Google’s Link Spam Update is finished

Google has confirmed today that the Link Spam Update that began rolling out in December has now finished. It took nearly a month to roll out as it was partially paused during the holiday. The Link Spam Update is focused on removing the effects of spam links that point to websites that may be artificially helping them to rank well. The effects of this update may be difficult to determine in isolation as it was overlapped by the release of the new Helpful Content Update.

Therefore, if a website has lost rankings over the last 30 days, it could have been because of either update or could have been affected by both. Google still heavily relies on backlinks for ranking websites and it is continuing to refine how it determines if a link is natural or artificial, i.e., that the website hasn’t gained that backlink organically. We can expect more Link Spam updates to continue rolling out during the year.

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