Securing the Anchor Text Signal Against Spam Site Impact: Googles Approach

In a recent Google SEO office hours session, Duy Nguyen from the search quality team addressed a question about the impact of links from spam sites on a domain’s trustworthiness. Interestingly, Nguyen explained that Google is focused on protecting the anchor text signal and weeding out spam to improve the quality of search results.

Google’s Approach to Untrustworthy Links

Google does not trust links from spam sites, and if a domain is demoted due to spam, it can impact all outbound links. According to Nguyen, this approach helps maintain the accuracy and quality of Google’s anchor signals.

Note that while the broader SEO community talks about “building trust,” this is really about ensuring that your site is not considered spam and detected by Google. To that end, Google uses an artificial intelligence platform known as Spam Brain to weed out low-quality sites and index pages at different stages.

The Spam Brain platform blocks low-quality sites at crawl time, so they never make it into Google’s search results. It can also help detect spam that has already been indexed and prevent it from ranking. By training the AI on Google’s vast knowledge of spam, the platform has become incredibly effective at catching both new and existing spam patterns.

How Google Identifies Spam Sites

Google doesn’t reveal the specifics of how it identifies spam sites, but there have been patents and research papers published that give us some insight. For example, Google uses a “link distance ranking algorithm” method of ranking links, which assigns scores based on the distances between pages that link to a set of trusted seed sites.

This approach is used to determine which sites are normal and which are spammy. Research papers cited in a previous article also describe how the Penguin algorithm is used to calculate spamminess through link distance. The producing a ranking for pages using distances in a web-link graph patent explains, “the system then assigns lengths to the links based on properties of the links and properties of the pages attached to the links.”

Reducing the Link Graph

Google also uses a “reduced link graph” approach to remove low-quality links and minimize spam. This involves creating a sub-graph containing links that are flow-ranked from the trusted seed sites and have the same length as the paths in the original link graph.

While it may be obvious that Google does not trust links from penalized or spammy sites, it’s not always easy to know which sites are trustworthy. Therefore, it may be prudent to research sites and avoid those that are already linking to spammy sites. Rather than relying on third-party metrics, it’s important to understand how Google detects and ranks spam to build a trustworthy site.

If you want to ensure your site is trusted by Google, consider seeking professional SEO services to help improve your rankings and remove any spam or low-quality links.

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