In the first article, for quick reference, I talked about how searchengines have the ability to identify pages as spam by comparing a series of characteristics from the site to see if it deviates from the average of all websites on the Internet. This part is about the fact that this does not only work for Onpage-characteristics like the length of the title but also with Offpage-factors – and that with a much higher efficiency.

Similar to the Onpage-factors, you have certain patterns that emerge with increasing growth in social networks like the Internet. If we take the linking of German SEO-blogs among themselves for example, we will notice a structure: a few will have more incoming links while others have less but all together they form a nice networks which is also called cluster. Neighborhoods like with the SEO-blogs can be found in very many areas – all of it grown naturally.

The problem arises when you are trying to change these linkstructures to your benefit. A few bought links here, a few entries in questionable webcatalogs there and to top it all off a few articles in different articledirectories. All of these will result in a complete change to your own linknetwork and the destruction of basic structures that make up naturally grown networks. To depict these changes is much more complicated than for the Onpage-factors, but I will try my best: for 16 German articledirectories we analyzed the first thousand sites of each of them for outgoing links. If, in the picture on the right, we take a look at how many domains are represented on a multitude of these articledirectories, you can imagine which link-neighborhood they are being pushed into. Seeing that a while ago, Google has added the inconspicuous little word “almost” into the sentence “There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.“ it should be enough of a clue to take a more careful approach to picking your linking neighbors, that you might expect on first sight.

The third and last part of this series will be about also keeping track of the chronological development.




Is this still normal? – part I
Is this still normal? – part II
Is this still normal? – part III