SEO Spam & Disavow
Google works perfectly now right? After the menagerie of black & white animal updates over the last two years, Google has now got it right, right? Even some long time SEOs are quitting the game because they say Google’s algorithm is working so well there is no longer a need for their services. What a load of twaddlebosh and poppycock. Google is broken, in some cases worse that is was before and we need to help fix it.
3 SEO Spam Examples
1. Asbestos Removals in Sydney
If you do a search for “asbestos removals” in Sydney you will find there is a result in the top 3 that essentially only has one page. It actually has two but the other one is a “hello world” page.
How can that be? With all the Google Panda changes this site should be nowhere in the top 50 for that result. It offers practically nothing for the user and has no content! Back in October I flagged results like this but it seems to be getting worse. So far I have seen this happen in at least 3 search categories but I am sure there are many more. I’m not going to name the sites publicly that are benefiting from what can only be described as a Google flaw but you’ll be able to find them yourself easily enough. For the above search the top result is a Government website. One of the top 3 results is essentially a single page website with only 197 words on the page. This low word account alone should be enough to exclude the page from this search result if I believe all the Panda analysis I’ve read.
There are only two things that could possibly get this page ranking, an Exact Match Domain and backlinks. A quick check of the backlinks revealed the truth pretty quickly.
This site has nearly double the backlinks than it has words! That is insane. We’re meant to believe Google Penguin is working? Really Matt Cutts? WTF? One of the backlinks is coming from a raffle ticket printing page. Obvious high relevance – not! Another is coming from a virtual ghost town of a site in NZ. These are not “good” backlinks.
SEO in Melbourne
Up until recently and I’m talking maybe in the last week, one of the top three results for SEO, when searched from Melbourne was a site with only 5 pages and plenty of backlinks. It seems that site has now disappeared. However there are plenty of other examples. If you have been following the blog for a while you know I have lamented about the spam around the phrase “SEO Melbourne” . It’s as bad as ever today. Once again I’m not going to name names and this isn’t sour grapes. I’m simply pointing out that despite what Google is saying spammers are still being rewarded. There is a site that has lots of spammy backlinks form crappy “blog” posts. Here is an example written in September this year.
The site that has published that piece of nonsense is owned by a company based in Pakistan. Now I’ve worked in Pakistan and met some wonderful people there but it wouldn’t be my first choice for content writing.
A quick examination of the company that owns the above site shows that they are a “full service” agency, offering guaranteed SEO services. Well it seems to be working for one Melbourne SEO company. That is just a single example but they have lots of other examples of similar quality backlinks. So if you’re drinking the Google koolade you may want to put down the glass for a second. Backlink spam combined with EMD is alive and well.
3. Limo Hire Melbourne
Once again the same deal. A partial match domain with only 5 pages is in the top 3. I won’t bore you with the details but basically buggerall content and a lot more backlinks.
Disavow Now
Today’s video is all about why you should be using the disavow tool. You may have thought it was only there for sites that have had manual penalties or been engaging in lots of backlink spam. Not the case. Matt Cutts says that if you suspect you are the target of negative SEO backlink techniques you should also use it. He goes on to say you should use it before someone reports you for backlink spam….. which is what I am certainly going to do today with the SEO Melbourne result above. After the last round of hummingbird and ironically Penguin, they came from no where. Matt Cutts has challenged SEOs to show him the spam . Well I’ve already reported one of those sites above and now I’m reporting the Melbourne SEO one. I did report the other SEO one back in September that only had 5 pages and it has now gone. If you can see that a site is high because of backlinks and not much else you can use the Penguin Spam Reporting Doc. If you want to report a site selling links or other types of spam there is a list of resources here.
Backlinks EMD or Both?
What do you think? Is exact match domain really strong again? Does Google need to do another update on it? Or is it that some forms of spammy back linking are still working. I am told by new clients that the other SEO companies they are contacting are still doing back linking. They are buying links still but just being more careful. Do you have any examples to share? If you could tweet this to Matt Cutts as well that would be cool. I want Google to work as advertised and at the moment it is not, not in Australia anyway. Matt Cutts on twitter @mattcutts
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
