It turns out that acting natural is really hard. Even the best efforts often fall short, as this particularly damaging link spam network did. This network had bothered me for 2 years because it included a directory of the top million sites, so if you luxembourg number data were one of those sites, you could see anywhere from 200 to 600 followed links in your backlink profile.
I called it “The Globe” network. It was easy to look at the network and see what they were doing, but could we spot it automatically so that we could value other networks like it in the future? A profiles of the sites included in the network, the spam score distribution lit up like a Christmas tree.
Spreadsheet with spam score distribution
Most sites get the majority of their backlinks from low spam score domains, and the domains’ spam score decreases as they increase. But this wayback machine is an interesting feature that offers a link network couldn’t hide because we were able to detect sites in their network that had quality issues using spam score. If we had relied solely on ignoring bad spam score links, we would never have discovered the problem. Instead, we got a great ranking for finding sites that were likely to be penalized by Google for poor link building practices.
DA distribution and link spam
We can find similar patterns among sites with the distribution of inbound domain authority. It is common for businesses looking to fans data increase their rankings to set minimum quality standards for their outreach campaigns, often DA30 and above. An unfortunate result of this is that what is left are clear examples of sites with manipulated link profiles.
Let me take a moment and be clear here
A manipulated link profile is not necessarily against Google’s guidelines. If you do targeted PR outreach, it’s reasonable to expect that such distribution can occur without any attempt to manipulate the graph. However, the real question is whether Google wants sites that have such reach to perform better. If not, then this blatant example of link manipulation is too easy for Google to ignore, if not ignore altogether.
Spreadsheet with domain authority distribution
A typical link graph for a site that is not targeting high link equity domains will have most of its links from DA0–10 sites, a few fewer for DA10–20, and so on until there are almost no links from DA90+. This makes sense, as there are far more low DA sites on the web than high ones. But all of the above sites have an uneven link distribution, which makes it easier to detect and correct link value – at scale. When we looked at the link
Now, I want to be clear:
These are not necessarily examples of violations of Google’s guidelines. However, they are examples of link graph manipulation. It’s up to you to determine whether you believe Google takes the time to distinguish between how outreach was done that resulted in unusual link distribution.
Which doesn’t work. When we looked at the link
For every type of link manipulation detection method we discover, we scrape dozens more. Some of them are actually quite surprising. Let me write about just one of many.