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