Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

The new PR update is in, and people are not happy. I think at this point though, I have a decent understanding of what the changes impact was.

First, a quote from the anti-seo himself, fuckin Matt Cutts.

This was actually the first update that I can smile over; all of my sites went up in rank. Some of my social bookmarking profiles have even hit high page rank levels.

But on to the analysis.

Ok, so first off, some major hitters got nailed. I’m going to borrow a bit of the list from Search Engine Land to illustrate this point.

• WashingtonPost.com
• Forbes.com
• SfGate.com
• StatCounter.com
• PhpBB.com (not on their list)

So what do these have in common? Their anchor text is almost always identical. PhPBB for example, gets the vast majority of it’s backlinks from the text at the bottom of forums (”Powered By PHPBB”). StatCounter is the same. The other sites, news sites, are sites that would, the majority of the time, have their backlinks come from people citing their sources(for which people generally put the newspaper name).

Now, on the same point, most directories got hit worse than any other sites. This first off, is likely an emphasis on my point that the directories have too many links, and too low content, and will surely be penalized for that. Second of all, what is the anchor text for directories? Well, they get most of their backlinks from submitting to OTHER directories, which means they specify their own anchor text. Which means, guess what? It’s almost always the same. Hence, they took the same hit, and were perhaps the primary target, other sites being splash damage.

So why weren’t search engine spammers nailed too badly? Because this update was primarily aimed at destroying the pagerank of sites that were “too” high up. A bad link:content ratio, and static anchor text for their incoming links did them on. Blackhat sites either shuffle the text(macros), have very few OUTBOUND links, or (in nearly every case) have a lot of backlinks that are just their raw URL, mixed in with the targeted anchor text, so they were not affected. Also, they generally blitz their link gathering so quickly, that pagerank is not assigned to lose, so it’s less apparent how they were honestly affected.

Take this knowledge, and run with it young ones. I’ll update as I think of things.

Posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 12:12 pm in the category:Link Spamming, backlinks, google, pagerank, seo. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.