Following on the heels of Eric Lander's NoFollow: An SEO Red Flag?, I thought I'd pose the question of whether updating inbound links may also be a red flag.
Google uses inbound links to assess the value of content, but it wants those links created naturally. Don't get me wrong. Naturally doesn't necessarily preclude a marketing effort, but it does mean that the person that created the link was free to choose what URL and anchor text to use. Overtly manipulating those two items is entirely unnatural and I would think Google would want to devalue the impact of such behavior.
Deciding What Is Unnatural
So what might this mean? Well, if Google detects that the anchor text of a link is updated 30 days after the link first went live, I'd say that's pretty unnatural. But that's not good enough because, despite being rare, some people do go back and edit old content. So lets add another layer that includes checking the number of links on different sites that all point to the same site that within a short period have their anchor text updated. That combination of variables seems like a pretty good indicator that there's an active SEO effort in the works.
The trick here is determining the threshold where updated links reveals a concerted effort rather than just the natural edits people make. I don't think figuring out such a threshold would be too difficult. I'm sure the Google spam team could come up with that measure along with a few refinements during their lunch break. And I suspect Google already has the storage capacity to store previous link data to compare to current link data.
OK. The tinfoil hat is coming off now, but I would be interested in hearing what others have to say about this theory.
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I have seen direct evidence as of late that you can actually hurt a page by changing the anchor text. In the past my experiences have been that the link gets devalued. (not always but a majority of the cases)
This obv. differs from site to site, backlink profile to backlink profile, authoritative site to non authoritative site etc etc.
@Brian Would you say that enough devaluing is happening that it's not worth the effort to try and "clean" links? Or are you at the point where you're able to pick out the ones that are likely to continue to be valuable and so the ROI is still positive?
Thanks for the Sphinn!
I have stopped updating links altogether. However this tactic might still work for clean sites that do not engage in many of the practices we do.
Least you can do is run a test for the site in question. Like you said it is not that hard to discern whether it is working or not.
I really don’t that it works this way. Checking of anchor text and then a decision is made by the SE.
I feel that the history associated with that anchor text+URL is broken after it is changed. So it is reset and then starts over earning history. We all can probably agree that URLs earn history in Google “eyes” so the longer that an stable URL with good anchor text, the more they are worth. Of course this is all relying on the fact that this is a desirable URL.
I can not confirm this from my experience. Better anchor = better results whenever it appears.
I think it is important to keep in mind that updated anchor text needs to be unique to each site, and that a true 'clean up' effort might cause a red flag for the SEs if they notice a significant number of links that have all been updated with the same anchor text.
I would have to go with Vlad. tuning anchor text with time just yealds us better results, - have never even seen a drop away from the previous link coming off, just positive responses from the new anchors.
@ Tristan, absolutely, its always good not to abuse the same anchors and to mix it up a bit, that keeps it looking natural, but even on switch 100+ sig links in one, go have still never seen anything but positive results from better anchors.