Not all links are equal. It’s something we’ve known for years now but as Google confirms the importance of links in its algorithm, it’s something to bear in mind now more than ever.
1. Cross site filter
1000 links from 1 page is not the same as 1000 links from 1000 pages. If you get linked to regularly, it’s better.
2. Outgoing links
Outgoing links have been shown to have an impact on your website’s rankings, thanks to a report from Reboot.
However, Google is also watching our outgoing links, as evidenced by the recent penalties against websites with unnatural outgoing links.
Link Detox is an upcoming Chrome plugin to help you review your links.
3. Scraper links
Scraper links are not ignored automatically. This is because Google gave us the disavow tool years ago and wants us to take control of sorting this out.
Always disavow proactively to protect yourself against poor quality scraper links.
4. Disavow file upload is not enough
Those links must be crawled so that the disavow command works.
If the links comes from sites which are not being indexed because they’ve already been penalised, the disavow file can take ages to work, if at all. Google recognises this and stated in its report that it can take weeks to process the disavow request.
5. Old links matter if you keep them
If you look at case study of ranking without links, it’s actually about not ranking because of missed links. You can do better when you have strong links, so you should ensure you retain links when you’re moving to a new website or having a restructure.
In negative SEO, your competitors can ask for link removal for your links, having a terrible impact on your business – make sure you own [yourcompanyname]@hotmail/gmail etc so that your competitors can’t take those names and use them to request link removal.
6. Redirects pass penalties
If you had domains in the past which you redirected to your current site, you need to be aware that you could be hit by penalties meant for those sites. This means cleaning up all your old domains as standard.
7. Page rank is dead
Page rank is dead. We need to let it go. Google sees this as a problem and has stopped providing pagerank data now completely, so any page rank data you see today is fake or old.
Instead, consider Power vs Trust to identify which links are worth having.
