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It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html http://www.seroundtable

It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html you can read where Bing said "You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught. One of the reasons that Google is such a popular search engine is that we do take spam seriously and we take action to counter spam.

Terretta 12y ago
They're not talking to you about link spamming.
- karpodiem 12y ago
  agreed, matt is talking in generalities at this point
  - justincormack 12y ago
    Matt is not reading what the discussion is about at this point.
    - kordless 12y ago
      More specifically, I believe people feel they aren't being heard at this point. Rationalizations are the tell.
jamesbritt 12y ago
When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught. This still seems to be missing the point. As I understand it, sites that are not doing anything in the realm of SEO can get penalized because of the actions of people outside of their control. If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  "If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fairly and would like a level playing ground. In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it. I made a video about the "what if the wrong sorts of sites link to my site" question here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I
  - newaccountfool 12y ago
    There is no spam, you algorithm is wrong. Wrong because it's implying the link isn't mean to be there. It appears after years and millions spent it is impossible to get the perfect search algorithm.
  - nivla 12y ago
    >In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it. So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google? Like everything this could go both ways. If you penalize sites for having links from link farms, what is stopping your competitors from paying link farms to link to your website? or worse yet, some link farm owner comes up with an ingenious idea to hold other websites hostage until they pay up? It would be more understanding if Google din't have any other resources on hand to make smart decisions but heck you guys have hands on realtime experience with most traffics via Google Analytics, Google Adsense and even DNS. All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable.
    - MitziMoto 12y ago
      > All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable. The Google webspam team seems to prefer psychology over technology to solve the problem, especially recently. Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic. IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn" websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan. So why should I risk all the time and effort it takes to generate quality web content when it could all come crashing down because an imperfect and overzealous algorithm thinks it's spam? Or worse, some intern or non-google employee doing a manual review wrongly decides the site violates webmaster guidelines?
dchuk 12y ago
"You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." That is an absolutely ridiculous rule of thumb to follow. What exactly is wrong about doing something like: 1) Having a good article on your site about a certain topic 2) Reaching out to other site owners who have similar content and asking them to link to you as an additional resource 3) Getting that link. Can you honestly, with a straight face, tell me that's BAD!?
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  dchuk, that's a direct quote from Bing, not Google: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2014/05/09/10-seo-myths-reviewed.aspx http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/201... It's in the "Links are all I need" section. Here's the full quote: "While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn. Obviously buying links is a dead end, and it doesn’t matter how you split this hair: sharing, encouraging, incentivizing, buying – it’s all the same. You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path. Links are part of the bigger picture. You want them, but you want them to be natural. If an engine sees you growing tem naturally, you’re rewarded with rankings. If they see you growing them unnaturally, you’re rewarded with penalties." If you disagree with that, you'd need to take it up with Bing's webmaster outreach team.
  - dchuk 12y ago
    Holy moly man, you were the one who provided that link: "It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html you can read where Bing said "You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." Your statement implies both Google and Bing share the same sentiment. So now, my question still stands: What about that scenario that I laid out is actually bad/spammy/evil? Why should anyone ever be punished for doing that?
  - 12y ago
higherpurpose 12y ago
But in this case they didn't spam. The op's site linked naturally to that site, and that site's admin got a message from Google that the op's link is unnatural (when it was natural). That's what's wrong with this picture. The link was perfectly valid and yet Google recommended that site's admin to disavow the natural link, simply because Google's algorithm isn't good enough to see what's natural and what isn't. So his suggestion is: if it's not good enough, then don't recommend the wrong stuff to people.
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  higherpurpose, nowhere in the original article did it say that Google said the link was bad. This was a request from a random site (we don't know which one, since the post dropped that detail), and the op can certainly ignore the link removal request.
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    > Apparently Google convinced them, via their Webmaster Tools portal, that the link looked “unnatural”, and that they should use the Link Disavow Tool to discredit the link. This is pretty typical of 2014 Google. To be honest these days I pretty much regard Google as one of the banes of my existence, you guys hold so much power and influence so much of the internet the rest of us have to work around you, I'm currently pulling all our customers off Google Apps for Enterprise for a multitude of reasons (buggy code, broken imap implementations, impossible to get an actual human answer) as well as moving myself away from all Google services (including Android). I remember when you guys where the good guys.
    - malandrew 12y ago
      Exactly. Instead Google should suggest that they investigate the link and appeal the way it was categorized if the search engine was wrong in its classification. Anything less is tampering with the natural way links should work.
    - magicalist 12y ago
      Yes, truly Google's rules held no sway over the SEO world until 2014.
dingodoo 12y ago
I'm sorry Matt, but that is a pretty silly thing to quote. After all, what's the point of building a strategic network, or making friends, or any other long, grueling white-hat tactic that takes forever to pull off? Under that same logic, Google Adwords should never know in advance where their ad clients are coming from, and if you have someone out there trying to on-board big clients (or increase their spend) that's the wrong path. You say "if they get caught" when sometimes, there is nothing to catch. You're dinging people who have grinded to forge relationships, in the name of trying to keep spammers out of the index. It makes it too easy for me to hire a spam company to blast an overwhelming amount of crappy links at my competitors who may or may not be well equipped to disavow those links. Which, if my company has the budget to hire someone to monitor & disavow, and my competition does not, well... somebody's still gaming the system...just not in the same way...

Terretta 12y ago

They're not talking to you about link spamming.

karpodiem 12y ago
agreed, matt is talking in generalities at this point
- justincormack 12y ago
  Matt is not reading what the discussion is about at this point.
  - kordless 12y ago
    More specifically, I believe people feel they aren't being heard at this point. Rationalizations are the tell.

jamesbritt 12y ago

When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught. This still seems to be missing the point. As I understand it, sites that are not doing anything in the realm of SEO can get penalized because of the actions of people outside of their control. If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?

Matt_Cutts 12y ago
"If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fairly and would like a level playing ground. In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it. I made a video about the "what if the wrong sorts of sites link to my site" question here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I
- newaccountfool 12y ago
  There is no spam, you algorithm is wrong. Wrong because it's implying the link isn't mean to be there. It appears after years and millions spent it is impossible to get the perfect search algorithm.
- nivla 12y ago
  >In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it. So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google? Like everything this could go both ways. If you penalize sites for having links from link farms, what is stopping your competitors from paying link farms to link to your website? or worse yet, some link farm owner comes up with an ingenious idea to hold other websites hostage until they pay up? It would be more understanding if Google din't have any other resources on hand to make smart decisions but heck you guys have hands on realtime experience with most traffics via Google Analytics, Google Adsense and even DNS. All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable.
  - MitziMoto 12y ago
    > All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable. The Google webspam team seems to prefer psychology over technology to solve the problem, especially recently. Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic. IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn" websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan. So why should I risk all the time and effort it takes to generate quality web content when it could all come crashing down because an imperfect and overzealous algorithm thinks it's spam? Or worse, some intern or non-google employee doing a manual review wrongly decides the site violates webmaster guidelines?

dchuk 12y ago

"You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." That is an absolutely ridiculous rule of thumb to follow. What exactly is wrong about doing something like: 1) Having a good article on your site about a certain topic 2) Reaching out to other site owners who have similar content and asking them to link to you as an additional resource 3) Getting that link. Can you honestly, with a straight face, tell me that's BAD!?

Matt_Cutts 12y ago
dchuk, that's a direct quote from Bing, not Google: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2014/05/09/10-seo-myths-reviewed.aspx http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/201... It's in the "Links are all I need" section. Here's the full quote: "While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn. Obviously buying links is a dead end, and it doesn’t matter how you split this hair: sharing, encouraging, incentivizing, buying – it’s all the same. You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path. Links are part of the bigger picture. You want them, but you want them to be natural. If an engine sees you growing tem naturally, you’re rewarded with rankings. If they see you growing them unnaturally, you’re rewarded with penalties." If you disagree with that, you'd need to take it up with Bing's webmaster outreach team.
- dchuk 12y ago
  Holy moly man, you were the one who provided that link: "It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html you can read where Bing said "You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." Your statement implies both Google and Bing share the same sentiment. So now, my question still stands: What about that scenario that I laid out is actually bad/spammy/evil? Why should anyone ever be punished for doing that?
- 12y ago

higherpurpose 12y ago

But in this case they didn't spam. The op's site linked naturally to that site, and that site's admin got a message from Google that the op's link is unnatural (when it was natural). That's what's wrong with this picture. The link was perfectly valid and yet Google recommended that site's admin to disavow the natural link, simply because Google's algorithm isn't good enough to see what's natural and what isn't. So his suggestion is: if it's not good enough, then don't recommend the wrong stuff to people.

Matt_Cutts 12y ago
higherpurpose, nowhere in the original article did it say that Google said the link was bad. This was a request from a random site (we don't know which one, since the post dropped that detail), and the op can certainly ignore the link removal request.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  > Apparently Google convinced them, via their Webmaster Tools portal, that the link looked “unnatural”, and that they should use the Link Disavow Tool to discredit the link. This is pretty typical of 2014 Google. To be honest these days I pretty much regard Google as one of the banes of my existence, you guys hold so much power and influence so much of the internet the rest of us have to work around you, I'm currently pulling all our customers off Google Apps for Enterprise for a multitude of reasons (buggy code, broken imap implementations, impossible to get an actual human answer) as well as moving myself away from all Google services (including Android). I remember when you guys where the good guys.
  - malandrew 12y ago
    Exactly. Instead Google should suggest that they investigate the link and appeal the way it was categorized if the search engine was wrong in its classification. Anything less is tampering with the natural way links should work.
  - magicalist 12y ago
    Yes, truly Google's rules held no sway over the SEO world until 2014.

dingodoo 12y ago

I'm sorry Matt, but that is a pretty silly thing to quote. After all, what's the point of building a strategic network, or making friends, or any other long, grueling white-hat tactic that takes forever to pull off? Under that same logic, Google Adwords should never know in advance where their ad clients are coming from, and if you have someone out there trying to on-board big clients (or increase their spend) that's the wrong path. You say "if they get caught" when sometimes, there is nothing to catch. You're dinging people who have grinded to forge relationships, in the name of trying to keep spammers out of the index. It makes it too easy for me to hire a spam company to blast an overwhelming amount of crappy links at my competitors who may or may not be well equipped to disavow those links. Which, if my company has the budget to hire someone to monitor & disavow, and my competition does not, well... somebody's still gaming the system...just not in the same way...