Google continues their crackdown on link networks around the world with a recent announcement by Matt Cutts on Twitter that the company has taken down seven such networks in Japan. As is usual for this type of event, this announcement by Cutts did not include any specific details of the networks in Japan that they shut down.
“[I am] incredibly proud of [our] Japanese webspam team. Over [the] last few months they’ve taken action on seven link networks! [This makes the] playing field more level,” Google’s leader of Webspam Team, Matt Cutts, tweeted.
Here is Matt’s tweet:
Link networks are a black hat search engine optimization technique that attempts to boost sites rankings in search results by artificially building links to them. While many other factors are involved in deciding which web pages are displayed in a search result, these link networks sometimes give sites an unfair advantage over their white hat competitors.
Among even black hat SEOs, these link networks are seen as less and less trustworthy given Google’s strict enforcement of rules against them in recent years. What was once an almost sure way to get a site ranked higher in search results is now an almost sure way to eventually become the target a Google penalty for one’s web site. These “unnatural or paid links”, as Google calls them, are seen as a way of negatively manipulating search results, and therefore, are associated with lowering the overall user experience on Google search.
Japan is not the only country to be hit recently. In the past couple of months, Google has announced that they shut down these types of link networks in Spain, Germany, and Italy. They want to send a message around the world that this tactic is no longer viable and should be avoided by webmasters. Over the past decade, Google has been more and more insistent towards webmasters that their Pagerank algorithm is just a piece of the puzzle and should not be obsessed over by building these spammy link networks.
What is the best way to avoid this and still have a top ranked site on Google? The answer is simple: focus on providing quality content for your visitors. Meanwhile, a professional SEO service can provide a webmaster with the latest ideas and innovations in search engine optimization. It is a field that is constantly changing and it is beneficial to focus on your site’s content, while letting the SEO professionals handle the details of getting your site ranked higher in search results.
