I often see SEO agencies and SEOs who play with their link network and follow almost all the usual rules. How would there be:
- Variable Whois data
- Class C variance
- Variable backlink structures of the satellite pages
- Different templates
- Unique texts
- Always changing anchor text.
- Etc…
So far, so good, but then most of them make a huge mistake. You only ever link to your projects or customers. Especially with smaller satellite sites, where there are only 10 to 20 sub-sites, this can go very badly!
Assuming I have 10 customers and on each satellite page, I always set 10 sub-pages with corresponding links to the customers, with different texts, and always changing anchor texts. Still, the target URLs or hosts remain 100% identical. With this, I would then create a recognizable pattern.
What does something like that look like in practice?
In doing so, I posed a threat to both sides. The customer can be identified as a link buyer or as someone who builds unnatural backlinks because Google recognizes its backlinks pattern. All 7 satellite sites set the same 10 outbound links.
Although every satellite page follows all the essential rules, a link pattern can still be recognized by Google. It may be that every target page has a different backlink structure, but due to the same links on the linked pages, such a customer is relatively quick with his domain in the unnatural link building in the sights of Google, and Google can devalue or filter the linking and link receiving pages accordingly.
How do I check which external links I have set on my satellite pages?
At the moment, Bing makes it very nice. That’s why there is the command: linkfromdomain: domain name. For example, you can see that Spiegel has placed around 4.2 million external links.
I see the probability that another site has set the same links at below 0.000001%. Even if one were to take the big competitors, there would always be an overlap, but this should also be due to the number of external links in the Per mille range.
For example, I created two small graphics that illustrate how such a healthy and critical intersection can look.
What to do?
Just link more. External links are rated as a quality feature by Google! Anyone who links to other trusted sites and thus creates a trustworthy link environment strengthens their links rather than devaluing them, just because there are now one or two more external links on the site. And if you only think to link to Wikipedia, it should be said: “That doesn’t help”.
Conclusion
In such cases, link aversion can even be dangerous for your link network. Not to mention that this also puts the pages received from the link in danger of running into corresponding filters.
