Ever since Google announced Penguin 4.0, SEOs began talking about how they are now more eager to try to escalate link buying and other link schemes to see how they can quickly manipulate the algorithm. This is chatter spiked a lot when the news around the disavow and Penguin came out.
But Google's Gary Illyes said that Google is prepared for that.
He said this in multiple tweets but here are two of them:
@AlanBleiweiss @rustybrick @ShahMenz @scottpolk we are prepared for that, but I'm not going to go into details for reasons
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 11, 2016
@beanstalkim @IrishWonder @JohnMu we do have built-in protection for manipulation, keep that in mind ;)
— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 12, 2016
It is like we have these SEOs publicly mocking Google and Google telling them don't risk it, don't do it. But knowing SEOs, they will test it and test it and see what happens.
It is a bit too early to tell if SEOs feel more comfortable with older link building tactics again.
But it would be a shame if Penguin 5.0 was released where it no longer devalues, but also demotes for a period of time based on how bad the link spamming is. Wouldn't that be bad?
