Two Link Questions Teed Up

Meredith's Husband 0:26

All right, a couple questions have come in, both about links and how they affect SEO, and they're pretty closely related, so I want to answer them together. One of them about reciprocal links, and another about toxic links. So the first question, and I'm just gonna read this. Quote, I know links are good for SEO, but I remember you mentioning on an episode that trading links can actually hurt you. A friend and colleague of mine suggested that we trade that we link to each other's websites, but before I do, I want to make sure that's not going to backfire on my SEO. So it's a good question. I have probably mentioned reciprocal links on a few different episodes, but I don't remember. I couldn't find them either. I don't think I have an entire episode that was dedicated to reciprocal links. So yeah, let me answer this very specifically. First, links are good for SEO. Okay, that should not be a surprise to you. I've mentioned many, many, many times how important links are for SEO. Links are what set Google apart from other search engines. It's how Google has evolved. It's it's it's like the infrastructure that makes Google work,

Why Links Power Google Rankings

Meredith's Husband 1:31

basically. That's how important links are. So you can imagine SEOs have found ways to, you know, we've had many, many different types of link schemes, different ways to get links in order to basically trick Google, because Google's not looking for uh websites that have gone out and found clever ways to get and trade links. They are looking for websites that naturally get links to them from other websites. And I tend to think of this like uh I've probably mentioned this story before, the high school uh popular, not the popularity contest, but in though in high school, you probably had things like who is the most likely to succeed, or you know, who is the most likely to end up in jail or whatever. Links kind of work the same way. It's like if you were to go around to a high school class and ask students who is the most likely to succeed, and let's say you get a thousand people in your high school class, you get a thousand votes, and it's gonna give you an indication of, you know, at least in that class, who do students think is the most likely to succeed? Okay, that's what Google does with links. Other search engines, like before Google emerged and took over the search engine landscape, other search engines, the way they did it, say they were trying to figure out the same thing, they would go around to every student and ask them, are you the most likely to succeed? So you can imagine with that uh method, you probably had a a tie of a thousand students all with one vote. Of course, Google's system is not perfect, but you can see where it's probably a lot better than the alternative. Okay, so that's why links are so important. And like I said, SEOs have come up with uh I don't even know how many link schemes to try to get links. Reciprocal links are one of those schemes. And what a reciprocal link is, is trading links. So if you have a website and I have a website, and I say to you, hey, I'll link to your website and you link to my website because links are good for SEO and that will help our SEO. That's a reciprocal link. And the value

Reciprocal Links And The Real Risk

Meredith's Husband 3:36

of a reciprocal link is much less than the value of a one-way link, of a link that occurs naturally. And this became an issue because SEOs, they didn't do this with just one or two sites at a time. We did this in bulk. Reciprocal links became a huge thing where we would go out and we would get, we would trade links by the hundreds and thousands. Entire reciprocal link networks and platforms were built so you could go on on these sites and then trade links with people. It got to be really, really excessive. And that obviously is not what Google was looking for. So when Google identified that that was happening, they changed their rules. Reciprocal links became a spam signal. Now, the thing that you got to remember is sometimes a reciprocal link is natural. Like if you uh have a colleague, like let's say you're a wedding photographer and there is a wedding planner that you work with a lot, or some other sort of colleague, and you often work with this person, it might be normal for you to trade links. Hey, I will link to you and you link to me. That's a sort of natural business relationship. It just becomes a problem when you do this in bulk. But what happens if you're doing this with just one website? Well, the the value of that link won't be the same as if it's just a one-way link. So if you link to somebody's website and they link back to you, it's probably going to be sort of a wash. There might be some, there'd probably be some benefit there, but it's not going to be the same as if somebody just links to your website. So I would say, kind of general rules of thumb, there's no magic number first. There's no, I can't say like, well, five reciprocal links is fine, but 12 is too many. But in general, I would say, yeah, if you have a handful or fewer than that, that's probably fine. It's when you have dozens or hundreds that it's going to become a problem, likely. Or more specifically, if all of your links are the result of reciprocal links, that's a problem. Or I would say, even if half, even if more than like 10% are reciprocal links, that's probably a problem. But again, general rule of thumb, like if it's normal, if you if it's a natural business relationship for and you would, you know, somebody you do business with and you want to link to their site and they should link to your site, you know, Google understands that that is, you know, sometimes normal. Like I said, it's only going to become an issue and a real spam signal if you have a bunch of them. And then the second question, kind of related, and that question was quote, the Sunrush tool reported that I have toxic backlinks pointing to my site. How do I get rid of those? Okay, so first, what a what a toxic link is, is like I just said, if you have too many reciprocal links, those would be toxic backlinks. Or what is more often cited as a toxic backlink, especially in Sunrush, is a link from like a very low quality website. And by low quality, this is not like, don't think of a you know, another photographer or another vendor and their website being low quality. By low quality website, I mean like a link directory, like a website online that just focuses on linking out and it might be called something like SEO backlinks.com or something like that. This is another link scheme that SEOs

Toxic Backlinks Reports And Penalties

Meredith's Husband 6:46

have done in the past. We would go out and we would just buy links on websites like that because, you know, yeah, links were good. And so we would get them in bulk. Kind of the same approach to the reciprocal links, we would get them in bulk, but Google identified that method too pretty quickly. It could see that there are these websites that do nothing, they don't offer any value themselves, but they just link out. And so it was that sort of behavior and also the behavior with the reciprocal links, Google started giving out manual penalties. So when Google found that let's say your website had a toxic link profile. So links from a lot of these really low quality websites or reciprocal links. And a toxic profile means a high percentage of your links. So again, there's no magic number, but if all of your links are coming from really low quality sites, or half of them, or again, I would say more than 10%, that's gonna look very suspicious to Google. It's gonna look like you're going out and you're trying to buy and trade backlinks to get better SEO. And what Google did is they started handing out manual penalties. So literally, your website would basically be kicked out of Google and you would get an email that said, you've been doing bad stuff, basically. And in order to get your website back into Google, you need to prove to us that you have undone all this bad stuff. And it was a huge process to do that. And a lot of times what happened is those same websites that you would go out and buy links from, now you would go back and you'd ask to be removed. And they know what they knew what was happening, and they said, no, we're not going to remove you unless you pay us again. And they would pay, and you need to pay like 10, 20 times as much to get your link out as you paid to get your link into those. So it was a bad situation all the way around. But my point is uh Google handed out these penalties, but this was kind of a a one-time deal for Google when they did this, because if Google started that sort of behavior, they started giving out manual link penalties. They couldn't keep doing that because what would have happened, and probably what did happen to some extent, was SEOs saw what was happening, and what a lot of SEOs, or maybe some sort of really I'll call them low quality SEOs, would go out and they'd buy a bunch of toxic backlinks and point them at their competitors. Okay, so Google knows that that was happening. They can't continue to hand out manual penalties after that once that's happening. So these manual penalties don't really happen anymore. But you will still see reports like this in Sunrush. Oh, you have a toxic backlink profile. And usually what's happening is Sunrush or whoever is reporting toxic backlinks or trying to sell you something. So this is kind of a scare tactic. And there's a whole you know disavow process that you can go through. It's still available. You can still go through a link disavowal process on Google, but you really don't have to. I haven't seen any sort of manual link penalty that requires you to go through that process in years, and I don't expect to see it again. So when you see something that says your link profile is toxic or you have toxic backlinks, you can largely ignore it because number one, you're not gonna get a penalty anymore. Google's not going to do that. Number two, it would be hard to get rid of those links. Like I said, they're not gonna charge you money, but a lot of these link directories are still online and they just they scrape data and they're kind of built almost automatically, or some of them are just left over from years ago. So there's no, there's nobody actively maintaining them. So you can't write to somebody and say, take me out of this directory, please. So my advice if you see, if you get a notice from anywhere that you have uh toxic backlinks, you don't have to worry about it unless you have actually done, if you've gone out and purchased links and you've paid for links to your website, uh, you might think about trying to undo that. If you haven't done that, don't worry about it. And of course, moving forward, I would say, yeah, don't buy links. That's kind of a bad practice. Google has a, they have a very sophisticated system for figuring out if a link is paid for or not. I know it seems like it would be a hard thing to determine like, how is Google going to know if I paid for a link from that website? Well, they have they have spent probably millions, tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars trying to figuring out ways to do exactly that. So, best case is just don't

Disavow Decisions And Safer Link Building

Meredith's Husband 11:06

do it and focus on getting good links in terms of the reciprocal links. A few are not bad, but don't make it your primary focus of how you get links. All right. I hope this helps.