We have to stop this game of “spammy links” vs “link spam”.
Spammy links are images/cdns/scraped content, machine generated noise – for a bunch of reasons.
Spammy links are a strong correlation with paid for links.
Spammy Links is a broad, vague, generalization often used for cover.
This isn’t hurting any sites that I’ve seen.
What webmasters need to look at is: “Link Spam” – as per the Spam Policy Guide looks like “legit links” – i.e.
a related website, a legit website.
A post with human content where words like “best credit card” is magically linked to “myaffiliatesite.com/best-credit-cards” – something that people think is how links “should look” – but they’re actually owned by link farms or the links are often paid to the writers or editors – it depends, its a massive industry.
The problem with these is that Google builds a database of these:
- people disavow and disavow EVERYTHING they bought
- Google sees a site about a camera blog suddenly linking to car parts, digital agencies, car insurance sites.
Disavow is for link spam, not spammy backlinks.
Google DOS NOT ignore link spam and these sites had tons of link spam – DOFOLLOW exact match phrases for what they want to rank for to the most difficult pages.
Not spread out uniformly, not with “click here” or read here” – exact phrase matches inside articles.
Links in the wild don’t happen like that in those quantities.
The conversations where “SEO experts” (with websites) who don’t understand backlinks is truly terrifying.
It’s fundamental to SEO.
There are “experts” with no rank and backlinks (and no coincidence) – there are experts who have a backlinks and no longer rank – clearly also not experts and then there are “experts” who think you can’t get penalized for Link Spam (either because they don’t know or because it’s convenient not to know or understand what link spam is)
Backlinks are literally the fundamental working mechanism for objectively ranking pages in a mega-system where everybody’s content is vying to be 1st and the value, quality, usefulness of that content is fluid – changing at evry search user every time they are search – as in it can literally change as the user searches and reads more….
Fascinating… if not terrifying.