Did anyone else just lose a bunch of backlinks?

Over the last two months in particular I have noticed dramatic link drops with primarily GWT used for confirmation.


I run a test group of domains that total around 650 or so today across a huge range of markets and niches, they comply with the following set of standards.

<ul>

<li> All keyword targeted domains with at least one primary keyword in the URL</li>
<li> All .com TLD's</li>
<li> All hosted on separate c-class ip blocks and ranges (I typically use a combination of reseller accounts and services like seo host from host gator)</li>
<li> All private reg through various registars</li>
<li> No inter linking between any of the domains what so ever</li>
<li> No black hat stuff (I use another batch of a few hundred site for that stuff)</li>
</ul>

Bottom line is my sites that use quality incoming links with highly targeted anchor text from category and thematically relevant pages have been staying around and pushing substantial link juice domain wide ( in case your wondering, specific rel=no follow still do work if used in the right way with your internal linking strategy )

These site have also seen very strong SERP increases with very competitive terms as more and more spammy sites and links are being de-indexed.

Lower quality links have been getting culled at a much higher rate than usual, we also do not have any increased googlebot activity on our servers, so this has nothing to do with links being followed, it has everything to do with google evaluations after spider crawls. (The Algo Effect)

To put this in context a very big client of mine has had over 50K links culled and discounted since the middle of November, ( Those links were there long before I came on board to handle the SEO ) Every one of those links were weak and it was a combination of those domains just being de-indexed and simply no longer counted.

A linking pages PR ( notice I said linking page not linking domain ) has less and less to do with overall value transfer, and it really is becoming apparent that PR really is only one aspect of the link metric evaluation today.


It also seems clear non content domain external links are becoming more and more dampened, especially if the link is site wide / on the homepage or in the footer and sidebar to a slightly lesser extent.

Bottom line, The engines and obviously I am really only talking about Google here are putting much more weight on in-body keyword targeted content links.

Also remember google will only count the first link to a URL found in the XHTML per page.


Anyways I have to make a phone call so I will wrap this up.

Bottom line is google wants to see more and more quality authoritative links to your domain and not just your homepage.

Be very careful who and what you link to from your site and use your common sense.

Links / Resources pages are often being looked at as poison-pill words more and more often on your sites and they are hurting you if they exist.

If you do have have them, change it over from text to an image and obviously don't have the alt tag or image path named something like link button, etc....

I don't see googles image OCR really paying all that much attention to that in todays engines, they have much more important things to be focussing on.

Googles Index wide link graph today is so advanced that very few little tricks will work in even the short term moving forward.

In fact if they determine or even think a small domain ( less than 1000 pages ) is playing games there is a very good chance that back to the sandbox the site will go.

There is a long list of people doing the right things today and google is now starting to reward them for it.

Few free to hit me back if you need any further clarification.


Marc