I think there may be a simple answer to what they are attacking, it's indirectly down to me partly but only because I shared my genius idea, that was tweeted by Rand Fishkin, and then every man and his dog was doing it.
1) Expired domains with pre-existing high value links - these have ended up being used in PBNs, and of course old sites will have old links from the same pages the expired domains have links from.
Google start to tackle the problem of old high value links to expired domains in 2 ways:
i) Devalue the expired domains.
ii) Reach out to some of the big boys, e.g. the BBC and get them to clean up their old pages and remove links to duff websites - they could clearly either send them a list of pages that need editing, or devalue those old news pages themselves.
I have noticed that some of the old domains I had with excellent old BBC links - those very old (10 years+) pages no longer contain the outbound links any more - so they must have been edited.
This hits PBN's, and old established sites whose rankings were also based on years old high value links.
In other words Google have added "freshness" of the high value links into the equation.
2) Kill sites with little useful content but lots of ads - so an "ads to word count (or some other measure) to user interaction" metric to get rid of people trying to make money by not offering anything useful.
If you think about it 1) and 2) are interconnected, since the people involved in (1) are often just trying to earn money by doing (2).
I think that makes a lot of sense, but I expect people will scoff at me just like they did when I first suggested that expired domains with high value links were like gold dust for rankings, and so I won't be sharing my new methodologies with anyone since that's what kiled the golden goose above.
1) Expired domains with pre-existing high value links - these have ended up being used in PBNs, and of course old sites will have old links from the same pages the expired domains have links from.
Google start to tackle the problem of old high value links to expired domains in 2 ways:
i) Devalue the expired domains.
ii) Reach out to some of the big boys, e.g. the BBC and get them to clean up their old pages and remove links to duff websites - they could clearly either send them a list of pages that need editing, or devalue those old news pages themselves.
I have noticed that some of the old domains I had with excellent old BBC links - those very old (10 years+) pages no longer contain the outbound links any more - so they must have been edited.
This hits PBN's, and old established sites whose rankings were also based on years old high value links.
In other words Google have added "freshness" of the high value links into the equation.
2) Kill sites with little useful content but lots of ads - so an "ads to word count (or some other measure) to user interaction" metric to get rid of people trying to make money by not offering anything useful.
If you think about it 1) and 2) are interconnected, since the people involved in (1) are often just trying to earn money by doing (2).
I think that makes a lot of sense, but I expect people will scoff at me just like they did when I first suggested that expired domains with high value links were like gold dust for rankings, and so I won't be sharing my new methodologies with anyone since that's what kiled the golden goose above.
