Seo ( internal Linking ) Riddle me this RED.

[PeterShene]

What im about to share is something I have touched on before but never found a clear enough example as this to have a discussion around.
Id love anybody to weight in on this and share their thoughts. So below are two pictures of a footer present throughout a website:

Jusat how long is this thing?

Ok. So as you can see that the webmaster has been doing is basically creating the same page, for web design {city}. In every instacew when you click on the footer links you will fond the exact same content except the city name being a difference.

So what we have is :

Web design city x ( All the other pages link to it via that footer )
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Web design city a Web design city y Web design city z ALSO Web design city x

Web design city y ( All the other pages link to it via that footer )
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Web design city a Web design city x Web design city z ALSO Web design city y

So page lets say web design x has about let say 50 links with web design x as anchor text on other page footers in internal linking.

Im running my own experiment with this. I would love if you guys would share your thoughts on any effect this has on rankings.

DOES Webb design x gain any ranking benefit for the keyword web design x thats been spammed internally.

Obviously to me this is a shocker most guys I see employing this are ranking really well really fast.
Despite google's claims on duplicate content, and also keyword spamming, keyword spamming with slight alterations.

Ive been to the webmaster central forum with this question they said its wrong report it in short. I didnt bother because years ago I realised google doesn't do anything about much unless its affects paid search or reeaaaallly bad user experience ( porn, viruses ,scams ).

@bigredseo

 

[bigredseo]

Thanks for tagging me on this Peter.

I've seen some big footers in my time, but this one may take the cake! Wow!!

There are two answers to this particular question;
1) Does adding this text (and link) in the footer help? YES
2) Does Google frown on this, and devalue links in the footer? YES

If EVERY page created is unique for each city, then Google has no choice but to consider it unique content, albeit redundant content. Are they getting traffic on each one of the pages they list? Highly doubtful!

There is a psychological aspect at play also however in that any user that comes to the page, and sees the crazy list in the footer, they know it's spam and the "dis-trust" flag is raised. They also would probably never agree to put a list like that on their own site. With the hundreds of clients that we've worked with, getting more than a handful of links in a footer is a struggle sometimes.

Does reporting it help? It doesn't hurt. It takes just a few minutes and if something comes out of it, awesome. I'd still report it.

Any time you link a phrase in your website to another page in your website, you're boosting the overall relativity. If nearly every page links to every page, then you've devalued the links entirely, so that's not a good strategy.

So at the end of the day, is this a good thing to put on the bottom of your website? No, absolutely not. Does it work? Yes, with limited success. Are there better ways to accomplish the same task? Absolutely.

Creating doorway pages just isn't an effective use of time. Creating a landing page that is tailored to a specific user's needs, that's a different story, but what they've done in the footer goes against every possible guideline and experiment with regards to increasing ranking.

Internal links do count, but not as much as links from other places.

 

[PeterShene]

Thank for diving in Red your thoughts are always well respected.

I like that you say that this thing puts a red flag up for users.

We both agree its not a good move at all especially with the above thought you mentioned.

So my next question, tale adwords for example, you have a certain character limit.
You have to have relevant content with regards to your ads vs website.
Your ad is assigned a estimated click through rate, based on history, bid , relevancy and quality.
You cannot spam a ad, if you do via the extentions they simply never show.
You cannot add your phone number to show in the serp to try bypass the click.
You cant even capitalise words entirely only sentence case or standard format.

Now i know not all of this applies to the above post directly but indirectly google can assert so much control in paid search. Why not do it in organic search too?

Is it resources that it would take to combat this not worth investing because it wouldn't return them a profit?

I wish that bing and a few other search engines could gain alot more traction. I think that google needs to pushed out of its monopoly. If i know as a web user or wemaster that there is a search engine out there that is more fair, yields better search results, has decent traffic im going there and google would knowing that would be forced to clean up.

Its like having the only grocery store in a city, you could pretty much do what you want whatever serves you because ... where would anybody else go they take your nonsense or starve. Add another store and all of a sudden you have to clean up your act , competitive prices, better service ect ect I think you get the idea.

I hear duck duck go is doing well same for amazon and bing is set to make a comeback from what ive read. Sadly I dont know if this is even possible against google not for a while atleast.

 

[PeterShene]

Btw this is how the chat with google went.


Ok. So as you can see that the webmaster has been doing is basically creating the same page, for web design {city}. In every instance when you click on the footer links you will find the exact same content except the city name being a difference.

So what we have is :

Web design city x ( All the other pages link to it via that footer )
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Web design city a Web design city y Web design city z ALSO Web design city x

Web design city y ( All the other pages link to it via that footer )
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Web design city a Web design city x Web design city z ALSO Web design city y

So page lets say web design x has about let say 50 links with web design x as anchor text on other page footers in internal linking.

DOES Webb design x gain any ranking benefit for the keyword web design x that's been spammed internally.

Obviously to me this is a shocker most guys I see employing this are ranking really well really fast.
Despite google's claims on duplicate content, and also keyword spamming, keyword spamming with slight alterations.

It seems to be working. These guys are so arrogant they even advertise the site they buy paid do follow links from.

They carry the number one rank despite showing up about a month ago in many heavily competed search terms.

I been advised to report it. this was a few months back and nothing came of it, are spam links ok, buying paid links too seems so. Or am i missing something?

Please do explain this situation to me.
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barryhunter said:
It probably comes more under 'Doorway Pages' than 'DUplicate Content'
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721311?hl=en
... in general these techniques often work really well for the short-term, but long term dont work out, as they get 'found out' and rankins suffer.

I said: Edit message
Agreed reading the link you posted that is a much more fitting description.
Long term could be anything from 3 months plus. Thats how long ago it started. I mean if we lose 3,4,5 months to black hatters they already have the next site up and ready to go.
I am moaning a bit here but moaning with a acceptance that this isnt just going to go away, its annoying stuff like this makes it hard to stay white hat, makes you hope that google loses its monopoly on search.

barryhunter said:
"makes you hope that google loses its monopoly on search."
huh? Being manipulated by Black Hat techniques is not unique to Google.
Other search engines can be manipulated in similar ways by actors willing to do it.

I said: Edit message
I know that, but think a bit bigger. Without a monopoly they will clean up their act, id rather work on the search engine with less spam, and google would know that. Right now Paid advertising is where all their spam focus is at. Most things considered as spam you aren't even allowed to publish. curious isn't it. . Competition is healthy

RickRoll said:
Whack a mole doesn't scale
Google deals with it algorithmically with a slant toward avoiding false positives
High impact niches are addressed with greater zeal
We don't get to see the billions of pages suppressed or de-indexed that have already been taken action on
You should hand around here and watch the daily steam of webmaters doing this very thing complain about their poor performance

I said: Edit message
Your first point is noted. As for the second...
Didnt google say they encourage spam reports ? Now its because we perform poorly ?
If I was deciding if i should take a chance and manipulate googles rankings by violating their terms and I came here and looked at these expert responses ? Id go for it.
You guys probably turn more white hatters with your attitude than blackhatworld

 

[bigredseo]

DuckDuckGo is a great alternative when it comes to privacy etc. But Google is still the king of search.

With regards to Google reviewing an individual site, they generally only do this themselves on large sites - we're talking tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. 90% of what happens on Google is based on math (the algorithms), and scaling that takes time in many cases.

One of the things that will likely hurt the site you're talking about is that they use "web design" or "web designer in" over and over again. I'm sure Google has SOMETHING written that if a word is repeated X times, it's spam.

We used to refer to it as Keyword Density back in the 90s. The math was about 3% being the threshold. So for every 100 words on the page, you could mention your phrase 3 times. Of course, that was spammy back then and it's even more spammy now.

The reading style online has changed, so 100 words is roughly 1 paragraph. There are 20 words in a sentence and 5 sentences in a paragraph. This is ROUGH math, but that's how much of the web is configured.

As far as comparing to others, the best advise I can give is to build a better mousetrap. Essentially better content will outrank other websites. If a spammy site is outranking a normal site, then likely there are boxes that haven't been checked that are causing other issues.

That's not to say it's always this way - heck, I deal with a spammy SEO agency in my town for the past few years, and they still get a better rank. We just decided to concentrate on other phrases which deliver better results.

With regards to Adwords - I wouldn't link any of those spammy pages to an adwords campaign. Instead, I'd create a UNIQUE page, set it to NOINDEX and then tailor the entire content around the particular city. This way there's no question in Google's mind that I'm getting a quality score of 9 or 10 and not diluting the quality with other phrases etc.

The response from the person saying that you should watch every other webmaster complaining about performance is a flippant answer. There's no value in doing that of course, and you're talking about an actual situation of blatant spam, not theory or "how do I" type things.

Reporting to Gary Illyes who is Google's Webmaster liaison will likely get a cloaked response of "just do better", but you may try reaching out to him on twitter with the handle @methode