If you recall in one of the latest Google algorithm updates (Penguin), among other things, they continued to emphasize the quality and as much as possible, intent behind backlinks leading to fairly massive changes in how unnatural backlinks such as article directories, low quality articles, templates (widgets, wordpress templates as two examples) were treated.
Here is Matt Cutts in a quick video that puts even more color around the types of back links that Google see’s as legitimate and those that are less legitimate –
While Matt (or anyone else from Google) never come right out and say exactly what they are looking for when they dismiss or lower the emphasis on a given back link, it’s pretty obvious that there are a few things at play here:
1. Too many back links with the same or very similar anchor text (the text over top of the link that brings people back to your website). The best guess here is that Google has made some assumptions around “normal” linking behavior that see’s a mix of anchor text, some perhaps as natural as “click here” mixed in with optimized anchor text as well as the number and timing of back-links (meaning that if they see a sudden huge spike in back links with similar or highly optimized anchor text, then that is not natural). So the objective here is to always think longer-term and natural – creating quality content that leads to OTHER people voluntarily linking back to you is the key.
2. The quality of the content containing the back links. It is less clear how they go about doing this, but Matt alludes to it in the video by saying that a low quality article that ends up in several places around the net containing the same anchor text linking back to the same page will raise suspicions on the quality of those back links.
Google traffic is important to us, and should be important to you too…it’s always good to know why short-cuts and black-hat SEO techniques will not work, here is another reminder.
