SEO pros have been talking about link echoes or phantom links or ghost links for some time. The idea on link echoes is that the value of a backlink remains long after the backlink has been removed.
After monitoring the test page, the link echo has ended and this is the follow up to the original test.
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We tested this way back May or June. The link echo is the phenomenon where you place a link on a page. Google crawls it and it affects rank. The juice has been passed and then you remove that link and the juice remains. That is the echo. The deleted link will stay in the index or within Google’s database for a certain amount of time and will continue to pass juice and prop up that page and affecting that page’s rank for a certain amount of time.
We have expanded on this and you can actually change that link so in the simplest sense, you have a link going to page A, you can change that exact link and point it to page B and both pages will receive the juice of that link. The first page is getting the echo and the second page is getting what that actual link is.
We also took it a step further into link shorteners where you can change the destination URL and you can do it within the program and you can move multiple pages, you can pass juice to multiple pages with a link shortener.
Anyway, I want to show a follow up on how long the echo lasted and in this situation, it came out to almost 6 months. What was really great was that William Twiner posted some results where he was running some similar tests watching the echo and I think he got 6 months and some change.
Right about there: 5-6 months, maybe 5-7 months would be a decent range of how long that echo would last. If you are thinking about taking advantage of it, say you get a link and maybe it is a short term rental if that is something that you do, or a link that you can control and you want to point it to different places in that 5-6 months maybe up to 7 is how long you can expect that echo to last.
That is where you would want to refire that link to the original page to kick it back up again.
Are you using an indexing tool to index it?
It depends on the test. Usually, what we do when we make changes on a page or when we introduce a factor, we submit that to the Google URL submitter. There is this little tool where you can just put it in and Google will recrawl the page. It is often how we do it.
I understand that deindexed site still pass juice but will the deindexed site pass the penalty through the link? Example, site deindexed, I rebuild on new domain and link to the rebuilt domain with domain with penalty.
Dori: We have not tested that. If it has a penalty and you know that it has the penalty, I would not 301 redirect it. I have heard that it will pass the penalty. I do not know for sure if it will or not but it it was a client site, I would not redirect that thing. I have not heard much about penalties in the last year or two because it does not seem like Google was as aggressive as they were in 2011 and 2012 with the introduction of Panda and Penguin.
I would be surprised if it does have a penalty and the way that you can tell is if you put your URL into Google and it doesn’t come up or if it comes up at five and not number one, then you pretty much know that you have a penalty.
You could put in “domain com” without the “.” so “yourdomain com). If you do not come out on that then you have problems.
Question on content on link test, Fiverr is crap, we all know that. What if you point a strong PBN, would that make a difference?
I don’t think so. The reason is that, you can copy and paste that keyword and you can see that there are 200 links from DripFeed and the crap Fiverr stuff that are actually indexing for the keyword. You know that they are 100% crap links but they are still indexing.
Meaning, Google is ranking that page, that crap link, for that target keyword. We rely on spam a lot, actually, because in testing, you will see the movement with spam. You might see long terms down the road but you can see if something is a factor through just blasting them and then in this situation, there is no movement.
Would you use the Weebly domain and subdomain technique to buy paid links to subdomain and send links from domain to your money site and can you create a step by step for rookies?
That is something that I definitely like doing – sending links through those Weebly subdomains. Let me see if Carolyn would put up a step by step on those Weebly subdomains. It is pretty straightforward – you have to do the paid Weebly. The standard Weebly is not doing the technique that we are talking about. You are running your site through the Weebly platform.
What is interesting is that some people have problems taking in existing domains and taking it over to Weebly and Richard Morrison in our group called Weebly. He got into their support and he was – Hey I had a thousand business cards made with this subdomain because I thought that was how it was going to be but I don’t have it, can you do it? They were – oh yeah, no problem.
The issue was that the subdomain did not exist because the system did not do it automatically, let me help you. They created that hidden subdomain. If you have any problems doing it, you are taking an existing domain, and you want to move it over to Weebly and you do not get that hidden subdomain, just call them and say the same thing – you were expecting a subdomain – and they will set them up for you.
Does a 100+ word article outrank a 500-word article just from having more keywords on it?
Dori: Yes, it does. This was early in the beginning we found the sweet spot to be 1300. I do believe that at the beginning of the test, the 1000 outranked the 500?
That is right, the thing though in that situation was that the pages were consistently optimized. The additional content was consistently optimized. The optimization rate, if you will, stayed the same. It was 2% keyword density that we were playing with for that particular test. So, 2% density 500 words, 2% density 1000 words.
That remain the same and I think that is an important point. I am not sure that you can just add content to a page just to add content and it will outrank a page with less content. It should be properly optimized content in order to outrank lower word count pages.
The point is, do not just throw lorem ipsum on pages and expect them to rank.
Would you say 200 words negatively effect, say, 1300 words on a small site or are they graded separately rather than site wide?
I see what you are saying, so you’ve got a thin page and then some other. From what I have seen from testing that we have done, actually some test that we have not posted yet, I would say that there would be no effect having a thin page affecting other pages on a site.