The SEMrush team shared the results of a study designed to find out what factors most often lead to Google’s manual action for links.
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The company’s specialists analyzed 830 link profiles of those sites that fell under manual sanctions for unnatural links.
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The results showed that the top 3 factors leading to such sanctions include sponsored or paid links (53%); guest posts and press releases (45%); PBN and link networks (27%).
Key findings of the study:
- In most cases, one bad link is not enough to impose manual sanctions. Usually, this is a combination of 2-3 or more types of manipulative behaviour on the site.
- Google can classify as bad even links from reputable sites if they seem unnatural or paid.
- Sites and resources are subject to sanctions more often than individual pages and sections of sites.
- In almost 50% of cases, the cause of the sanctions was the so-called “money anchor” or “money anchor”.
- In most cases, Google does not provide examples of artificial links.
- To get rid of sanctions, you need to spend an average of 2-3 requests to review the site.
- Even very old links can lead to manual actions.
