Good morning, Search Marketer, let's talk about the cycle of spam and why some of you may be led down the wrong path without even knowing.
In the newsletter items below you will read about how Google released its webspam report for 2020, saying how spam is increasing but Google's efforts to detect and ultimately block spam from its search results are improving. If there is one guarantee in life, outside of taxes and death, is that as long as search engines are popular, spam will always be a concern for Google and those search engines.
In What We're Reading below, I listed an article I wrote (I also did read it after I wrote it, which is rare): Brands Value Domain Authority Because They Mistakenly Think Google Values It. It is a vicious circle with DA or domain authority. What you get is SEOs who don't understand that DA is not a Google metric, and those SEOs buying links from sites that have high DA. This causes a multitude of issues. Site owners work hard to get their DA scores up, because for some reason marketers believe there is value in the score, then those sites then sell links on their sites because they have a good DA score.
Google's Webmaster Guidelines strictly forbid link selling in this manner, so what eventually happens is the people selling links on their sites will ultimately see their rankings in Google Search drop because Google will stop trusting the links on that site and trusting the site in general.
You also then have those who are buying the link, paying for a link that does them no good – because Google isn't counting it. This isn't a new topic, we covered it before.
In short – these SEOs are obsessing about a metric called DA that's not even used by Google but created by an SEO toolset provider. SEOs should be obsessing about what really matters: Building a website that has great content that people naturally want to link to, that helps users solve a problem and that people want to recommend to their friends. And that is what will perform well in Google in the long term, not pages with high DA scores but pages that have great content, user experience and that people love.
Stop wasting your time, money and resources on vanity metrics.
Barry Schwartz,
SEO spam good cop