Link spam
Link spam is Google's term for creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings. Its spam policies cover buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, excessive link exchanges, automated link creation and keyword-rich links in guest posts, and Google detects it with automated systems including SpamBrain.
What do Google's spam policies count as link spam?
Google lists these examples, among others. Buying and selling links for advertising is allowed when the links are marked rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".
- Exchanging money, goods or services for links, including free products in return for a linked review
- Excessive link exchanges and partner pages that exist only for cross-linking
- Using automated programs or services to create links
- Advertorials with links that pass ranking credit, or optimised anchor text in guest posts and press releases
- Low-quality directory and bookmark links, and keyword-rich links in widgets, footers and templates
- Forum comments and signatures with optimised links
How does Google detect it?
Google announced the algorithm change against webspam that became known as Penguin on 24 April 2012. On 23 September 2016 Penguin became real-time and more granular, devaluing spam by adjusting rankings based on spam signals rather than affecting a whole site.
SpamBrain, Google's AI-based spam prevention system, launched in 2018. With the December 2022 link spam update, announced on 14 December 2022, Google said SpamBrain could detect both sites buying links and sites used to pass outgoing links, and that credit passed by unnatural links would be lost. Human reviewers can also issue manual actions for unnatural links to or from a site, shown in Search Console.
What to do about spammy links
Google says most sites do not need the disavow tool, because it can usually assess which links to trust. It recommends disavowing only when a site has a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links and they have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action. Removing the links at source comes first.
Example
A site buys 200 placements on blogs that each carry a keyword-rich link and no sponsored attribute. Under SpamBrain, the likely outcome is that those links are ignored and the money is wasted. If a reviewer spots the pattern, the site can also receive an Unnatural links to your site manual action.
Related terms
Further reading
Our SaaS Link-Building Agency service puts this into practice for brands in the UK and US.
Sources
- Spam policies for Google web search, Google Search Central
- Another step to reward high-quality sites, Google (24 April 2012)
- Penguin is now part of our core algorithm, Google (23 September 2016)
- How we fought Search spam on Google in 2021, Google (21 April 2022)
- December 2022 link spam update releasing for Google Search, Google (14 December 2022)
- Manual actions report, Search Console Help
- Disavow links to your site, Search Console Help
