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I'm sure it would probably be valuable and pass on some SEO benefit but if it's likely that someone has purchased this domain purely for transferring the link equity of inbound links to your website, then there's always a chance that this is going to be picked up on. A small chance, but a chance nonetheless.

Thank you for the responses everybody I appreciate your input.

Thank you very much for the thoughtful answer and the helpful advice!

Does it work? Yeah, probably. For now. Should it work? Probably not. I obviously haven't seen the sites, but if they're hosted on the same hosting account with the same IP address, then it wouldn't surprise me if this was eventually hit. And if it was reported, it definitely would not pass a manual review by the Google spam team IMO. As others have said, it's super risky. Just a few weeks ago I didn't let someone join my platform to provide local SEO services specifically because they are doing this sort of thing as their main link acquisition tactic for their clients, and while it works right now it's definitely very grey hat and will stop working at some point. I've spoken with people who used to operate Personal Blog Networks like this, and they always get hit eventually. I'd also hate to be the SEO brought in to clean this sort of thing up and get the clients that this company loses ranking again. Lots of small businesses sound like they'll be harmed because of this, unfortunately. Hope that helps! John

Absolutely. I definitely do not believe that Google is just ignoring bad links now, and Penguin can be a really hard one to debug once you think you have been affected especially since they aren't really (from what I have seen) announcing them anymore because they folded it into the main algorithm. When you have a manual penalty for manipulative links, sometimes you have to go the hard way of disavowing after you've tried rounds of getting them removed and it's still not enough. This may be the main reason, along with negative SEO, that Google has left that tool in Search Console. I don't expect it to go away anytime soon. Interesting times we live in.

We contacted Majestic but no change from them. The backlink actually got removed from the offending site.  Good to see our trust flow has gone up again.  We had a client who was getting pitches from another seo company so I suspect they might have added this link temporarily and then removed it - crazy ethics!

Thank you SO much for raising this question! The Beginner's Guide To SEO is currently being updated and will address exactly this. Google's John Mueller has stated in the past that it's ok to put a link on a client's site back to yours as long as it's rel="nofollow". When I was previously self-employed at Pryde Marketing, and heard Google state this, we instantly changed our client footer "Made by Pryde Marketing" links to rel="nofollow" and almost immediately saw organic improvements. I can't say for certain that changing our client > Pryde links to "nofollow" 100% caused this, but it didn't hurt. My personal opinion is that you can benefit from clients linking back to your site in a credible way (ex. If you built their website) and have a rel="nofollow", you will be fine. If you reverse engineer any of the top web developer's sites, you'll likely see quite a few "built by xyz" linking back to their domains.

Thanks, Kevin!

Thanks, Andy. They've been around for a long time so I can't say they've created a drop. I'm more or less wondering if they could be holding us back. They show up in SEMRush as having spam scores that vary. I'm going to disavow the ones above 50 and see what happens. Probably not much but we'll see.

Hello, has anyone got an idea then? We get follow link we put rel=nofollow - is it better hat follow vs follow or for google, it still looks like exchange?

Hey Patrick, Thanks for your response. I have read Kristina's article before but I'm afraid now it might be a bit irrelevant with the latest Penguin update. Google should be recognizing linkbuilding efforts much faster now that Penguin operates in real-time.

Hi Leggo, thanks for the question! Your current setup is definitely not optimal for SEO, as you are discovering. There are a few things that you can do to help yourself out here. First, there are three good resources here on Moz that you should check out (the last 2 done by me in 2012, but still very relevant): https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link https://moz.com/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond https://moz.com/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday On to your specific questions. You ask how to set up your internal linking. Your current setup of linking to just 20 pages internally is definitely not helping you out because you are effectively just telling Google about those 20 articles and not the longtail of articles that you have. XML sitemaps are for discovery purposes for Google, not ranking. An HTML sitemap is a must for you if you have a lot of content and can also help with discoverability and a bit with rankings as well, but it's definitely not all you need to do. If your content is structured well (in categories that make sense, tagged, etc), then you can set up a system (all depends on your CMS how this is configured) that links similar articles with other similar articles. Some sites have done smart things with linking to specific articles that have more potential search volume, and deprioritizing the number of internal links to articles that don't have much potential. In the latter case, eventually you should audit if you should remove those lower volume or quality pages to help your site overall. You say that it is indeed the case that you have these pages. I would at first not put them in the sitemap. Then, decide if you want to a) update them to make them quality or b) remove them. That's an internal decision based off of current available resources (time, people) and opportunity. I've done both in the past (updated or removed) and both can definitely help. It just depends on your overall strategy for your site! Good luck!

Hi Chris, I was just referring to the task of a link audit, which would include downloading your links from Google Search Console and/or third-party sites, auditing them to identify the toxicity, and then disavowing the toxic ones.

Hi Julie, Sorry, I don't think I agree that Google ignores links from pages that have "links" in the title. That would mean they ignore this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents/links/ Which obviously wouldn't make sense. Cheers. Paddy

Very much so. Thank you for your insight! We will have to restructure our packages.

Thank you so much Tyler! This was helpful.

Thank you very much for your kind and considerate response. Rob

Hi, Depending on how long ago the links were added, you might need to wait a bit before you start seeing links in tools. Also, I would try Majestic and Ahrefs to check for links since not every link gets picked up by one tool. Using Ahrefs I can see a pickup in links pointing to your domain recently. Another place to look would be Google Search Console under "links pointing to my site". Oh and in regards to your second question, always check your main domain (it looks like for you it's the www version, non-secured). Hope that helps!