[Case Study] Realtime Penguin, do bad links still carry negative effect ?

Nearly three weeks ago, after the FRED Update I started a small test to see if a crappy links build by GSA SER, do have any effect I am using a 2 year old site, with quite a bit of content, but without any links.

The Site is ranking Google page 1 and gets hit by 100 daily with different variations

- Exact Match Anchor
- Branded Anchor
- Random Anchor
- Porn Anchor
- nacked URL

On different targets:

- Main Page
- Inner Page
- Inner Page with adult content

And from different sources:

- Forum Profiles
- Articles
- Blog Comments
- Wikis

What I can say so far. Nofollow links don't do anything. Regardless which anchor or where they came from. Branded, random or nacked URL have very little to no effect.

Also if you are targeting your homepage very little to no effect. However, exact match and porn anchors dofollo links on an inner page are pure dynamit.

If you are targeting sexual oriented content, with do-follow porn anchor it will get deindexed practically immediately. Porn Anchor on non-sexual content shows little to none effect.

But exact match certainly does. Here again google dance started practically immediately, disappeared for two days and bounced back to it's exact position. Stayed there for another two days and now starts slowly loosing ranking.

Conclusion: G got smarter on matching links with content. However if they do match, they count initiate a G dance and bad links will slowly decrease your rankings.

Stay tuned, for more information.

They would have an effect obviously. they had before too.
Would still like to see the outcome, good luck.

I'm interested in your findings. Thanks for going to the effort of testing and writing up your findings.

It would be far more useful if you could isolate actions and effects so that you could say for sure that doing X causes Y. You need to do it at scale (say 10 sites) as well so that you can say that it isn't by chance that your results are as they are.

There is lots of talk (and it isn't proved) that brand and URL links can take between 3 and 6 months before credit is given. It would be useful if you could keep us updated with what happens over a longer period.

The deindexing that your site has experienced gives us much more information than anything else because there is a determined reaction. With nofollow links for example, we don't know whether the effects are delayed or whether they do something that you haven't identified (such as diversifying anchor text that avoids the site as a whole having a Penguin "algorithmic filter" applied to it).

You need to do it at scale (say 10 sites) as well so that you can say that it isn't by chance that your results are as they are.

Click to expand...

Thanks for you reply. I am sorry, but I simply don't have the ressources to scale it up to 10 sites. I do diversification on a page and a keyword level. Means it's a rather large site, several hundred pages so I hope to assume, what I do on page x doesn't affect page y too much as they are ranking for different keywords in a broad niche and I am not sendin 20.000 links. The site isn't targeted by niche but for a specific demographic.

So far I don't see any effects from no-follow links whatsoever, neither anchor diversification nor anything else. I just know another webmaster who got manually penalized, as he was using not a single no-follow link, which resulted in unnatural link building message. So it seems the ratio of no/do follo is some kind of marker for manual review.

You said porn anchors get de-indexed right away ? What about sex related anchors in a health niche. So like best condoms for sex, best yoga sex. Will google think these are porn and de-index?