Yesterday, I covered at Search Engine Land an interview I did with Gary Illyes last week where Gary Illyes from Google told us Google has link labels.
Link labels are basically various attributes or characteristics added to a site's link profile, on a link-by-link basis. So if page A links to my home page, that page A link can have multiple link labels.
Some of the examples of what labels would be given to a link include footer links, Penguin real time links, disavowed links and so on. In short, algorithms and systems are automatically labeling links with these labels.
And Gary said that Googlers do have access to see what labels are on a specific link. So while Google's manual action team may not get automated flags from algorithms about sites they should investigate - if they are looking at a site and see some link label issues, they may dive deeper and find more issues, he said.
Here is the audio of that interview:
I posted the transcript over here.
Here are some tweets that found this interview interesting:
E.g. this. @sengineland @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/E9xxufQSAi
— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) October 10, 2016
A "link tagging" system used by Google. Labels are being used for different types of links. Interesting. #seo https://t.co/y6brkR6A3B
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) October 10, 2016
Google quote of the day #1: Footer links may have a lot lower value than in-context links https://t.co/lZEL22Pzv5 pic.twitter.com/Hj6ulZdGzF
— Cyrus Shepard (@CyrusShepard) October 10, 2016
Fascinating. If the webspam team sees you're disavowing, they know you're actively trying to work on link spam. pic.twitter.com/tdJ9aU5F4F
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 10, 2016
I guess this is why Google says keep using the disavow file to protect your site.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
