gathered your original backlinks list using either your own Majestic account or an SEOToolSet Pro Link Report, then your spreadsheet should already contain columns for Trust and Citation Flow. Briefly … Citation Flow is a number from 0 to 100 that shows how much link juice the site has (based on how many sites link to it). So this number roughly shows how influential a backlink from this site may be, whether for better or worse. Trust Flow (also 0 to 100) shows how trustworthy the site is based on how close those links are to authoritative, trustworthy sources. In other words, this number shows whether a backlink from this site could be helpful or not.
• Moz: Page Authority and Domain Authority
  Moz’s Open Site Explorer product shows you scores (on a 100-point scale) estimating the authority of a specific web page and of the site as a whole.
• Ahrefs: URL Rating and Domain Rating
  Ahrefs’ proprietary scoring system can help you judge backlink quality. Ranking scores attempt to measure the authority of a URL (page) and its domain based on backlinks, similar to Google’s PageRank.
• DisavowFiles.com (a free service of Bruce Clay, Inc.)
  DisavowFiles compares your backlink profile (pulled from Majestic) against disavow files others have submitted into a crowdsourced database, telling you how many times a particular linking site has been disavowed by others in the database. Knowing which of your backlinks have been disavowed by others can help you easily identify sites you might want to disavow, too. There’s no stronger red flag for backlink cleanup than knowledge that a site is a frequently disavowed suspect.

Visit the Linking Sites

Once you’ve combined download sources, merged duplicates, removed already-disavowed links, and added trust metrics and intel, it’s time to review your master list. Now’s when you roll up your pant legs and prepare to wade through a little mud.

Just kidding. (Not really.)

Unfortunately, there’s no substitute for going to look at most backlinks manually to determine whether they are OK to keep. Since you may be working with thousands of backlinks, prioritize the work so you find the worst offenders first. You may not have to wade far before you’ve discovered and removed the links that are hurting your site the worst.

To prioritize your backlink analysis, sort your spreadsheet by the metric you feel shows trustworthiness the most clearly. For example, you could sort by Trust Flow (with Citation Flow and Root Domain as second and third sort levels). Invert the order if necessary (by clicking on a column heading) so that the lowest trust metrics appear at the top.

Make Decisions and Take Action

Create columns for where to put the results of your research. In the spreadsheet example we showed above, there were columns for Action and Notes. Use these to mark whatever you find out and what you decide to do, if anything, with each link.

There are several possible backlink cleanup decisions you can make from your backlink analysis.

• Ignore (keep the link)
  
• Request that the site remove or nofollow your link
• Request that the site change the anchor text of your link
• Disavow the linking page or domain

What Makes a “Good” vs. “Bad” Backlink

Unless the site engaged in illicit link-buying in the past and accumulated a slew of spammy links, most links are probably beneficial or at least neutral in their impact. You should be able to ignore the majority of backlinks in your spreadsheet for most non-penalized sites.

Good backlinks come from a trustworthy site, not a spam site. So look at those trust metrics you gathered. For example, a Trust Flow of zero could mean the site is new and hasn’t gotten any link love yet — but it also could indicate a problem. Watch out especially for a site with low Trust Flow and high Citation Flow — that means it’s getting a lot of link juice from all the sites linking to it, but they may all be spam! A link from that type of site could be poison.

Good backlinks come from web pages that are relevant to your page’s topic, as well. One or two links to your auto insurance site coming from a local dog groomer might be innocuous. But beware of patterns of unnatural linking. If every dog groomer in the state is linking to your auto insurance page, it could cause an eyebrow raise or even a penalty from Penguin.

Similarly, beware of global links to your site. For instance, if every page on a site has a followed link to your auto insurance quote page, that looks really suspicious to the search engines. If you see hundreds of links all coming from a single root domain, you should look to see what’s going on there.

Nofollowed Links Are Okay

Besides ignoring the good links you find, you can also ignore links that are nofollowed. Google won’t tell you which ones are and aren’t followed links to your site, meaning that they pass link value (for better or for worse). So it’s up to you to know how to tell the difference.

Look at the HTML source code of a page. If either of these are true, then the link is harmless to your site:

• The attribute rel=”nofollow” is contained in the link tag itself.
• The head section of the linking page has a meta robots nofollow tag.

Ongoing Link Maintenance

The first time you download links and go through them takes the most time. Once you have that initial work done and submit a disavow file with the stubborn links to Google, it takes a lot less time to do the ongoing maintenance of your link profile. Use our flowchart — feel free to print a copy for your wall — and make backlink analysis part of your regular (monthly or quarterly) SEO procedures.

The post Backlink Analysis: How to Judge Good Links from Bad appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

So, when an Penguin 3.0 update was announced by Search Engine Land on October 19, significant SERP rank fluctuation was expected. Instead, what we’ve seen in the six days since the update can only be described as overwhelmingly underwhelming.

Penguin 3.0: What We’ve Seen In the First 6 Days

• In a post on Google+, Google UK Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far confirmed that the “update” (referred to as a “refresh” twice in the body of the post) started rolling out on Friday, October 17. Wording the change as a “refresh” in the body text gives us the impression that the event we’re witnessing this week is a minor algorithm reiteration more comparable to the quiet release of Penguin 2.1 than the massive release of Penguin 2.0.

• The Mozcast barometer which monitors fluctuation in Google’s rankings and reports volatile conditions as hot, stormy weather, showed a temperature well over 100 degrees when Penguin 2.0 was launched in October 2013. Currently the Mozcast is showing a comfortable 71 degrees at the time of this posting, and an actual decrease in instability between Friday, October 17 (when the update was announced), and Saturday, October 18.

• At this point the analysis we’re seeing from our SEOToolSet ranking tool aligns completely with the comfortable, stable Mozcast forecast: we’re seeing very little SERP fluctuation – for better or worse. In general, we have seen neither significant penalty removal or penalty increases. It was thought that sites would show marked recovery for repenting this last year while those continuing their spammy ways would see increases in ranking drops. We have seen neither.

Speculations: Why Release an Update That’s Not Really an Update?

With so much anticipation leading up to the long overdue (in our opinion) release of Penguin 3.0, we can’t help but wonder: after a year, why would Google release a Penguin “update” that is so insignificantly affecting so many?

Here are four speculations we’ve cooked up in our internal discussions:

• One theory is that the public was getting antsy and Google took this recent action to appease a vocal industry. In this scenario we posit that Google, overwhelmed with millions of disavow requests, has yet to figure out a meaningful way to use the abundance of disavow data. If the elongated lapse in time between 2.0 and 3.0 updates is the driving catalyst for the update we’re seeing this week, then this week’s update may reflect the best they could do to throw us a bone, so to speak.

• Another speculation shifts the blame toward the upcoming holiday season; reasonably, Google doesn’t want to create mass instability in the SERPs right before Black Friday ushers in the biggest online shopping season of the year. In this case, a bigger shakeup could be coming with a Penguin 3.1 update roll out just after the holiday season.

• A third speculation takes Google at its word that the update is still rolling out, and the U.S. market will see a bigger impact in the days to come. In the above-mentioned Google+ announcement, Pierre Far says, “It’s a slow worldwide rollout, so you may notice it settling down over the next few weeks” (emphasis ours). Jennifer Slegg reports that the Penguin 3.0 update was rolled out on international Google sites Google.co.uk, Google.de and Google.fr,before roll out on U.S. sites. In other words, there still could be a tiny glimmer of hope that Penguin 3.0 is in fact still rolling out, and will begin to affect U.S. sites with more gusto in coming weeks.

• The fourth and most pessimistic speculation suggests that this update-slash-refresh may actually be a sign of things to come; what if Google aims to make cheaters pay for their crimes with an unforgettable punishment, as Bruce Clay, Inc. Senior SEO Analyst Robert Ramirez proposed speculatively in an article last month, Does Google Have a Responsibility to Refresh Its Penguin Algorithm? What if this update is a sign that penalties for black hat marketing techniques may be in the initial phase of an exponential increase, evolving into website death sentences with no hope for the penalized to ever fully recover?

What Now? We Wait and See

With a substantial lack of data to show Penguin 3.0 significantly impacting the SERP space, or an at all, really, we can only continue to wait and speculate among ourselves.

If above-mentioned speculations one, two, or three are true (or near truth), the seismic Penguin update we’ve been holding our collective breath for could still, very well, be on the horizon. This means hope could still be in the cards for former corner-cutters who have been working hard to prune their backlink profiles and waiting patiently for the Penguin update that would result in penalty resolution.

If the more dramatic fourth speculation is closer to true, we’re in for a real game change. In the Search Traffic portion of their Webmaster Tools Help, Google goes to great lengths to teach webmasters how to disavow unnatural links and correct manual link penalties. We like to believe all this training and effort means something and that Google really does want what’s best for your site, and for the greater good. For that reason, we choose not to put too much weight on the Penguin-3.0-as-eternal-death-sentence speculation.

But, still, it all boils down to waiting and seeing.

The bottom line is that something has to give sooner than later.

We’ve been waiting over a year to see Google refresh the algorithmic elements that manage the analysis and judgment of backlink profiles so that reformers can see rank recovery. What we saw this week just wasn’t that update.

Here’s to hoping that update is coming our way…soon.

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