Rick Lomas on February 2019's Wave of Unnatural Links Penalties

Key Takeaways

[Music] hey everybody how's it going so this is Matt digity here and I have Rick Lis on too so a couple days ago actually maybe about 24 hours ago people started getting reports of a bunch of manual review penalties in the form of unnatural links penalties so uh I work with Rick and we we very commonly look at and help people with manual review issues and uh we've seen quite a few issues come up I I think in the Facebook groups I've seen at least 10 people report natural links penalties Rick is currently looking at a handful and I brought Rick on just to kind of share with us what he's finding about them what are the commonalities and what he sees are the patterns uh before we jump into this we kind of have a bad connection right now so in case like it gets choppy or Rick can't understand me bear with us because I'm gonna have to repeat myself but we'll get through this together all right Rick thanks thanks a bunch um I'll hand it over to you like with this latest wave of a natural links penalties what are the things you see in common um as as ever what I'm seeing is uh overdone anchor text in the links uh and once again I'm seeing you know all the kind of best whatever or top 10 whatever that them them kind of links just really too heavy in the link profile um sites that seem unaffected tend to have you know mostly kind of brand anchor text you know with the with the actual domain name or the raw URLs that kind of anchor text and not so many money anch Texs um in the few I've looked at in the last 24 to 48 hours um what I am seeing is quite a lot of uh links that are old school comment span um now a lot of this is blog spot which as you know will be a no follow link um so I think good this time are you know if if the intent to spam is there uh and it's a load of no follow links they're actually looking at no follow links and thinking well that guy's violating our our guidelines so he deserves a manual penalty so uh I don't think no follow links are safe as what we say they are so that's that's really interesting so these guys that you're seeing with the blog spot spam they're not building them themselves it looks like right it looks like negative SEO um possibly but quite a lot of it is is is like really old you know it's from like 2015 so I don't think it's anything people have necessarily done excuse me I don't think there anything people have done like really recently that might cause a problem it might be like old comment span from 2015 um you know that all of a sudden Google are saying well he's violating our guidelines now whether that is triggered by you know like a bunch of new gbn links uh I'm not entirely sure but I suspect so um negative SEO I don't think I don't think that's particularly the case I think it's old school SEO come fight you in the ass really in in a lot of cases and and going back to Anchor Tex ratios when you're saying like you're seeing a lot of Target anchor text the best key best blank best this best that like what kind of ratios are you talking about where that seems like to be too much like do you are you saying 40% 30% like what is a lot in the cases that you're seeing um the sites that are p realized it's uh I'm actually seeing more than kind of 50% money uh compared to the brand titanas um so but you know they're obviously quite severe cases um but um I've never seen anything where you you've got you know kind of 80% brand and 20% money with a manual penalty it's normally the other way around um and by then it's too late um so it depends on the niche but I think you probably can get away with probably up to 20% before you start seeing problems and certainly no% I think you're going to be looking at manual penalty sooner or later and folks when we're talking about 20% or more we're talking about on a perur basis you can't send a billion uh branded anchors to your homepage and expect that to apply to an in page it's on a per page basis um another thing I wanted yeah do you want to CH in um yeah I mean the whole point is it's it's got to look natural uh what I have seen there's a lot of people where they do these uh like press release blasts thinking that's that's going to you know fix the anchor Tex ratio and I don't think it does did you know what I mean all those kind of press releas you know so you got a dentist in London and he's got article on you know the Kansas City news or something you know I think those LS get ignored by Google so I you know that isn't going to fix your anex it's really got to lot natural to avoid these kind of penalties really right right another thing uh we were chatting before the call and another thing you were pointed out is you're saying like there is a decent chunk of these guys that have uh manual penalties right now that are using pbns do you think it was the the pbn that got him into trouble or do you think it was the anchor text that they were using right um I I think what happens here and this is purely because P pbn's work as we know you know they work and you know you will rank well with pbns but if people kind of get greedy with those you know money heavy anchor text I think at that point um there must be something in the Google algorithm that will then trigger uh something or raise a flag for a manual reviewer to have a look at it now I think at that point the manual reviewer will come along see a few pbn links and I mean you know I can I can spot PBM links a mile away so you know a Google Reviewer is just going to well think well that CL just using a bunch of u a bunch of pbn links and uh and so so I think they're not problematic until you get caught and you get caught by being greedy trying to push all those money heavy anets I think that's kind of where they fit in but I I don't I don't I don't think they're necessarily problematic because otherwise they would just regard disregard the link and ebns would have no power so you know uh I I think it's more to do with the actual as you say that the kind of the anex ratios being wrong and then triggering a problem and at that point uh pbn's become a problem because they're kind of exposed and you reviewer can see them that's the case that's interesting yeah when I was running digity links now now operating as rank club we every from time to time there would be a huge chunk of D indexes and that always coincided with a wave of manual reviews and we would see notifications com up and we would see okay we just lost 30 pbns okay what are these 30 P pbn pointing to okay they're all pointing to the same guy of what was he doing is he's over optimized he's using scholarship link building he's doing sape on tier two there's always something so I feel like I feel like pbn standards at a certain point are to the point where they they won't trigger a penalty themselves but if you get caught in a manual review by doing something else that's silly you got pbn's pointing to you you're not going to pass that manual review I see the exact same thing how about um like the interesting thing last time we did one of these Rick is like especially I think it was in late 2017 is we saw a whole bunch of manual reviews that were targeting supposedly white hat stuff like like the scholarship link building do you see any of that going on right now yeah I I must admit the ones I've looked at in the last uh 48 hours they have had scholarship links um so I think that is probably still a problem uh almost definitely actually um I have seen scholarship links yeah um other white hat um probably trying to avoid that old school technique of like having one link to your to your money site and then one link to Wikipedia I think that just looks really obvious that's 2014 SEO but you know kind of having articles are actually that are actually worth reading uh and not there just for the link um oh um poor English um you know that kind of uh not exactly spun but things that just ramble on about nothing uh I'm seeing that quite a bit as fing guest post so poor quality guest post um I mean I I can always tell if I I mean some issues are quite interesting like you start thinking is this link any good and you actually if I find myself actually reading the blog I think that's quite interesting well that's got some value for me you know if it's just rambling on about you know people buy microwave ovens because they like to heat food before they eat it you know that kind of just nonsense you know so uh definitely improve the quality of your articles as well if you do have your own pbns and you know don't mix it up with all all those kind of like heavy duty niches you know yeah um you know makes sense be careful makes complete sense anything um anything else to add before we wrap it up um not just at the moment but uh I probably probably will have more to say about things in the next well after the weekend because I've got quite a few jobs to do over weekend and uh I think I'll I'll probably know more then uh but I would say that um overall comment spam isn't worth it um and just you know try and try and keep everything look looking as natural as possible uh because if things look unnatural it looks like you're spamming and violating Google guidelines and they're just getting better they're getting better and better at spotting all these kind of like you know pbns and sponsorship links and sorry scholarship links and that kind of thing so just be careful yeah awesome good advice and if anyone has a penalty just go ahead and reach out to Rick Lis gmail.com he can help you fix it up he's great to work with 100% success rate um he's helped me out before too so again thanks a bunch for your contribution Rick that's very nice of you I like your unicorn um drawing on the back I wonder if beautiful absolutely beautiful all right take care we'll talk soon brother okay byebye [Music]