Seo Services Spain Blog

I was recently reading one of the latest SeoMoz blog posts on 30 SEO problems and tools to solve them and point #6 concerned link atrophy and one of the tools that you can use to diagnose link atrophy issues.

For me, the post was quite interesting and got me thinking about something that many people are either not aware of, or just don’t pay too much attention too.

But first lets define what “atrophy” is. From the dictionary we have

If a muscle or other part of the body atrophies, it decreases in size or strength, often as a result of an illness.

or

If something atrophies, its size, degree, or effectiveness decreases because it is not used or protected.

So how does this apply to our links or our overall link profile?

Lets use an example.  Site A has 500 links pointing to it. Over a period of time approximately 30% of these links are churned, i.e are lost and replaced with new links.

So what does this mean to a search engine? What signal does this send to a search engine in respect to a sites trust?

For me and I am sure to a search engine also, this indicates that a site is possibly renting links or buying links/subscriptions for short periods of time. The owner buys some links, the links expire, are removed and are then replaced by similar paid links on other sites, which also are removed after a short space of time.  It also indicates a lack of quality.

Site B on the other hand also has 200 links (far fewer) but the link atrophy rate is at just say 2%. This means that the churn rate for new and old links is far less, signaling more trust and stability and long term link profile strength.

Google for example say they use over 200 ranking signals in order to rank a site organically.  You can bet your bottom dollar that this is used as one of the stronger ranking signals.

Think of it this way. If you engage in aggressive link building and acquire many poor quality links over a short period of time, the fact that they are of a poor quality will also mean that these links in a lot of cases get removed after a short amount of time. So having a high atrophy level is a strong signal of spammy link building practices.

Lessons To Be learned

1. Try not to buy or rent short term links. If you do “buy links” say from directories, try to make sure they are lifetime style links with a one off payment.

2. If you do reciprocal linking, keep an eye on whether your link partners are linking back to you still. We all know there are some shady characters out there who just love to link exchange only to remove you link hoping you will not notice.

3. Make sure that if you do undertake some reciprocal linking that you try as much as possible to link exchange with trusted sites or business partners.

4. It really is still about quality over quantity when it comes to link building.

5. Use the link atrophy tool from Virante in order to check your link atrophy rate on a regular basis.

Until next time.

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