6 Strategies for Recovering from Google Link Spam Algorithm Update

Did you experience a dramatic decrease in your website traffic after November 2021?

The reason might be directly related to Google’s Link Spam algorithm update, which was officially released in November 2021. Last two-part core updates in June and July focused on penalizing sites that participate in link schemes and other manipulative linking practices.

Google Link Spam Algorithm Update: What Is It?

Google’s Penguin algorithm targets spammy backlinks and devalues bad-quality links. Links are still a significant ranking factor, but now it’s based on good quality vs. poor quality links. The link spam update is designed to detect and penalize websites that participate in schemes designed to increase their PageRank scores artificially. It’s not a penalty for building lots of links. In fact, Google has been encouraging businesses to do that for years — and it’s not a penalty for buying links, either (though Google recommends against it).

As part of our regular work to improve results, we’ve released a spam update to our systems. This November 2021 spam update should be fully rolled out within a week. We encourage sites to follow our best practices for Search: https://t.co/jK3ArQmTqT

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 3, 2021

But some sites have taken unnatural link building to an entirely new level, and this update aims to penalize those sites by dramatically decreasing their search traffic. The Penguin Update earlier targeted “over-optimization,” and now the Link Spam Update targets “over promotion” and “bad, spammy links.”

Targets of the Google Penguin update include:

1. Sites with paid links or attempted manipulation of PageRank
2. Sites that participate in link schemes (such as article marketing)
3. Site owners who use “link farms” or other techniques to boost the number of links pointing to their website

Tips for Recovering from Google Link Spam Algorithm Update

The Google spam algorithm is an ongoing battle of getting indexed in the search engine’s top ten results. If your website has been affected and you are looking for ways to recover, here are some steps you can take to help remove the penalties.

1. Create an Audit Report

Google is constantly changing its algorithm to improve the user experience. Unfortunately, it means websites that were once ranking high in Google search results may now be dropping down the ranks or even being filtered out of the search results. If your website has received a Google penalty, SEO experts recommend creating a website audit report to see what factors led to this change.

There are numerous reports available online, but most will provide recommendations for improving your website’s SEO and increasing its visibility. It’s highly recommended to hire a professional digital marketing agency to fight the battle of penalties with effective SEO services and practices.

2. Focus On High-Quality Link Building

Build new links one at a time by earning them through merit rather than building them all at once. Doing so will help you avoid the appearance of trying to game the system and will also ensure that your site is not penalized again in the future. However, when it comes to link building, there are a few things you should avoid:

(A) Bad neighborhoods – Avoid buying links from scraped content or spammy domains. These links could get your site penalized by Google.

(B) Buying or selling links – Buying and selling links from other Webmasters is another way you can get your site penalized by Google. The algorithm considers the following link schemes bad neighborhoods:

• Link exchange for directory submissions or business optimization.
• Link exchanges in which no helpful resource is added to the page (e.g., when the only purpose of the link is to pass PageRank).
• Links exchange only to get a link back, such as reciprocal links.
• Links embedded within irrelevant content (e.g., within an advertisement).
• Links embedded within content that have nothing to do with the topic of the linking page.

3. Qualify Your Affiliate Links

The Link Spam algorithm update will also target affiliate links and penalize sites that have vast numbers of unnatural links pointing at them. You might need to remove or modify all affiliate links from your site to avoid this. If you are an affiliate marketer, you need to look at your own website first before others and remove any affiliate links that lead back to your site. If you don’t know how to find these links, your best bet is to hire a professional digital marketing & SEO agency, which will help you get the penalty removed quickly.

4. Avoid Over-Optimization

The update also targets any sites that contain “over-optimized anchor text.” That means that you cannot repeatedly use the same anchor text on different pages within your website. If you do so, this is automatically detected by Google and can cause penalties for your site if it deems there are too many occurrences of this type of over-optimized anchor text on your website pages. Consider changing up your anchor text mix for links pointing to your site, as well as removing any links pointing to competitors’ sites that may be negatively affecting your ranking.

5. Use Tools to Identify Problematic Backlinks

The easiest way to determine which backlinks might be hurting your website is to use an advanced backlinks checker tool, such as Monitor Backlinks and SpyFu. These tools will allow you to see which links are being used by your website. Then you can use the list of links provided by these tools to contact the webmaster and request that they remove their links from your site. If you have no idea how this works, hiring a skilled SEO and digital marketing agency would be a wise idea. The professionals you hire will clean up your link profile and remove all spammy, low-quality, and manipulative links to prevent further damage to your traffic and search rankings.

6. Avoid Keyword Stuffing

The most common type of link spam is keyword stuffing. It is the practice of cramming a website’s metadata and page content with as many targeted keywords as possible. This builds up artificial, unnatural links to boost search rankings and drive traffic to a site.

The problem with this tactic is that it’s easily detectable by Google that, in turn, will penalize you for it. The other problem with keyword stuffing is that it looks like spam, making the page unreadable and adding no value for users or web crawlers. If Google catches you, you’ll be punished by the search engine and lose any hope of good results from your hard work.

Conclusion

The link-building world changed significantly in the wake of this link spam update. The fallout was pretty immediate: sites that were previously ranking well in the SERPs seemed to disappear overnight. Sites that used to rank well for competitive terms suddenly no longer did at all. It indeed can be devastating for any business, especially if you’ve spent years or even decades building up your site. You may have worked hard to build up that organic traffic through blogging and backlinks, and then one day, you wake up to see it all gone. That’s why it’s essential to navigate your way back to the top with White Hat SEO techniques only. You can reduce spammy activities on your web pages, build quality links, and increase organic traffic with SEO strategies, as mentioned earlier.

If Google has penalized your website, hire a professional digital marketing agency in London that can help you recover from Google penalties.