In a recent Twitter buzz, Google’s John Mueller has informed that Google neutralizes bad links and neutralizes spam instead of penalizing them.
Such a statement has shown Google’s stance on penalty on these spam links and has created a storm of doubts on the Company’s policy.
Let us first learn about what bad links refer to.
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What Is A Bad Link?
A bad link is one such link that does not adhere to Google’s guidelines. These can stem right from the building process. A user must stay cautious and away from link farms, paid links, link wheels, and black-hat link-making techniques.
Links referring you to multiple other links, usually for advertising, are referred to as spam. Spams are a form of bad links, and they cause trouble to the user.
Over-optimized anchors also fall under this category. Unrelated links on headers and footers of external websites are a violation of Google’s guidelines.
On the other hand, good links are the links that comply with all the guidelines of Google and are informative to the user. They provide a convenient and disturbance-free experience.
Google Neutralizes Bad Links
Bad links are available in significant quantities and often disrupt a smooth user interface. People earlier believed that they were penalized, so that sites took the guidelines seriously.
However, according to the recent tweets of John Mueller, this assumption has been declared primarily false.
His reply was to a fellow user, who brought an unethical practice into notice pertaining to websites that stemmed their links all over their client’s pages and hid their website’s link in their client’s footer (in the copyright). It was evident that he was referring to a bad link.
To this, John Mueller replied that algorithms make sure that google neutralizes bad links on their own most of the time. In such conditions, there is no longer a need to penalize them.
Penalizing vs Neutralizing: How Do They Differ?
One may wonder about the difference between penalizing and neutralizing.
Neutralizing
Neutralizing refers to ignoring the links and penalizing refers to demoting the rank of the link for not complying with the guidelines. In neutralizing, the link may drop a page or two because of a change in value but wouldn’t affect the website.
Penalizing
In penalizing, the effect could be fatal to a website, dropping down, say, ten pages in search or not occurring at all. The users would not be able to find it in organic search.
The Aftermath Of Neutralizing Bad Links
Such a reveal has led to a wave of questions amongst the users about how the differences are made between a site solely built for bad intentions or if a backlink is affecting the site that is now neutralized. It also raises questions if the feature ‘disavowing’ will be rendered useless or not.
What Is Disavowing?
Disavowing refers to discarding harmful links pointing to your site. Its use came to light in case of a demotion in ranks due to penalty by removal of spam links.
However, with Mueller’s tweet bringing the preference of automatic neutralization of sites, this feature might seem of no use.
Conclusion
Thus, sites start adhering to the guidelines prescribed by Google to smoothen the user experience. Google can ensure this by maintaining a strict penalty system if they don’t, but also assuring low to minimal damage of sites victim of spam links, with no fault of their own.
We think you are now clear about how Google neutralizes bad links instead of penalizing them. If you have further queries regarding any of the google updates, leave them in the comments below. We would be glad to help you out!