Links, links, links. You can’t live without them and you can’t live with too many bad of them. If you are an eager beaver site owner, that is. Many good links can take you up to the top of the rankings kingdom and many bad ones can throw you down to the dungeon of oblivion.
Even though links were always one of the main point of interests since the Google empire soar to infinite Web glory, it seems that in 2012 we somehow crossed the borderline of reason and entered ObsessionLand. When exactly did it happen? Probably around April, when the Who-Must-Not-Be-Named animal has been viciously encroached the search algorithm.
The folks who runs the (search) Hunger Games knows that more clarity is desperately in need to calm the masses, so they have sent their head Gamemaker Matt Cutts to shed some more light about the burning topic of links with two new videos.
Distrust Links Without Editorial Choice
In the first video, Matt Cutts asks Matt Cutts how Google fathom links from article directories, widgets, footers, themes and similar less editorially controlled sources. Plutarch has asked and Plutarch shall respond…
Matt pretty much says that Google doesn’t fond these type of links- mostly, they aren’t really being created organically when someone likes something while they are “not really a person’s real choice.” Those sorts of links won’t count as much as links that organically reflects someone’s actual endorsement and therefore Google holds very little trust in them (if at all).
White Hat Sites Don’t Need To Analyze Linking Profile
In the second video, head Gamemaker Cutts address an issue which has been deterring webmasters since the hurl of the You-Know-Who algorithm update- when a webmaster should analyze links and remove spammy ones (or use the new Disavow Links tool).
Matt essentially says that if a webmaster hadn’t participated in any dubious SEO practice (grey-black hat) then starting investigating the site’s linking profile would most probably be unnecessary as every average website will likely to heap a mix of low-high quality links organically throughout time.
Unfortunately, Matt didn’t discuss about negative SEO and how a webmaster should deal with that, so I can only suggest myself that if you believe someone blasted many spammy links to your site in order to damage your rankings perhaps you should try to remove them or disavow them.
I just hope that the head Gamemaker have effective ways to handle with these situations and won’t reiterate similar mistakes as other head Gamemakers.