Has Google Made Unnatural Link Building Easier?

[sbrault74]

I see lots of competitors and crappy sites ranking well for highly competitive keywords in the web hosting niche.

After analysing their backlinks, I noticed that most of them had only 1 or 2 backlinks to the page they wanted to rank. The anchor text is usually a slight variation of the targeted keyword.

Now suppose you are able to rank well for a handful of highly lucrative keywords using very few spammy links. That would mean that even if you got a Penguin penalty, cleaning up your link profile would take an hour at most.

I really have no intentions of using this strategy but it's frustrating to see spammy competitors outranking you with crappy sites and a handful of backlinks.

Your thoughts?

[TomLondon]

It seems that everyone is talking about this at the moment.

Google would appear to have got super addicted to providing fresh content, that it is ranking the newer sites higher than those with most authority. Why? I have no idea. Everyone is just taking the black hat route of making more sites, newer sites that can cheat the system for now, until Google packs up it's ideas and changes the algo.

I mean look at what has happened this year with updates, everyday is an update. I think we need to hold tight for the storm to settle and wait for everything to stabilise. Google can't keep this up for long, the SERPs change everyday!

[sbrault74]

There's a guy I see he just buys a sh*tload of spammy links and ranks high for about 1 or 2 months. When his website gets hits, he just buy another domain, puts back the exact same content (doesn't even care to change the website name in the image), spams the hell out of it and now he's back at the top with a domain he bought on August 25!!!

That's right! He ranked a brand new domain only 3 days after buying it! The website already got over 15k backlinks.

[sbrault74]

I also happen to see new websites coming in and out of the top 10 on a weekly basis for some competitive keywords. Lots of them are about 6 months old.

[FedeEinhorn]

I see this all the time within my niche and almost every niche. Google has become a useless engine, unless you are looking for news or information, but in that moment you decide to buy something, BAM, pure crap.... maybe because those sites are the ones that buy google ads?

[sbrault74]

I don't think they buy google ads for most of them (the spammers)