Video Transcript – Culling Bad SEO Links

Culling Bad SEO Links – original post here

Welcome back, Rankers. I’m out in the rest of the office with the workers again this week, hence the iPhone recording device that we’ve got right here. I wanted to talk to you a little bit this week about Penguin. It’s nearly here, but it’s not quite.

Incidentally, a lot of people have been asking about how do you do local search now, how do you find your local search results now that Google’s taken away that little option in the search where you used to be able to say show me results in Britain. Well, we’re using a thing, just the ad preview and diagnosis tool from Google. It allows you to see the city. It’s used for AdWords. You don’t have to be logged in to user or anything like that. You can use it completely anonymously but it gives you that local search results that you are after.

I want to talk to you a little bit today about your disavow file. Back in January, I did the story about four things to decide whether a backlink is spammy or not. That’s fine if you’ve only got 20 or so, or 15 or so. But, if you got hundred thousands, how are you going to start that cull? You don’t want to go through every backlink and try to work out, “Is this an anonymous registration. I have to read the content. Is the content crappy?” Those things that we discussed in that video, you don’t want to go and do that if you’ve got thousands and thousands of backlinks.

One of the things that we do here and that we’ve talked about actually writing the script for is basically if you get a backlink, go to majesticseo.com. Or, go to the Moz one which I haven’t used. Ahrefs, I think it is. Is that the one, the other one that does backlinks? I use the Majestic. There is a free version, but we have the paid version. Look for links, or domains I should say, that have either the word article, directory, SEO, or submit in them. All of those will be spammy, pretty much, even directory ones.

You might say, “Oh but a business directory.” Yeah, if a business directory is a good directory, it probably won’t have directory in the URL. They only came sort of after it, so for instance, Yellow Pages business directory, True Local here in Australia. There are a bunch of others that are reputable. WOMO. There are a bunch of others. Yelp. This list goes on and on and on. A bunch of good directories out there that don’t have the word directory in them.

And then, what we do here is we look for backlinks coming from .ru, which is Russia, .pl, which is Poland, and .mx which is Mexico, just because in our experience here, they’re the ones that typically we’re finding a lot of spammy backlinks on. I would probably ad .pk to that, and maybe some .in, and maybe .id, and other countries where you know the spam websites are. Because look, it still works. If you were doing backlink spam since the last Penguin update, it would’ve worked in these 18 months.

Let’s have a look at this search here, skip bins. The reason I’m using that is that it’s notorious for the people trying to rank for that phrase going for really cheap SEO and buying backlinks. You can see here, this one, mobileskips.com.au. He’s got 53 different sites linking to him. Why would a skip bin company have 53 different sites linking to him? That doesn’t make sense unless you’re an awesome active member of your local community and you’ve got a skip bin in every home. I don’t know. Yeah, that’s unnatural. They’re number one for skip bins. They’ve got 53 domains totalling over 400 and something backlinks.

One of the things is they’ve only really got one piece of anchor text in their backlinks which I would consider reasonable, which is visit website. Everything else is like skip bins for hire. This contact us is all right. Skip hire also.

The reason I say that, these are all sure signs of someone obtaining backlinks. Then you can see some of these sites here. We would normally say .au for the most part in Australia or anyway…It’s okay. Your local country domain might be okay unless it’s with a .pl or .iu or .com. If you’re an .nz or .za or whatever, you might have a better chance and know that the local domains are less likely to spam from. That’s our experience here anyway. There are always exceptions to the rule. This is really a process to whittle down the list that you want to rank for.

I’m looking at this one here, ozeverything.com.au. I’ve never heard of that before. If this was my site, I may go and have a look at that and disallow that. businessinpipwater, this is another one, although the anchor text is all right.

I’ll just walk you through those again. If the URL has article in it, if it has directory in it, if it has SEO in it, if it has submit in it, if it has .ru in it, and possibly if it has press in it, as well…I would add that because there’s a lot of less than optimal press release sites out there now as well ever since Google started cracking down on spammy backlinks…then, you can go and submit your disavow file. That might make it easier to add domains to your disavow file. You can just go say everything from this domain do Google, please ignore.

Yeah, that guy, mobileskips.com.au, doing really well at the moment. If you want a phrase to watch, that’s the one I’d watch. If you want to know if Penguin’s happened yet, you can go and have a look at all these algorithm chasers like MozCast and all the others out there and watch what they say. Or, you can just watch a couple of these searches yourself. Here’s one that we know. They’ve got a lot of spammy backlinks and they rank number one.

The search was skip bins. I am based in Melbourne. What we’re saying is as soon as Penguin’s rolled out here in Australia, this one won’t be number one anymore. I’m not talking about twos or threes. They should be down here somewhere down in the 30s.

Hopefully, that’s helpful. Good luck with Penguin. Incidentally, check this out. This is the ad preview tool…hang on, get that right…on the iPad. I’m just trying to get that to focus. It’s the old version of Google on the iPad, and it’s broken. Where’s the responsive, Google? I hope they get clobbered by Panda.

All right, we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.