Is Google smart enough to ignore low quality links from Repost?

It seems common to have the same article getting reposted from Authority Sites by crappy websites that are meant as a link farm. Ive seen it again and again. I have ignored it for quite some time since most of them are using non-targeted keywords and on the homepage.

Recently however I have obtained a link from a decent website close to my niche, and it has use a keyword that's pretty close to my targeted. Normally, I would be happy with it. What I am not prepared for however was how there's a lot of website that copied the article after it was posted. More than what I expected to see... there were articles translated to different language, a lot pointing to my site, some even removing the link. But all of these websites are crap and obviously are not real. A lot of the site are even deindex already.

Around a week after the link went live, my targeted keyword went horribly down. I am not sure if I should be happy or sad. Happy in a way because I understand that google can bring down a site before moving them up to the SERP. Sad in a way if those repost links have negatively affect my site and my ranking will stay down permanently.

What do you think guys? Should repost be ignored or be disavowed?

Well, what you just described is the target of one of the more recent Google updates.

Index spamming has been around since forever.

Even though Google, using its artificial intelligence and machine learning, has gone a long way in detecting and penalizing such content, it’s never going to go away.

How come?

It’s done on such a massive scale.

It’s actually a fairly easy strategy if you have the tools and resources.

If you have 1,000 (or even 5,000) domains and thousands more web 2.0 pages that you control, with the right software, you can scrape all this material and then just place strategic links by the thousands.

Do this week after week.

If you have the scale, do this day after day.

Google is basically playing a “whack-a-mole!”

For every thousand pages that appear, maybe it can knock out 95%—but this leaves 5,000.

And then 100,000 appear!

They knock out 95% again, but by this time, there's 10,000.

I hope you can understand where this is leading.

This problem is not going to go away.

I mean, Google has amazing AI, but the scraping game is only going to deliver a really bad ROI the moment Google finally discovers a credible and high-authority alternative to backlinks.

But until that time, it’s going to have a tough time dealing with big-time players using massive global networks with access to unlimited proxies, tons of domain names, and lots of bulletproof almost-anonymous servers.

What you described is a big players game.

And, I'm sure, given the resources involved, there are relatively few of them.

But if I were you, I would worry less about this type of operation.

At the end of the day, they only benefit relatively few website owners.

Focus instead on what you can do to improve the experience of users going to your website.

Start there, and you will probably gain a better ROI on your time, effort, focus, and energy.