Are We Repeating History & Risking Backlink Penalties Again? via @sejournal, @TaylorDanRW

The race to monetize AI visibility services, claiming new acronyms and extending existing fields of practice as whole new trenches of engineering, is something we’ve witnessed a lot over the past couple of years.

We’re seeing new entrants to the market because they see a gap, but no one is really stopping to ask the question: Why does a gap exist in the first place?

The truth is simple. The gap has, more often not been left open by accident, but rather created deliberately off the back of Google changing its tack and introducing penalties for the exact same manipulation practices that people try to repackage today as solutions for AI visibility.

In the early days of SEO, it was very different from how it is now, regardless of AI and Google’s overall search features. How Google indexed and how Google weighted weak factors that led to ranking order, have changed significantly over the years. The two main mechanisms of manipulation have always been content and links.

The rise and fall of AI-generated content, and how there is a misunderstanding between content production and Google’s crawl economics, I’ve already covered in another article. What we’re now starting to see is a very confident entry into the market of services playing on the link side of how visibility is generated, based on a market gap where people are trying to exploit without actually understanding where and why those bad habits were driven underground.

A Short History Of Backlink Manipulation

Google’s Penguin algorithm, which is now a part of the core algorithm, was a series of standalone updates that focused on penalizing link manipulation practices. Not only in the volume of backlinks, but also the over-optimization of anchor text, unnatural patterns of gaining links, random and sudden spikes with little justification as to why the spike existed, and also patterns of websites linking out to random websites and non-sequential content themes.

Google does this now algorithmically at scale. If we can quickly and easily see the link manipulation going on, just by using exports from third-party tools or even in the user interface of third-party tools, we can guarantee that Google and Bing are also able to see this manipulation at scale.

Backlink Manipulation Penalties Still Exist

A common misconception about Penguin becoming a part of the core algorithm is that Google simply ignores spammy links – that you could almost run free and buy backlinks and manipulate your profile to your heart’s content, and you won’t receive a penalty because Google would have to ignore the bad efforts. Anyone believing this is gravely misinformed.

Over the past year, I’ve seen more link-based penalties occurring than in the five years before it. That’s because people have bought into buying backlinks for AI purposes without understanding, and potentially ignoring, the underlying consequences of how they appear within Google and Bing’s indexes. Being present for various fan-out, grounding, and stacked queries also plays a role in AI visibility, let alone the fact that you need to be strong and visible when it comes to being included in training data.

Buying backlinks from a marketplace has been a risky practice ever since Penguin was introduced. Failing to acknowledge and understand that doing something for AI doesn’t make it an agnostic SEO practice, and you could very easily damage one while having a minimal impact on the other.

How Gurus Are Accidentally Saving The Industry

There is a certain irony to new entrants to the organic visibility market pushing these practices. What we’ve learned from them, they also are very likely aligned with the commentary that SEO is dead and a dead-end channel for investment, but what they’re actually doing is securing the future of SEO for the rest of us.

By repackaging tactics we regard as short-termist or spammy, what they’re actually doing is creating a large pile of clutter and signal noise that Google will inevitably sweep through and ignore or penalize, just as it has done during every previous cycle since Penguin was introduced. When the signal noise is gone and cleared, only those who have not been penalized and not engaged in these tactics will remain.

SEO has always been about understanding human search intent, providing accurate answers, and building genuine authority over periods of time.

Technology may be evolving from standard lists of links to conversational answer engines, but the fundamental economics of how Google crawls and understands websites, and the fundamental economics of how Bing does the same, are relatively the same, albeit with an added layer of AI in terms of processing layered on top.

Far from killing the industry, the current wave of spam will only make high-quality SEO work more valuable than ever before.

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