SEO Test finalized - Unnatural link growth

Is Google detecting and penalizing unnatural link growth?

Case Study

Sites used for the test:

Release dates of the two sites:

November 27, 2005
November 25, 2005

Both sites are new domains that was not before indexed by Google.

Links added to the sites within the first 3 days of release:

Links from 35 unique web sites + around 0,7-1,2K coop ad weight.
(Details: Two PR 7 links (both home page), ten PR 5 links (6 sitewide and 4 home page), ten PR 4 links (6 sitewide, 2 home page and 2 on subpages), seven PR 3 links (4 sitewide and 3 on subpages), one PR 2 link (home page), four PR 0 links (subpages), one PR N/A link (subpage), four people has added to their signature while posting on PR 3 threads. MSN shows now 10,456 backlinks.)
Links from 8 unique web sites + around 0,7-1,2K coop ad weight.
(Details: four PR 5 links (1 sitewide and 3 home page) and four PR 4 links (1 sitewide and 3 home page. MSN shows now 5,799 backlinks.)

What happened to the sites in the Google SERPs?

Banned or refused to be indexed.
Doing extremely well. 20 - 40 unique visitors a day are being sent only from Google from people searching on 3-6 KW combinations.
Examples of ranking:

#1 for: web related articles
#9 for: webmaster articles
#8 for: most profitable websites

This high ranking for this junk article site could be because of the fresh filter that I have observered with new sites time after time before they hit the sandbox.

Conclusion and confirmation based on this SEO test

Unnatural link building gets detected and penalized by Google. When building your links make sure you don’t - like me - add 10K backlinks the first 3 days when the site is brand new.

EDIT Feb 13, 2006:

There is another factor that should be mentioned on this SEO test. The site in question - netmarketing.us - is an article site with free articles that are hosted on other sites. The refusal of Google to index (still) does not 100% to do with the unatural link growth but could in fact be because of the the duplicate content filter.

EDIT March 15, 2006:

Aaron Wall posts Can You Build Links too Quickly? and gives a good answer that also confirms my test.

EDIT May 17, 2006:

Almost all the links to NetMarketing.us was removed some time ago and today Google listed the site. Start page instantly PR3 and some internal pages PR4 (weird post-4/4-PR-update). In total 8 pages listed in Google so far.

5 responses » Leave a comment

Marcus said on January 9, 2006 at 4:01 pm
This is what I always expected, but now i know for sure.
Thanks! This is useful info
I shall try not to overlink myself, I didn´t have that problem a few months ago but now when I have more websites I have to link slowly.
I guess there isn´t really a way of setting a limit just don´t hit over oh let+s say 9000 backlinks on MSN.

I tried this myself a while ago and added a total of 7500 backlinks (MSN links) all at one time.
And the site is still indexed (luck perhaps)
Now the question is how long will it take for your website to get reindexed by the allmighty Google.
Andre said on March 21, 2006 at 3:43 am
Very odd but interesting. Maybe there are other factors?
Aviva said on July 13, 2006 at 6:24 am
1 thought and 1 question:

1. Could this also involve an issue of trustrank? One of the things that struck me immediately was that netmarketing.us had several high pagerank links to it, which would have given it a much higher pagerank than webrelatedarticles.com. My understanding of trust rank is that it flags high pagerank pages with a low trust score. I wonder if you had the same number of links, but lower pagerank ones, if things would have been different.

2. It don’t know if there’s a typo or something, but I don’t understand why the link difference between the two sites was so large when it seems like approximately the same amount of co-op weight was directed at them.

I do appreciate you carrying out this experiment. Very interesting and helpful.
Avivasearch said on May 9, 2007 at 4:07 am
Excellent article. I guess the only way to fool the search engines is to (unnaturally) build links in a way that appears natural.

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