I’ve seen a few new sites rise in the past few months before suddenly dropping off a cliff, says Olivier Poirier-Leroy.
My theory: Because they have a clean link profile, they do well initially, but once they hit page one, they start attracting the avalanche of trash links and get spanked.
The scraper sites don’t scrape you until you rank, says Grind Stone.
Then, depending on structure and quality link profile, you either drop like a rock or slow decline over multiple updates.
XEOS who can’t grasp the simple concept that algorithms use math for computations won’t be able to grok the concept that their site and ‘big massive sites who rank despite these links’ might have different maths.
I disagree that these spammy scraper sites impact your site, says Nick Jordan.
EVERY SINGLE SITE with a footprint in the SERPs picks up these automated scraper links.
Google knows what these links mean.
Disagree all you want, I don’t care, says Grind Stone.
I’m not trafficking in the theoretical here.
We’d already recovered a dozen sites before I ever talked about this publicly.
And now others are using it and regaining (some of) their traffic.
I have nothing to sell, nothing to gain by sharing this with site owners who got smacked.
Hell, I don’t even use an affiliate link for LRT (Link Research Tools).
But by all means, continue to believe what Google says vs what they show us.