The Collateral Damage of Google’s Link Policy

Monday, June 8th, 2015 at 4:04 pm

Google’s “com­pany phi­los­o­phy” states “Google search works because it relies on the mil­lions of indi­vid­u­als post­ing links on web­sites to help deter­mine which other sites offer con­tent of value.” Over the last two years Google has rolled out a series of algo­rithm updates and pub­lic rela­tions tac­tics that have lead the SEO indus­try to ques­tion this fun­da­men­tal premise. Are links good or bad? What is the real dif­fer­ence between build­ing and earn­ing links? Has Google bro­ken the Internet?

A Brief His­tory of Linking

Before the Inter­net, writ­ers would cite their sources in foot­notes or a bib­li­og­ra­phy. The web allowed peo­ple to give a direct link to those sources for more infor­ma­tion on a topic. Google started using links as an indi­ca­tor that a site was a good one and moved that web­site to a place where more peo­ple would find it: Page one of the search results. Fig­ur­ing out ways to cre­ate back­links became a new indus­try. Some pur­posely man­u­fac­tured links made for Google search results that weren’t nec­es­sar­ily the best results. That’s when every­thing went hay­wire.
Fear?

Some­times

Brett Bastello of Inseev Inter­ac­tive received this mes­sage from a reporter who quoted him in an arti­cle: “Per our com­pany guide­lines, all the out­siders links are nofol­low links.” Bastello assumes this has to do with fear of a Google penalty and says, “unfor­tu­nately this think­ing couldn’t be fur­ther from the truth and the amount of mis­in­for­ma­tion cir­cu­lat­ing around this topic is astound­ing. Just as Wikipedia ref­er­ences out­side web­sites, Google likes to see blogs and web­sites ref­er­enc­ing other qual­i­fied and author­i­ta­tive web­sites on sim­i­lar top­ics. The rea­son the links on Wikipedia are nofol­lowed is because it is User Gen­er­ated Con­tent with a high pos­si­bil­ity of abuse, how­ever, as an edi­tor of a web­site you have 100% of the con­tent con­trol, and thus, this elim­i­nates vir­tu­ally any pos­si­bil­ity of abuse, there­fore, these sites should be dofol­low­ing the links.”

Agreed.

But, read Rand Fishkin’s blog post about an unwar­ranted Google penalty. No won­der peo­ple are afraid!
Hold­ing onto the Link Juice Simon Ensor of Yel­low­ball, believes that “some web­sites have a pol­icy of not link­ing out to web­sites, usu­ally due to a fairly archaic rule of attempt­ing to con­serve their PageR­ank (or ‘link juice’). This ‘rule’ is highly con­tested nowa­days with co-occurrence and co-citation being pre­ferred by the major­ity of the SEO world, how­ever web­sites are usu­ally slower to change poli­cies than SEOs. In my expe­ri­ence it is often the case that the per­son man­ag­ing it is either adher­ing to poli­cies set years ago or has heard about con­tain­ing PageR­ank and is cling­ing to it as a valu­able source of SEO knowledge!” From Josh Rubin of Cre­ative Cal­i­for­nia: “For some rea­son, the con­cept of link juice bleed­ing started to get some­what pop­u­lar when Page Rank was in the heights of its usage. A web­mas­ter who has his ear to SEO a lit­tle bit might have heard that you can bleed link juice by hav­ing out­go­ing links, and doesn’t want to lose the value of the page. It’s wrong, but that’s the thought.” John Holtkamp of Aper­ture Inter­ac­tive has heard ref­er­ences to Link Juice when he’s been denied a link, he said: “The basic idea is that sites gain juice by get­ting linked to, and they give away juice by link­ing to other sites. I know it sounds silly, but it is real.” And Bill Elward of Cas­tle Ink Car­tridges says: “The issue is a mis­un­der­stand­ing around SEO. Too many peo­ple still think that link­ing out to third par­ties squan­ders PageR­ank. In real­ity Google likes to see exter­nal links when they aren’t con­trived and enhance the user experience.” Allen Wal­ton of SpyGuy Secu­rity was inter­viewed for a story about entre­pre­neur­ship and pro­vided a lot of valu­able infor­ma­tion. He said: “It was a great arti­cle, but they didn’t link to me. So I asked why. They told me, ‘Sorry, we don’t know any­thing about your com­pany and can’t endorse it.’ Even though I gave them all sorts of info and advice they posted on their own web­site! Crazy link-juice hogs.”

Don’t Push Your Luck

Many sites accept guest posts and cer­tainly, authors who write a piece of con­tent that is wor­thy of being pub­lished on the site deserve to get a link for their efforts. But James Rice of Wik­i­Job says, “by ask­ing for spe­cific anchor text in the link you are ask­ing for a less nat­ural link, and the site owner may (jus­ti­fi­ably) start to worry about a poten­tial search engine penalty. Don’t go down this route. Just request the link itself and leave it up to them to link as they choose.” That sounds rea­son­able. But too many sites stick with the “brand link in the bio” pol­icy and won’t give a link in the con­tent itself, even when the link leads to crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion for the reader.

But, That’s Where I Found It

Mike Juba of EZSolution.com can point to mul­ti­ple occa­sions where peo­ple post his info­graph­ics with­out a source link. “Some­times, they link to visual.ly where they found it, and I ask to link to the orig­i­nal source and they refuse because they claim since they found it on visual.ly they use them as the source,” he com­mented.
In Decem­ber, my agency posted data from a sur­vey of dig­i­tal mar­keters. Numer­ous web­sites ref­er­enced the data; some linked to it, some didn’t. One writer linked to a press release about the sur­vey, most likely because that’s where she found it. Upon reach­ing out to the writer and request­ing a link to the actual sur­vey data, the writer redi­rected the link. Link­ing to the real source would cer­tainly be more use­ful for the reader. But was ask­ing for the link unnat­ural or manip­u­la­tive?

Cameron Gra­ham of TechnologyAdvice.com asserts that: “Rep­utable sites almost never have an issue with link­ing to con­tent that they cite. Occa­sion­ally they may not know where a stat orig­i­nated from, but if we reach out and pro­vide a link to the report, they’re often more than happy to update the post.” There’s no harm in reach­ing out to ask the site owner to link to your site if you are in fact the orig­i­nal source. You’ve earned that link! Out­reach doesn’t always work though.

That Other Site is Bet­ter than Yours

Chris of cutcabletoday.com broke a big story in his indus­try that got picked up by major pub­li­ca­tions like Engad­get and TechCrunch. The major sites linked to his site as a source for the story, but a num­ber of oth­ers who picked up the story didn’t men­tion his site, opt­ing instead to cite the big­ger sources. He’s reached out to the sites that ran this story with­out link­ing or men­tion­ing his site and they either ignored his request or didn’t add the link for one rea­son or another. Chris’ the­ory: “These web­sites pre­fer to link to a pop­u­lar main­stream pub­li­ca­tion than a smaller blog like mine. Maybe they feel it gives them more cred­i­bil­ity link­ing to a site like Engadget.” It is true that a well-known site that ref­er­ences con­tent on a lesser-known site will get linked to like crazy. For exam­ple, Hub­spot pub­lishes “ulti­mate lists” with data from numer­ous sources. Bet they get lots of links and the orig­i­nal sources don’t. And bet some of those orig­i­nal sources spend pre­cious time try­ing to get the link redirected.

Not to be Self­ish, But…

Brock Mur­ray of SEO­plus was recently inter­viewed by the Finan­cial Post; he asked for a link on the online ver­sion of the arti­cle and the author didn’t do it. “My thought is they dis­cour­age link­ing out as much as pos­si­ble so as to keep the read­ers on their site rather than link­ing out. It’s pretty com­mon, par­tic­u­larly in the news media indus­try.” Jor­dan Bauer of Ver­sique finds that “a com­mon objec­tion is they want to keep users on their web­site instead of giv­ing them an exit por­tal.” And Sean Graw of Brad’s Deals thinks “some sites don’t like link­ing because they want to keep users on-site and drive up pageviews. That’s gen­er­ally the expla­na­tion I get from reporters.“
Of course a busi­ness wants to keep vis­i­tors on site. Of all the rea­sons for not adding an earned link, that makes the most sense. When quoted in arti­cles about finan­cial plan­ning, Dale Degagne has been denied links due to “cor­po­rate pol­icy.” He says, “They did not inform me of this pol­icy until I asked. They get what they want — a story and a solid ref­er­ence, and I did both inter­views with­out a link pro­vided because in the end, it’s still good publicity.” Prob­a­bly true, when it’s a local news site that might gen­er­ate busi­ness, or a well-known site like New York Times or CNN. An obscure site that won’t give you a link in exchange for your exper­tise is prob­a­bly not worth your time.

Links are a Hot Commodity

“Many web­sites and blogs have now come to real­ize the impor­tance of links and just how valu­able they really are and expect finan­cial remu­ner­a­tion for exter­nal links. They equate link­ing out to other plat­forms with the pro­vi­sion of a ser­vice,” says Wojtek Mazur of Ele­phate­SEO. Jonathan Bentz of Netrepid agrees that in many cases, it’s “No pay? No play!” Bentz says “Of all the rea­sons I’ve had link requests rejected, this is prob­a­bly the most com­mon rea­son.“
So that’s still going on… and pay­ing for links is a vio­la­tion of Google policy. SEO illu­mi­nati make things sounds sim­ple — “Just cre­ate great con­tent and it will earn links.” But Google has a long his­tory of putting out vague guide­lines and infor­ma­tion about links, which has cre­ated this cul­ture of hav­ing to care­fully nego­ti­ate your way into get­ting a link that you’ve earned. #thanks­google
Has Google bro­ken the Inter­net? What is it like on the ground for you?

Guest Post By:

Adam Stet­zer
Jun 4, 2015

Rat­ing: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)