Enterprise SEO Blog

After the May day update, we started looking for the changes that actually improve the search. Our largest sites, the ones that actually use our power center strategy fully are mostly performing better than before the update on long tail terms. So we have no complaint there.

But for those of us who live in the forensic world of rank issue problem solving, penalty unwinding, and compliance discovery, Google just became vastly less friendly when it removed our ability to see all inbound links that they have indexed in Webmaster Tools. No longer can we download "all external links" - even though the download button still says that. We are only able to see a tiny fraction, now called a "sample" of the links.

So perhaps we're getting faster searches at the expense of some metrics.

Our biggest issue with this loss of information is that Google already is nontransparent, and unresponsive if you have an issue with rank. If your site is penalized, Google does not even acknowledge this fact, and the responsibility of discovery is entirely up to the site owners. Since we know that inbound links are a major source of rank problems and penalties, removing our ability to discover the problem links is clearly harmful to our interests, and provides even more cover for Google to act with no accountability. And if Google mistakenly harms a site with a penalty (did you think G was flawless?) our ability to point out the error is now also compromised.

One of our link builders has been experimenting with using links to deliberately harm the ranks of another owned site. While these experiments generally fail, we do see momentary success, even though the result is not long lasting. But put yourself in the position of a site that is targeted by a 3rd party, throwing unwelcome links at your site. We see this all the time, where upon investigating the inbound links of a client, we discover huge numbers of links from porn, gaming and other bad neighborhoods. Because of Google's new limited information set on inbound links, such discovery is now impossible.

We've also been told that Caffeine has better paid link detection built in. This sounds great, but believe it's a false claim, since no logical explanation accompanies the rumors. And if your interests lie in eliminating paid links, any rumor that suggests a magical ability to detect the undetectable is in your interest, isn't it?