February 24th - The Day Profile Linking Died?

the sky is falling ... Dont crack that champagne and bust out the high 5's and self congratulatory backslaps just yet ...

17 days late there Mike.

The real hit to the profile linkers took place around the 7th or 8th - and a few folks saw it thru their datacenters 5-7 days earlier than that. We were noting google playing with the algo - as we watched sites jumping from page 1 - to page 8 - to page 1 - back to page 5 - back to 1 and then across 30 or so sites ... all across the boards.

New emd sites that were getting fresh new unique content and copious amounts of profiles were in hte 50's - instantly hit the high 100s when the Google algo tests were done on or about the 10th. Thin Sites with exclusively profile links on page 1 hit the 50' s or - if they had more depth - were .com/.nets - they seemed to have taken smaller hits.

Across 20+ marketers - new was then - its so random and across the board its rather hard to tell and pinppoint what theyve done - what exactly they are after - as a lot of "quality" sites also got flushed.

This new change they released - apparently targeting content and dupe content and scraped content farms - seems to have been a huge boost to the thinner content sites with massive profile spam.

I saw many sites knackered by the earlier algo change take some rather nice serp climbs - still not where we wnt them - but steadily climbing none the less.

Have a friend on skype now actually - using xrumers and doing some energizing - who was page 5 3 days ago [ from #3 on 2/1/11 ] is now nearing the top of page 2 again for their PHARMA kw's ...

This latest 2/24/11 - from what Im seeing and reading took out more quality white hatters traffic and serps than it did - thin / mfa / dupe content scraping / profile link spammers.

Its still way to early to tell and I cant put a finger exactly on what they are doing. With the amount of "quality" white hat sites that got caught up and tossed with the bathwater - as they say - I cant see google leaving it alone as is for too long.

Everyone got hit .... and Im hearing complaints that googd sites went way down too and skanky mfa s with profile spam usurpped them.


Im also still seeing really weak thin mfas adsense sites in several niches propped up on page 1 - right there on top with low quality content and weak links.

I notice Matt Cutts isn't tweeting away today. He's probably on red alert fixing the mess they created.

Not seeing anything in the 24th Feb update which affected backlinks?

It seems to be mainly to do with on-page SEO... and even then it's left some poor sites alone and hit some good sites hard.

I think there'll be big backlink related updates coming soon (more so than the one in earlier Feb which was more of a tweak), but for now I don't see that profile links have 'died'..

I'll say this, I have one blog where half my backlinks were profile links from Angela and Paul, I've seen no variation at all with my rankings. I have two keywords I ranked for and I have stayed consistently #1.

So I doubt Google has targeted profile links.

-Jay Vance

We'll before you guys go nuts about profile links being dead go type "Angela" in Google then you will have the answer whether or not profile links are dead

My main money maker has seen a spike in traffic over the last couple of days. Even today is higher than a weekday last week.

I haven't used profile links on the site for over 12 months. I built its original rise on high PR blog commenting and then started profile links before it took a big dive at the end of 2009 (due to hosting issues and C&Ds lol). The comments were before the power tools hit the market (except xrumer and other private ones).

When it came back 'from the dead' (July last year) I only used BuildMyRank, articles, and paid links (renting). There is 10x more content on the site than before the crash too.

My site hasn't experienced a drop from any of these algo changes.

My links aren't exactly high qaulity, but I would like to believe they are a step up from profile spam.

I personally think the stability has come from the inclusion of a lot of relevant content and less focus on sniping keywords. I have less keywords at #1 but the traffic is spread a lot wider. When the changes happen this might lower the impact as any drops for specific keywords results in a lower % of the total drop.

I think to get a better picture of what these algos are REALLY doing is by finding the difference between the stable sites and the volatile.

Profiles are not dead, lol!

If you know how to build them they'll work just fine.

I don't use them on my new sites, still I use them everyday on older sites that don't have a problem in the SERPs.

If you can't get profiles to work, chances are it's because nothing links into the profile, not really that complicated to figure out.

I've traded profiles for free high PR authority links, takes half the work compared to profiles & ranks a page faster than you can do a Google search (no joke).

Algo. Tweaks will always be there, but ranking will be based on On-Page + BACKLINKS always. enough said!

I tried link profile as a backlink strategy and it didn't work for me. I can get the backlinks indexed well, it takes time.

I agree, the days of mass linking with the same profile is about to come to its death, Google is all about being unique, so it's a good idea to give them what they want

Well, Google has been lining up to try to do "something" about profile links, autoblogs, cuto comments, auto sites, scraped and spun content, auto scrape, spin..scrape, auto auto auto.

but again they have failed, unless my sites are all in a different Google to the rest of the worlds!

Good to see you posting btw Mike - you open proper debates which is good.

On a more general point, I am not sure Mike that the premise of your opening post is correct.

You seem to be saying Googles new update is targeting LINKS. that is not actually the case:

"Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on."

(from google's webmaster blog).

So its targeting CONTENT, not links, from how I have been understanding it.



From my site members and others, and data, I am seeing articles and link sites/directories taking a hit. Google massacred them a couple of years ago, and it looks they are slapping them back down again now.

Glad my income does not rely on article marketing.....

None of my sites have been affected, so far as I can tell. Just a good, steady stream of traffic.

Ok, so from that quote it is clear that duplicate content is now, more than ever, an issue Google is tackling - a good day for original content writers and people who habitually spin their original content for submissions to multiple sites.

That is the worrying bit of the quote. The only way a bot can determine if a site is "not very useful" is by looking at the amount of content (which would penalise perfectly useful single page static sites which can provide excellent original information) or by evaluating backlinks.

The only way to properly evaluate backlinks is by quantity and whether they come from sites which the same bots declare as 'useful'.

SEO will always be a challenge as all search engines try to improve the algos to represent an organic, quality-based result which the searcher is happy with.

Automation is irrelevant. Think about it. By doing any SEO task, big or small, on or offpage, manual or automated, we are attempting to manipulate the ranking of a site or page in a non-organic, artificial way. We are all spammers, big or small, at the end of the day, lol.

In the end, the main losers in a major algo change are simply those whose whole business strategy relies on free search engine traffic and who have spent their whole focus in trying to manipulate the previous algo to their favour.

I am not being judgmental here. I, too, make sure that everything I put out is as optimised as possible and build backlinks regularly. I play the same game. I just do not rely on free search engine traffic for an income and would suggest that it does not make such good long-term business sense to do so.

interested in this thread

@mikeanthony - I actually ran an Xrumer blast to one of my test websites a few weeks ago. Rankings improved modestly for numerous terms that I was targeting so I still believe profiles have hold some weight with the algorithm.

Whether or not these rankings stick around longterm is another question, but I think acquiring profile links is not a bad idea.. as long as your acquiring links from a variety of other places as well.