GOOGLE pure SPAM - How does pure spam look like

LINKR RISK MANAGEMENT
www.link-audit-consulting.com
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A
deep dive
into
Fitted
Wardrobes
How does Pure Spam look like?

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Learn from the Google Penalty of FittedWardrobes.com
Google called a site “pure spam”. The site owner
shortly after complained about the manual penalty he
received and obviously his drop in traffic.
That made us curious what Google refers to as “Pure
Spam”.
And here is the result – we proudly present the 7th
deep dive case study by a Certified Link Research
Tools Professional.
We look forward to your feedback and
greatly appreciate you sharing this quality piece of
work by Harry Tschuggnall
Enjoy & Learn!
Christophe C. Cemper

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Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• The day after
• What happened to fittedwardrobes.com?
• Did fittedwardrobes.com have a good visibility?
• Did fittedwardrobes.com have lots of suspicious or toxic links?
• Spammy link breakdown
• Is fittedwardrobes.com part of a link network?
• Enter Competitive Link Detox
• Did fittedwardrobes.com have lots of weak links?
• Did fittedwardrobes.com have an unnatural link profile?
• Wow – a Wikipedia link
• Competitive Landscape Analysis on its keyword ratios
• Strong competitors and another spam site?
• Did fittedwardrobes.com have lots of sneaky redirects?
• Did fittedwardrobes.com remove some links already?
• Did fittedwardrobes.com get a lot of new links?
• Conclusion

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Introduction
I recently found this post in the Google Webmaster Forums where the owner of
fittedwardrobes.com complained about his site being manually penalized for “pure spam” as
Google called it.

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Ann Smarty picked up the topic on Threadwatch shortly after as this was the first time Google
called something pure spam in a message.

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She also mentioned the
definition by Google
what they called “pure
spam” earlier:
QUOTE: Google on Pure
spam
” They appear to use
aggressive spam
techniques such as
automatically
generated gibberish,
cloaking and scraping
content from other
websites“
Looking at the "manual
penalty" graph, it
seems like Google is
getting much more
aggressive with
removing "pure" spam
sites:

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Then doing a site search on Google (site:fittedwardrobes.com) we get this result:

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No results. That means the website got de-indexed fully! So we thought:
Let‟s find out why this happened!
The day after
It looks like that reaction on Threadwatch caused a couple things only a few hours later
So called “Google Top Contributors” replied with discouraging and not so top comments at all

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The post was from June 19 – one day later looking at Google‟s forum where I found the post, it is
gone, just the comments are left. Now the forum post looks like this:

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Makes you wonder who
actually deleted that:
post – a frustrated
site owner?
Or the moderator?
Or Matt Cutts himself?
Surprisingly, the
following day,
Google listed the
results for
fittedwardrobes.com
again, at least via
the SITE: command

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What happened to fittedwardrobes.com?
So what happened? Was the de-indexing of fittedwardrobes.com a mistake made by Google? And
why is the question gone from the Google Forum? Unfortunately, it is not possible to answer
these questions for us now.
What we can do is to look at the link profile in detail and also do a Link Detox because as you can
see later, the site has already been hit before twice by Penguin so it is very likely that also the
de-indexing was link based or at least those links caused many red flags to go off.

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Did fittedwardrobes.com have a good visibility?
First, I am curious if fittedwardrobes.com had a good visibility, so I am going to check this issue on
Search metrics:

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Wow! They already dropped around the 5th of October (Penguin #3). It seems to me that either
fittedwardrobes.com didn‟t realize this drop of their visibility or they didn‟t react to this first drop.
After that, they have been hit by the last Penguin Update (Penguin #4 or 2.0) and now they
dropped further and were even de-indexed due to that manual penalty.
It seems to me that Google tried to get rid of fittedwardrobes.com two times but did not succeed so
they finally de-indexed the domain.
As we know, Penguin is a link-based algorithm.
So let‟s check fittedwardrobes.com‟s link profile in order to find out why it got de-indexed.
So let‟s start the tools!!

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Did fittedwardrobes.com have lots of suspicious or toxic
links?
To find out the reasons for the de-indexing of fittedwardrobes.com, we use Link Research Tools and
in particular we use the Link Detox tool to see if it might have a lot of bad or toxic links.

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First we simply enter the URL: fittedwardrobes.com and select the theme of the domain.
Because we know from the Google Webmaster Forum thread that fittedwardrobes.com already got
an “unnatural link warning”, we pick „Yes“ and paste the text we found in the original post. Link
Research Tools now collect all singular emails to relate them. This ultimately improves the
analysis results, as Google now gives example links with their warning e-mails as mentioned
recently on Search Engine Land and anounced by Matt Cutts.
Because we want to check the existing Backlinks, we pick “Classic Mode”. As we don‟t have any
back link files for fittedwardrobes.com (i.e. their link building reports, exports from other link
tools, etc.) and also don‟t have access to their Google Webmaster Tools, we skip the next step
and don‟t upload additional Backlinks or a disavow file.

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These are the metrics the tool is
going to look at. OK so let‟s
“Detox my site“!

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Wow! Look at this:

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Well, it seems to me that fittedwardrobes.com has got a lot of spammy links!
Let‟s scroll down and look at the links in detail!
First let‟s look at the “Link Health Breakdown“:

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• As u can see, 170 links are looking suspicious, 37 are toxic and only 45 links are healthy.
Second, let‟s check the “Link Detox Risk Breakdown“:
• Third, we check the “Detox Rules Breakdown”:

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To see all of the rules that are applied here, I downloaded a
spreadsheet:

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So the tool tells us exactly why it thinks the link is toxic or suspicious. These will be the rules apply
in our case (There are about 20 rules the tool is able to process). Their meaning in detail:
• SUSP15 : Links coming from typical web link directories. This is a common way to inflate link
popularities and/or sell links. Not recommended these days.
• SUSP4 : Page has CEMPER Title Rank™ 30+, CEMPER Power*Trust™ Domain < 5 and
CEMPER Power*Trust™ < 5.
• TOX1: Domain is not indexed in Google. Usually a sign for a penalty.
• SUSP1 : Page has no CEMPER Power*Trust™ and CEMPER Power*Trust™ Domain < 5 – a
page without external links on a weak domain.
• SUSP3 : Page has more than 10 Backlinks from 1 Class-C, CEMPER Power*Trust™ Domain <
5 and CEMPER Power*Trust™ < 5 – possible Link Network.
• SUSP16 : Links coming from typical article directories. This is a common way to automatically
spread content on many domains. Not recommended these days.
• SUSP14 : Page has no Page Rank™ but at least some weak links. This could be a sign for a
page punishment by Google. Google Page Rank™ is more and more inaccurate and many
webmasters don‟t trust that metric anymore.

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Spammy link breakdown
• As you can see, fittedwardrobes.com has
• 88 links coming from typical web directories,
• 57 links from pages that rank for their title but having a Power*Trust < 5.
• 37 links are from domains that are not indexed anymore,
• 15 links are from domains that have no Backlinks at all
• 4 links come from pages that don‟t have Page Rank
• 2 links are from typical article directories and
• 2 links com from an older domain ( > 6 months) either having a missing Google Page Rank
Domain or a Google Page Rank of 0
• 2 links are from Pages that have more than 10 Backlinks from 1 Class-C

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Now we know what kind of links fittedwardrobes.com has. The next step is to filter the toxic links
and to look at them in detail:

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Let‟s click on some links and see what‟s coming up:
http://mail.afionline.org/Business/Furniture

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Ah! A web directory that gives SEO tips
as well This site has been de-
indexed as usually low quality or
spammy sites (TOX 1 rule applies).
Let‟s look at another one:
http://www.webmaster-
dir.co.uk/business_and_economy/
Games/home_and_garden?p=6

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Another webmaster Directory, also Tox1 (de-indexed) So the Link Detox tool did a good job in
finding the toxic Backlinks of fittedwardrobes.com.
Let‟s have a look at some of the suspicious links:

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Let‟s check some pages to see what comes up:
I select the first one which is “High Risk“ and SUSP 15. Please note that “High Risk” usually
triggered many more signals, and you can see those when clicking the (+) besides the URL.

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This one is also a web directory:
http://www.dirlinks.co.uk/business_and_economy/blogs/home_and_garden?p=3

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Ah! The website looks almost the same as the site before did but on this website the headline is
“Dir Links UK“ (before it was “Webmaster Dir UK“) Further, they even have the same owner.
Let‟s use the Quick Backlinks Profiler (QBL) in order to see how big this network is.
Is fittedwardrobes.compart of a link network?
First we start the QBL: In the image below, the page has almost no CEMPER Power™ and super
low CEMPER Trust™! We also have to look at the anchor text ratio, but let‟s do that later. The
breakdown doesn‟t promise much except money keywords.

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Now we want to try to identify the link network. After receiving the results from the QBL:

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Let‟s scroll down to see all the links in the table. Then we copy the URL of one of the
assumed link network websites into the URL filter box dive
Now we scroll to the right to find the details we are looking for (REG, IP, DNR, DNS…).

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In the next step, we reset all filters and type in the IP address from www.dirlinks.co.uk to see if
fittedwardrobes.com has other Backlinks from this IP address as well. This procedure did not
generate any results. So we reset all filters and try to filter by Domain Registrant (REG)
information. BINGO! 128 websites have the same Domain Registrant (REG) Information.
So the Link Detox Tool was right.

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I just realized that we just could have looked at the Link Detox report to find out if this is a typical
web directory – lets double check that.
Let‟s open the Link Detox report we generated before and let‟s enter one of the domains for which
we assume that it is part of a network into the “From URL” search filter so see what comes up.
If you click the “+” sign next to the URL, the Link Detox tool will show you the rules that have been
applied for this link:

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And you can see the Link Detox tool did a good job it also classified the link as SUSP 15
(Link Directory Links)

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Checking 128 “Pure Spam” Link Network by RobinGupta
A quick check for the registrants name says “RobinGupta.com” and when typing that in we find a
pretty good confirmation of why these 128 sites we found seem to be a very poor link selling
network.
The offering on this website that claims to be the “Brain behind your business” is more or less the
toxic link silver bullet to kill your business in my book.

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This is the typical Cheap-labor offshore SEO shop that offers you promising stuff like “manual link
building”, “guaranteed directory submissions”, and even a “premium package for quality link
building”! This is not the One-Stop Shop for Complete SEO Services but for a sure penalty.
It appears that all those “guaranteed manual links built” were actually just added to their huge
network of own spammy sites as seen above, that‟s exactly what Google forbids in their recent
reminder by Matt Cutts himself:
Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass
Page Rank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action
on such violations.
Loud and clear enough?
Now I am not sure which of these offerings was bought

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Was it PR2+ Niche
Link Building?
Was it Guaranteed
Directory
Submissions?
Was it authority
manual link
building?
Or a toxic mix from all of the
above and some of these?

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Anyway, advertising for PR (Google Page rank) and then putting your company name in all those
128 sites that you “manually” enter the clients link within a couple working days for crazy dollars
is far from good.
I would call this SEO malpractice.
Of course in the case that the site owner did NOT purchase those links there, we would have the
case of Negative SEO. Any competitor could have done that do him, so we leave this question
and possibility up.
The point is – those are harmful links for several reasons, and I hope we could make a point here.
The problem is – there are still hundreds of shady link snake oil sellers out there and anyone
should he super careful not to buy from and of these services.
If it sounds too good to be true, extra caution applies.

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Enter Competitive Link Detox
Now let‟s use the new Competitive Link Detox Tool (CDTOX). It allows you to compare your link
detox risk with that of your competitors. So the Competitive Landscape Analyzer allows you to
compare the back link profile of your website that of your competitors – with the Competitive
Detox Tool you are able to compare your link detox risk with that of your competitors.
The CDTOX tool does not only show you how bad your back link profile is in comparison to your
competitors, but let you go after their collective healthy links that you don‟t have already –
easily.

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First we enter the URL and select the “Theme of the Domain”.
Then we are going to pick the Theme of the Domain to help the Link Detox to handle the rules
better.
After that we can add up to 10 competitors or we can let the tool find the competitors for us for
a specific keyword by clicking “Find Competing Pages”.
As all of the competitive reports are based on a keyword, we need to find out for what keywords
fittedwardrobes.com wants to rank for.
But how can we figure that out if we are not the owner?
Let‟s have a look at fittedwardrobes.com‟s page source to check if we can find some meta
keywords. Meta keywords are the wish list for unprofessional SEOs till today…
Of course, there are more professional ways to find this out namely with special SEO tools, but
to solve this problem quickly this is a convenient method in a fast and easy way some might
have forgotten.
These are some of the keywords we‟ve found:

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Let‟s take the first keyword to find the first competitors:
fitted wardrobes, fitted wardrobes bedrooms, sliding wardrobes, built in wardrobes, walk in
wardrobes
We just need to enter the keyword “fitted wardrobes”, select the right search engine, the right
country and hit “Find Pages”.

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The tool shows us 10 competitors. These are the websites that are ranking on the first page on
google.co.uk for the keyword “fitted wardrobes”:

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Now we just hit the “Run Report” button and see what‟s coming up:

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Wow, look at that! So any further questions why fittedwardrobes.com got removed form
the index?
Let‟s also look at the brand new Detox metric profile:
As you can see in this chart, fittedwardrobes.com has got only 17% healthy links but 15% toxic
and 68% suspicious ones – a lot worse than their competitors.

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Looking at the new Link Detox Risk profile chart, we see that the website has got a very high
amount of “Very High Risk” links (30%). Further, it has 7% “Deadly Risk” and 8% “High Risk”
links. Again, this is a lot worse than the competitors.
The Link Detox Rule Metric also shows that there are 44% SUSP 15 links.
(SUSP 15 = These links are coming from typical web link directory footprints which were often
just setup to artificially inflate link popularities and/or sell links from.
While it was practice for years to fill up link profiles with these types of links for many SEOs, this
practice cannot be recommended these days anymore.)
Now let‟s look at the back link profile of fittedwardrobes.com in order to see if we can find
something interesting in there.

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Did fittedwardrobes.com have lots of weak links?
We decide to take a closer, deeper and more precise look, so let‟s start the Back link Profiler (BLP):

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• First we enter the domain “fittedwardrobes.com” in the “URL/Domain to Analyze” box.
• Now we can choose if we want to look at “Domain Backlinks”, “Page Backlinks”, “Subfolder
Backlinks” or an uploaded file only. We choose first option: “Domain – links to whole domain as
we want to see links to all sub-pages”
• We also have the possibility to upload a list of own Backlinks – in this case we don‟t have any
own lists, so we can‟t upload any.
• To get as many links as possible (up to 50.000!), we choose the “5x Link Boost” option.

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After our report is finished, we are going to have a look at some basic SEO metrics: at the anchor
text ratio, the Link Locations and at the Power*Trust metrics. Hence, we just tick all the boxes
you see below in the screenshot:

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First let‟s look at the Power*Trust metric (this metric is very similar to Google‟s Page Rank
combined with Trust Rank, but updated almost daily – that‟s why it is more precise and accurate
than the Page Rank or other similar metrics).
Here you see that fittedwardrobes.com has a lot of very weak links. Almost all of its Backlinks have
Power*Trust 0. That means most of the websites linking to fittedwardrobes.com do not pass any
Power or Trust to the site.

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Did fittedwardrobes.com have an unnatural link profile?
The next metric we are looking at is the keyword breakdown:
You can see, fittedwardrobes.com built a lot of compound and money keywords.

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Let‟s check the ratios in detail:

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Here we see that 52,5 % of its links have the keyword “fitted wardrobe company reviews” . That‟s a
lot! Very overdone actually.
As we have set the site wide links filter to 5, the reason for that high number can‟t be the site
wide links. Also the keyword “fitted wardrobes” looks quite over optimized.
Let‟s look where the links are coming from:
If we just click at the keyword “fitted wardrobe company reviews” the QBL is going to show us all
the Backlinks of fittedwardrobes.com with this keyword:

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In this list, we find our old web directory friends again (we already found them in the DTOX report).
All Backlinks from the directories are having exactly that same anchor text. That‟s not very
natural – or what do you think?
If we select the keyword “fitted wardrobes” we get the following results:

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WOW– a Wikipedia link
Look! The website also has got a Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardrobe

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Well, that‟s the only good link I‟ve found so far I still wonder if that commercial website is the best
possible citation for fitted wardrobes, or was just sneaked it.
Let‟s look at some more links: http://heyitsmikey.com/

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http://heyitsmikey.com/considera
tions-to-choose-a-right-fitted-
wardrobe/

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Ah! Another blog network site! It is very easy to
identify blog networks:
Look at the navigation points Home, About and
Contact – these do not look natural
Look at the sidebar. The section “My Links”
includes “Cell Phone Center” “Classic
Cars” “Kitchen Corner” and so on. All
topics are mixed. Looks like paid links.
• Almost each article has 3 outgoing links (in
most blog networks you are allowed to place
3 links, so… what a coincidence…)
• All links have exact match anchor texts
• Most of the articles have about 400 words
• Affiliate banners are there as well

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Competitive Landscape Analysis on keyword ratios
We don‟t want to focus on the toxic or suspicious links alone.
Let‟s dig deeper into fittedwardrobes.com link profile by using the Competitive Landscape Analyzer
(CLA) for analyzing 5 more keywords:
The steps for using the CLA are the same for each keyword. Therefore I‟ll just explain them for the
first keyword ”fitted wardrobes”.
As always, we enter the domain we want to analyze, and we‟re happy with the quick analysis for
now…

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Then we use the “Find Competing Pages” function to fetch the competitors:
This tool is going to crawl Backlinks from 22 different back link sources. As we want to look at the
domain Backlinks, we select “Analyze Domain Backlinks”. To get as many links as possible we pick
the “5x Link Boost”.

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If you look at the “Metrics”
section, you‟ll see all the
metrics we will get for each
link (if you need information
based on more or on
different metrics, you can
run the CLA in “Detailed
Mode” and choose between
92 link metrics).

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One last important step to get accurate values is to set the site wide links filter to 5. This means the
tool will count only 5 links per domain.
I guess you think right now “But if I do not count all the site wide links, I cannot make any
conclusion about ALL Backlinks.” Well, that‟s right but it will be the same for your site and the
sides of your competitors and you don‟t want excessive site wides skew that comparison.
The problem is this: Let‟s just say a website has only 1 link with the exact anchor text “xyz”. This
link is located in the footer of a big website template and this website has got 10.000 subpages.
The same website has 100 links (not site wide ones) with the anchor text “abc”. The anchor text
ratio for the keyword “xyz” would be much higher than for the keyword “abc” although the
website has much more “real” links (non site wide links) with the anchor text “abc”. Hence, all
the metrics wouldn‟t be accurate anymore. You may say “ok, but what about Google? Don‟t thy
count each link?”
Well, I don‟t think so. 1. links are submitting link juice 2. site wide links are submitting link juice as
well just as 3, 4 and maybe 5 site wide links
But what we have seen in our studies, the times when it was possible to have a good ranking
because of having only one or two good site wide links are gone. On the contrary, last studies
have shown, that lots of site wide links do hurt the ranking rather than help it.

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As soon as the report is finished, we get a nice overview of the domain and its Top10 competitors
for the keyword ”fitted wardrobes”:

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Strong competitors and another spam site?
Wow! It looks like fittedwardrobes.com has got very strong competitors! Only Nr. 9 –
londonbespokeinteriors.co.uk – has less Power*Trust than fittedwardrobes.com!
londonbespokeinteriors.co.uk has Power*Trust 2 but it is ranking on Nr 9.!? I haven‟t seen this
many times before, so let‟s see what‟s going on!
Again, we start a Link Detox report to get a quick overview:

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Can you believe that? This site is ranking on Nr. 9 for the keyword ”fitted wardrobes” in
google.co.uk, although it has almost no Power*Trust and lots of toxic links!
This website is not the focus of our case study, but let‟s look at the back link profile quickly to
maybe find out why this site is ranking that high.

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Ok. Please don‟t ask me.
I have no idea why this website is ranking for Nr. 9 on google.co.uk!
If you look at its back link profile, you see that the website has 100% money keywords!
I have never seen that before!
They also have 94% Power*Trust 0 pages!

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Well, in this case, Google really messed up!
One last thing I want to do is to look at the website’s visibility. Although I couldn’t find any redirects, I am
pretty sure the site is ranking because of its redirected links.

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Well, in this case, Google really messed up!
One last thing I want to do is to look at the website‟s visibility. Although I couldn‟t find any redirects,
I am pretty sure the site is ranking because of its redirected links.

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The tool could already classify 17 % of all keywords. The rest, we have to classify manually. To get
a visible chart we need to classify at least 50% of all the keywords. But pay attention! In order to
get accurate numbers we need to classify about 90% of all keywords!
There are 4 main categories of keywords. If you have problems to distinguish between the keyword
types, here you find detailed information about how to classify a keyword.

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Here you see some examples for keyword classification: “ikea” is a brand keyword for
www.ikea.com, “john Lewis” is a brand term for www.johnlewis.com. The keyword “website” has
to be categorized as “other”. If you would compare some web design companies for instance,
the word “website” would be a money keyword (not an “other” keyword).
Generally speaking, it doesn‟t necessary have a negative effect for your outcomes if you classify
some of the keywords wrong if you classify them for all websites you want to compare in the
same way – so the relation is going to stay the same.

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Looking at the Power*Trust metric we see that fittedwardrobes.com has twice as much Power*Trust
0 links (85%) than the total average (42%). We can also get detailed information in the table
below:

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Alright, let‟s look at the other 4 keywords:
keyword "fitted wardrobes bedrooms”
Also here have been built far too many Power*Trust 0 links.

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keyword "sliding wardrobes"
For this keyword, there have been built too many weak links as well. For the keywords "built in
wardrobes" and "walk in wardrobes" we got the same results, so I am not going to show you these
charts too.

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Now we need to have a look at the keyword metric. As you remember, before we categorized all
keywords in order to get an accurate keyword metric chart for fittedwardrobes.com.
Here we see that fittedwardrobes.com‟s keyword ratio does not fit at all into the link profile
distribution of its competitors.
Can this result be O.K.? Let‟s check the keywords we‟ve categorized already again – maybe we did
something wrong.

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fittedwardrobes.com is an exact match keyword domain (EMD). Times changed so we are treating
exact match keyword domains in the same way like any other domains (because Google does
so).
That‟s why we categorized the keywords this way:

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Well, in my opinion we categorized the keywords the right way.
fittedwardrobes.com is an EMD and sometimes these domains are hard to categorize but if you
consistently categorize the keywords in the same way for you and your competitors, the result
will be OK.
As one keyword is not really meaningful, I want to analyze 2 more keywords:
keyword "fitted wardrobes bedrooms"
These ratios look even more unnatural than the link profile for the keyword "fitted wardrobes”
because here also the money keyword ratio is over the top.

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Also for the keyword "sliding wardrobes" the keyword metric looks very unnatural.
Let‟s look at the CNTRY metrics – the hosting locations. As we know, it is important to have the
right kind of links from the right websites. This includes having the majority of your links from the
country you want to rank for.

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fittedwardrobes.com wants to rank in UK but has most of its Backlinks from US websites. Also this
country distribution looks very unnatural!

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keyword "fitted wardrobes bedrooms"
This chart shows almost the same values as in a.). Also the CNTRY ratio for the other keywords
looks quite similar. That‟s why we are not going to look at them in detail.

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Did fittedwardrobes.com have lots of sneaky redirects?
Another important aspect are redirects. Does fittedwardrobes.com have many sneaky redirects
hurting it?
We are going to answer this question by looking at the BLP report we created before:

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To get the numbers of fittedwardrobes.com's redirects, we simply click at the “Link Status” tab. Here
we can see that the website has 6 redirects (1,6 %).
Now we become curious and want to see what kind of links these are. All we have to do is to
click the “Redirect” button to get detailed information about them:

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If we scroll to the left, we can also check if these redirects are also passing link juice (redirect 301)
or not (redirect 302):
What we see: 5 out of 6 redirects are passing link juice.
Let‟s get some more information about the particular redirects by simply clicking on them. We are
going to start with first entry “http://valuemycar.org/“:

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As you can see by means of the redirect checker or simply by clicking on the URL, we get
redirected to fittedwardrobes.com.
We see in the table above that all the 6 redirects are coming from only 2 domains:
http://valuemycar.org/ and http://www.lookforuk.co.uk. 1 of these redirects does not submit link
juice, so there is no need to look at this one in detail.
Let‟s carry on with analyzing the other 5 redirects. Therefore we need to run a BLP and a Link
Detox report to see if these domains are transferring massive negative power to
fittedwardrobes.com.
Now we know that there are 301 redirects from http://valuemycar.org/ to fittedwardrobes.com so
actually we need to run a Back link Profiler and a Link Detox report because maybe this domain
is passing massive negative power to fittedwardrobes.com.

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Once again, we start a new Back link Profiler: Enter the URL http://valuemycar.org/, skip the site
wide links, select full link boost and there you go again:

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The domain that redirects to fittedwardrobes.com has got almost 15.000 links! To me it looks like
someone just redirected a dropped domain or an old project to boost its rankings!
This massive amount of links (almost 15.000) from http://valuemycar.org/ transfers 2/3 of its link
juice to the domain fittedwardrobes.com. (from my experience and from projects we did
If have seen that if links are redirected
If we click at the “14,904 Links” button, the LRT gives us the following information:
As we can see, most of these links are site wide links. But still there are links from 88 pages, 42
domains and 38 top domains (root level domains).
This is huge! Let„s take a deeper look, maybe this domain has got lots of quality links that helped
fittedwardrobes.com to get good rankings.

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First we take a look at http://valuemycar.org‟s Power*Trust metric:

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Remember: Having Power*Trust 0 is almost as having a PR of 0! So 94% of the Backlinks are not
doing good.
Again, we see a very unnatural link profile. As you know by now, the back link profile of a website
on its own is not an accurate source in order to see if the link profile of a website is unnatural or not.
This question can only be answered by comparing the website‟s back link profile with the back link
profile of the website‟s competitors. For that reason we simply run another Competitive Landscape
Analyzer (CLA).

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Look what I‟ve seen while I classifying the keywords:

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Well, if you are trying to rank for keywords like “fitted wardrobes”, I would not recommend
redirecting a totally off topic page like this to your project! (See the anchor texts “Value my car”
“how much is my car worth”, e.g.)
I think at this point there is no need to look at any other details more. What we have seen already is
that fittedwardrobes.com‟s Backlinks are of very bad quality and also off topic.
But as I am a very curious person, I want to start another Link Detox report for the domain
http://valuemycar.org because if good link juice is getting passed via 301, also bad one will
pass. Similar assumptions were made in this case study about the penalty of HOME24 after
Penguin 2.0 rolled out. So let‟s look if we find some toxic or suspicious links from
http://valuemycar.org that would also be toxic for fittedwardrobes.com.
On more time, we start the Link Detox report in “Classic Mode” and get the following result:

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Hmm this doesn‟t look too good – What do you think? Let‟s look at the summery:
Now we can be quite sure that this redirect is more hurting then helping!
Another important aspect: Being part of a link network could also be the reason for de-indexing!
In this case, speaking of de-indexing is not the right term as fittedwardrobes.com got back in the
index some hours ago. Therefore I suggest, being part of a link network is not the reason why
fittedwardrobes.com got de-indexed as got back to the index again. But let‟s check this issue to
make sure if I am right or not.
For it, let‟s use another tool out of the LinkResearchTools kit: the Juice tool.
Normally, we use the Juice tool to get metrics of lots of links at the same time. The Juice tool will
show you up to 93 metrics for your links, so with this tool you are able to get a very nice and clear
overview. But this time we are going to use the tool in a different way.

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First we need to copy the URL we want to analyze into the “URLS to Analyze” box. By the way, let‟s
look at both of the URLs (note how we could actually paste in 2.000 URLs or 10.000 with a boost
ticket)

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It is important to run the tool in “Detail Analysis” mode because by doing so we can get much more
metrics than by running it in “Quick Analysis” mode:

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Because we want to find out about the IP addresses or registration details of the domains, we need
to tick the “Domain Registration Details” box and the “Domain Expiry & Registrar details” box
and run the report.
Aha! fittedwardrobes.com and http://valuemycar.org are having the same IP address (For some
reason the tool was not able to give more details for these domains).
Now we have the IP address, the name of the person who registered the domain, the DNR (Domain
Name Registrar) and the DNS (Domain Name Server). With these footprints we can go back to our
back link report and search for it:

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So we open the BLP Report we have created before and type in the IP address into the filter box.

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9 Pages are coming up. I checked these URLs and found out that all of them are subpages of
http://valuemycar.org/. We already knew about that so let‟s reset the IP filter and enter the REG
Name:

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Now we got 14 results. You can see, there is also an IP address with the number “37.26.106.189”.
This domain is running on
totally different IPs – very
strange (The also have
different DNS and DNR
Data). Let‟s give it another
try and do a search using
the DNS.
Searching for the DNS
brought up the same
results as we saw using
the IP.
So I think we can stop here
– it‟s late already and I am
tired

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Did fittedwardrobes.com remove some links already?
To be able to find out if some links got removed already we again open the Back link Report we just
looked at:
In order to see if fittedwardrobes.com removed some links after its de-indexing, we just have to re-
run this BLP report.

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We need to do another report with the same settings but this time we want to see
fittedwardrobes.com‟s dropped links. Therefore we just select “Dropped Links Handling”:

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Choose “Remove Dropped Links” and run the report. Now we can see the numbers of links:

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Before the de-indexing, fittedwardrobes.com had 1.378 links. You can also see if a website dropped
a lot of the links by using the “Competitive Link Velocity” Tool.
What? The report that was made before the de-indexing found more links than the report that was
made after the de-indexing? Well, I guess they got a lot of new links within the last 3-4 days.
Let‟s see if my presumption is right:

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Did fittedwardrobes.com get a lot of new links?
We want to check why fittedwardrobes.com got back into the index. To find out if they got a lot of
new links within in the last days we use the “Competitive Link Velocity” (CLV) tool.
The tool works in the same way as almost all the LinkResearchTools so a) enter the URL b) we
use the “Find Competing Pages” function (we will use the keyword “fitted wardrobes“) c) we
select the option “last 30 days” d) we hit “Run Report”.

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After these steps we get the following results:
To get accurate numbers you need to switch to “Domain Popularity”, otherwise the chart also shows
you all the site wide links.
Generally speaking, the darker the green fields are, the more links the domains got this day.
So you see they got some new links the last days (maybe because some people like me were
writing about it).

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If we click on the “Deleted Links” tab, we can also see if links have been removed during the last 30
days:
So we could see, they got some new links and also removed some old ones. But the problem is we
don‟t know if they disavowed links – so we can‟t exactly tell what happened.
Well, I don‟t know why the domain was out of the index and came back so quickly, but I found out
some major issues:

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Conclusion
OK, you may say there are also other reasons for the de-indexing of fittedwardrobes.com!
You are right! So let‟s look at some other possibly factors:
What I have to point out is that the reason for the de-indexing can be technical issues on
fittedwardrobes.com or even technical issues on Google„s side.
Maybe fittedwardrobes.com got de-indexed because it was cloaking or had some doorway pages or
something like that. But what you could see from the link based analysis; we found once more
the very unnatural link profile and the high amount of toxic and suspicious links.
As you could see in the visibility chart, Google already hit this site 2 times (Penguin #3 and
Penguin #4). These facts also speak for a linked based issue.
Then finding those obviously paid links by RobinGupta for almost 50% of the back link profile speak
for themselves. If nothing else, THAT would be a reason to penalize the site.
Another big thing that we‟ve found are the 301 redirects from the domain http://valuemycar.org to
fittedwardrobes.com. Because the power of these links is very low and because
http://valuemycar.org has a big amount of toxic and suspicious links, I am quite sure these
redirects hurt a lot! If good link juice gets transferred – why shouldn„t bad link juice get
transferred as well?

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All these factors have caused the drop in my opinion.
<speculation>
And THEN, maybe they filled in a re-inclusion request, hoping Google would thank them for
their e-mail and restore their rankings. Instead, a Google spam engineer looked at the site in
their own “deep dive” process and could see what was obvious to see for us now as well… Pure
Spam.
</speculation off>
Final note: if something in this post reads like the low quality or spam links were created by the
owner that is a misunderstanding. Actually based on the public data that is public, you cannot
decide if spammy links were built by current site owners, past site owners or even a competitor
(in lieu of a Negative SEO attack).

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SUCHMASCHINENOPTIMIERUNG
www.mediabase.at
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Contact me:
Harald Tschuggnall
www.mediabase.at
Twitter: @seo_mediabase
Google+: https://plus.google.com/114692205518692366515/posts
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/mediabasegmbh
Mail: seo@mediabase.at

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