GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 41 - July 2018

SEO Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst for Google who liaises between Google and webmasters, was speaking at Brighton SEO in 2017 where he talked about disavowing. What’s disavowing? It is when webmasters tell Google that certain links should be discounted when assessing the link equity of a site owner’s website. Gary was saying he doesn’t believe in disavowing. Therefore, he is saying there is no such thing as a bad link, because if there were, then disavowing links would be an important issue to him. There’s another benefit to zeroing out link value for 98% of all links. If people want to pay money for links with zero value that don’t help rankings, then who gets hurt? Yes you, the link buyer. Google wins. WHAT ABOUT PENALTIES? Yes, Google still manually penalizes websites. Therefore, when I acquire links, I follow all the rules on link valuation that I’ve talked about and I make sure my links have editorial justification. I invested in a sports content and link acquisition business called perble.com so I could acquire more links with better editorial justification more cheaply, so I could expand my own projects. My rule of thumb: If it’s a semi-throwaway domain, SAPE is my link source. If it’s a domain I care about, I use the team at W W W . G P W A T I M E S . O R G 36