Google is Aware of Temporary Link Schemes

Temporary link schemes based on random link placement work a bit like this:

1. Spam the web with links.
2. Delete them soon after that (to avoid penalties but feed the algorithm).
3. Count money.

But there’s a problem with this plan. Google’s webspam team is aware of it and they do take action against it. In a recent post on the SEO Hangout Panel, Marta Gryszko noticed a rather unusual reconsideration request reply:

Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for http://www.[redacted].

We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines.

Sample URLs:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=pqotoolbar&strip=1&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.[redacted]

Please correct or remove all inorganic links, not limited to the samples provided above. This may involve contacting webmasters of the sites with the inorganic links on them.

If there are links to your site that cannot be removed, you can use the disavow links tool. Keep in mind that simply disavowing links will not be enough to make a reconsideration request successful; we will also need to see good-faith efforts to remove a large portion of inorganic links from the web wherever possible.

Removing links takes time. Due to the large volume of requests we receive, and to give you a better chance of your next reconsideration request being successful, we won't review another request from this site for a few weeks from now. We recommend that you take the necessary time to remove unnatural backlinks to your site, and then file another reconsideration request.

For more specific information about the status of your site, visit the Manual Actions page in Webmaster Tools. From there, you may request reconsideration of your site again.

If you have additional questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.

Google webspam team included a link from a page in Google cache, as the original resource no longer existed. This raised a concern with some that even links from Google cache need to be considered when managing disavow files. Some speculated this was simply a human error, but John Mueller stepped in and clarified the matter after consulting with the team at Google.

Google’s webspam team sometimes does this when they suspect a pattern of rotating, temporary link schemes:

I asked the team about this. Sometimes they do this if the link is on the cached page, but no longer on the live one (eg if it’s using a rotating link scheme).

Can you just wait this out in hope that the link will be deemed as deleted? No. Google is aware of these schemes and will take action if the pattern of temporary link placement persists:

If the webmaster is taking part in a link-scheme that uses rotating / random link placement, they need to get out of that. Otherwise a web-spam manual review (eg for the reconsideration request) will just bubble up the new links.

Hopefully those who still think these types of link schemes are still effective will reconsider their approach after reading this post.

Great job Google!

Related concepts

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Source Authority