SEMrush recently studied the backlink profiles of 830 sites hit by link penalties and shared some insights that might make you rethink your link building strategies.
It is not a ranking correlation study, so things can still be remarked upon and debated.
+ Guest posts: Many sites with manual actions for guest posts had specific patterns. They were labeled as “Sponsored” and used heavy, keyword rich anchor text on links not modified with the nofollow HTML link attribute.
Also, it took more than just one link to trigger a penalty. Such sites also displayed patterns in their links that showed the same kinds of links being created again and again.
+ Link age: It doesn’t matter how old the bad links are. This means that if your backlink profile was marred a few years back, this could affect your current link building efforts.
+ Unnatural links: It doesn’t matter whether your bad links come from a low quality site or a trusted media source. Many of these trusted sites sell links, and a website is only as good as its outlinks. So, just because it’s on a big media site, it doesn’t mean that a bad link won’t be harmful.
+ Penalty on the entire site: Contrary to the Penguin update, which is granular and only affects certain pages, Google’s manual action penalty affects the entire site.
+ Anchor text abuse: Nearly 50% of all manual actions involved aggressive anchor text that used exact-match keywords.
+ Vague explanations from Google: Google may or may not pinpoint what caused a penalty, but for the most part they are very vague. It’s up to you to perceive what went wrong with the links.
+ Link penalty removals: It takes a long time to get the link penalty removed. You might submit a disavow file and wait to hear the good news from Google, but it might take you two or three requests for reconsideration before the penalty is lifted. This whole process can take up to six months.
https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-penalty-unnatural-inbound-links/
It is not a ranking correlation study, so things can still be remarked upon and debated.
+ Guest posts: Many sites with manual actions for guest posts had specific patterns. They were labeled as “Sponsored” and used heavy, keyword rich anchor text on links not modified with the nofollow HTML link attribute.
Also, it took more than just one link to trigger a penalty. Such sites also displayed patterns in their links that showed the same kinds of links being created again and again.
+ Link age: It doesn’t matter how old the bad links are. This means that if your backlink profile was marred a few years back, this could affect your current link building efforts.
+ Unnatural links: It doesn’t matter whether your bad links come from a low quality site or a trusted media source. Many of these trusted sites sell links, and a website is only as good as its outlinks. So, just because it’s on a big media site, it doesn’t mean that a bad link won’t be harmful.
+ Penalty on the entire site: Contrary to the Penguin update, which is granular and only affects certain pages, Google’s manual action penalty affects the entire site.
+ Anchor text abuse: Nearly 50% of all manual actions involved aggressive anchor text that used exact-match keywords.
+ Vague explanations from Google: Google may or may not pinpoint what caused a penalty, but for the most part they are very vague. It’s up to you to perceive what went wrong with the links.
+ Link penalty removals: It takes a long time to get the link penalty removed. You might submit a disavow file and wait to hear the good news from Google, but it might take you two or three requests for reconsideration before the penalty is lifted. This whole process can take up to six months.
https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-penalty-unnatural-inbound-links/
