Are poor quality backlinks really dead?

SEO newbie here..

I've just been taking a look at the backlinks for a few websites from my niche using Moz and have noticed that almost all of the top ones look like they come from bullshit websites with good DA. Examples from one :


Examples from another:

Firstly, I'm trying to figure out what they are doing. It doesn't even look like it's possible to have guest posts on some of these websites. How are they generating backlinks?

My next question is: do you think December's link spam update is likely to kill these?

I'm primarily a content writer, but was thinking of establishing connections with sites in my niche that allow guest posting, and take advantage of changing algorithms to offer high-quality guest posts to sites that have had their low-quality backlinks deaded. Might this be a viable strategy?

People are mistaking the update with a penalizing of links from certain sites.

This is NOT what it does..

It's using machine learning to determine if a link is natural or not. It's not classifying site A as a link seller and site B as natural. It's not as simple as that. There are natural links and unnatural links on almost every site on the web. It's trying to discount any link that it deems as user built.

d0sa said:

but was thinking of establishing connections with sites in my niche that allow guest posting

Click to expand...

You can anyways do that irrespective of Google update. Relations with peers is always going to help you.

d0sa said:

SEO newbie here..

I've just been taking a look at the backlinks for a few websites from my niche using Moz and have noticed that almost all of the top ones look like they come from bullshit websites with good DA. Examples from one :

Domain	DA
thezenweb.com	78
ampblogs.com	74
pointblog.net	74
timeblog.net	73
mpeblog.com	73
widblog.com	73
imblogs.net	72

Examples from another:

medium.com	95
gumroad.com	91
slashdot.org	91
site123.me	90
justpaste.it	89
pbworks.com	89
instructure.com	85

Firstly, I'm trying to figure out what they are doing. It doesn't even look like it's possible to have guest posts on some of these websites. How are they generating backlinks?

My next question is: do you think December's link spam update is likely to kill these?

I'm primarily a content writer, but was thinking of establishing connections with sites in my niche that allow guest posting, and take advantage of changing algorithms to offer high-quality guest posts to sites that have had their low-quality backlinks deaded. Might this be a viable strategy?

Click to expand...

Gumroad and Medium allow for self-publishing, you can literally write and publish a guest-post yourself on these sites without needing to have any working relationship with the admins.

Those arent poor quality backlinks. They are hosts for creating articles and websites which you can add backlinks to if you wish. How its spammed is up to the user. Some will be crap and some will be good.

Lemmel said:

Gumroad and Medium allow for self-publishing, you can literally write and publish a guest-post yourself on these sites without needing to have any working relationship with the admins.

Click to expand...

Yep but what about https://justpaste.it/?!?

wowitsmekool said:

Those arent poor quality backlinks. They are hosts for creating articles and websites which you can add backlinks to if you wish. How its spammed is up to the user. Some will be crap and some will be good.

Click to expand...

So people can simply write articles, throw them on Medium and get link juice? I think I'm missing something here. If Medium has a DA of 95, surely it provides sites with large amounts of link juice. Why would anyone buy guest posts for $100s or $1000s if you can get link juice from sites like that without paying anything?

d0sa said:

So people can simply write articles, throw them on Medium and get link juice? I think I'm missing something here. If Medium has a DA of 95, surely it provides sites with large amounts of link juice. Why would anyone buy guest posts for $100s or $1000s if you can get link juice from sites like that without paying anything?

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Because they got no brain and greed .

d0sa said:

So people can simply write articles, throw them on Medium and get link juice? I think I'm missing something here. If Medium has a DA of 95, surely it provides sites with large amounts of link juice. Why would anyone buy guest posts for $100s or $1000s if you can get link juice from sites like that without paying anything?

Click to expand...

The barrier to entry for getting a guest post on Medium is non-existent and Google knows this. Most sites such as Medium is already likely recognized as a link farm in a lot of cases. It's the same concept as getting a do-follow link from Web2.0s. You can get hundreds of do-follow links from 90+ DA sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Linkedin, etc. but one good backlink from a niche-specific, mid-DA site with a highly-targeted audience will produce a far better result than a hundred of those 2.0s.

They are definitely not dead, 100% perhaps not as effective as they once were1

d0sa said:

So people can simply write articles, throw them on Medium and get link juice? I think I'm missing something here. If Medium has a DA of 95, surely it provides sites with large amounts of link juice. Why would anyone buy guest posts for $100s or $1000s if you can get link juice from sites like that without paying anything?

Click to expand...

Because medium links are n0follow so you'll get NO link juice.
Secondly, many posts there have noindex attribute so they won't be even indexed by search engines.

d0sa said:

So people can simply write articles, throw them on Medium and get link juice? I think I'm missing something here. If Medium has a DA of 95, surely it provides sites with large amounts of link juice. Why would anyone buy guest posts for $100s or $1000s if you can get link juice from sites like that without paying anything?

Click to expand...

There is difference in value what website will bring in both cases and that is why there is price difference.

Lemmel said:

The barrier to entry for getting a guest post on Medium is non-existent and Google knows this. Most sites such as Medium is already likely recognized as a link farm in a lot of cases. It's the same concept as getting a do-follow link from Web2.0s. You can get hundreds of do-follow links from 90+ DA sites such as Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Linkedin, etc. but one good backlink from a niche-specific, mid-DA site with a highly-targeted audience will produce a far better result than a hundred of those 2.0s.

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So Google takes into account whether the niche is the same as your website when figuring out how the link will affect your ranking?

splishsplash said:

People are mistaking the update with a penalizing of links from certain sites.

This is NOT what it does..

It's using machine learning to determine if a link is natural or not. It's not classifying site A as a link seller and site B as natural. It's not as simple as that. There are natural links and unnatural links on almost every site on the web. It's trying to discount any link that it deems as user built.

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Ofcourse yes.

Any clear picture on this Google update will be appreciated @splishsplash, as many threads regarding this Dec update.

d0sa said:

So Google takes into account whether the niche is the same as your website when figuring out how the link will affect your ranking?

Click to expand...

Absolutely. That is why niche edits are amongst the most popular of backlinks.

splishsplash said:

People are mistaking the update with a penalizing of links from certain sites.

This is NOT what it does..

It's using machine learning to determine if a link is natural or not. It's not classifying site A as a link seller and site B as natural. It's not as simple as that. There are natural links and unnatural links on almost every site on the web. It's trying to discount any link that it deems as user built.

Click to expand...

Are you Sure?

So one Link of Site A to Moneysite 1 can be unnatrual?

And one Link of Site A to Moneysite 2 can be counted as Natural?

Not a whole Domain is classified?

What about Bad neighboorhood of a Link?

What are factors to make a Link counted as Natural?

Benji1 said:

Are you Sure?

So one Link of Site A to Moneysite 1 can be unnatrual?

And one Link of Site A to Moneysite 2 can be counted as Natural?

Not a whole Domain is classified?

What about Bad neighboorhood of a Link?

What are factors to make a Link counted as Natural?

Click to expand...

Absolutely positive.

There's no WAY an update like this classifies an entire domain as spam, and another as clean.

It would just be chaos and they could have just gone with aggressive approaches like this years ago already. They don't need machine learning for that.

"bad neighborhood" is more of a community term rather than something that's real.

If bad neighborhoods existed, you could easily negative seo someone with them.

I doubt google has a concept of bad neighborhoods. They will judge sites individually based on a number of factors, and judge links individually based on other factors. We know they do this based on their patents.

Even pbns, have natural and paid links. pbns will usually link to 2 or 3 other "authority" sites to reduce patterns. Those are natural links.

There are endless sites you can buy guest posts on that have plenty of natural articles.

You can buy posts on businessinsider. Does that mean google will classify the entire site as a spam? Or a bad neighborhood?

Using machine learning to identify a website selling links isn't really going to work. It would end up classifying half the internet as spam.

What's more useful is classifying a link as natural or not. How they do this, is with machine learning. Not even the engineers know what makes a natural link. They will have an idea, as do we, but if you ask an AI to tell you whether a picture is a cat or a dog, no one knows WHY it picks 1 or the other. It's to do with the hidden layers in the neural network, but there's no set answer "Oh it's because this has X, Y and Z. AI is not an algorithm. You use algorithms to train the model, but the resulting model is not an algorithm.

I spammed tiered contextual links to an old website of mine all summer with GSA SER. There’s still thousands of live links. It’s been slowly gaining keywords daily and jumps in serp positions since the update was announced.

To answer your question: No. Not dead. But they are still crap links any way you shake a stick at them.

splishsplash said:

Absolutely positive.

There's no WAY an update like this classifies an entire domain as spam, and another as clean.

It would just be chaos and they could have just gone with aggressive approaches like this years ago already. They don't need machine learning for that.

"bad neighborhood" is more of a community term rather than something that's real.

If bad neighborhoods existed, you could easily negative seo someone with them.

I doubt google has a concept of bad neighborhoods. They will judge sites individually based on a number of factors, and judge links individually based on other factors. We know they do this based on their patents.

Even pbns, have natural and paid links. pbns will usually link to 2 or 3 other "authority" sites to reduce patterns. Those are natural links.

There are endless sites you can buy guest posts on that have plenty of natural articles.

You can buy posts on businessinsider. Does that mean google will classify the entire site as a spam? Or a bad neighborhood?

Using machine learning to identify a website selling links isn't really going to work. It would end up classifying half the internet as spam.

What's more useful is classifying a link as natural or not. How they do this, is with machine learning. Not even the engineers know what makes a natural link. They will have an idea, as do we, but if you ask an AI to tell you whether a picture is a cat or a dog, no one knows WHY it picks 1 or the other. It's to do with the hidden layers in the neural network, but there's no set answer "Oh it's because this has X, Y and Z. AI is not an algorithm. You use algorithms to train the model, but the resulting model is not an algorithm.

Click to expand...

But If the algo works Like this cant we Just buy guestpost on every site which has a good powerful Linkprofile and some Natural Articles?

Even If the Site is also selling guestpost to Casinos and other stuff?

Are you buying guestposts on Sites which are selling GP to Casino or CBD sites for example?

The May Update this year killed off the sites of many buyers of low quality links

Expect things to get even worse due to Google's 'ever smarter' AI