Google Search Completes Rollout of Link Spam Update
Google announced today that it has completed its rollout of the link spam update, which was started a month ago. In an effort to combat sites using spammy links to manipulate rankings, the search engine has developed more effective ways to identify and nullify link spam across multiple languages. The update took a couple weeks longer than anticipated but the algorithmic changes that re-assess the ranking of improperly qualified links has now been fully rolled out. Commercial linking can be differentiated from link spam by specifying the appropriate rel attribute. For example, affiliate links must be identified to the search engine by rel=”sponsored” in order to not trigger any negative effects from the most recent update. Website owners and content creators should be aware of the search engine’s requirements when publishing affiliate links or sponsored/guest posts. While it is appropriate and ethical to disclose commercial links in the content of the post, this is no longer sufficient for Google. A post on the Google Search Central blog warns that this update carries a more strict response for sites that do not properly qualify commercial links: When we detect sites engaging in either publishing or acquiring links with excessive sponsored and guestβ¦
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