With the changes Google made to how Blogspot links are handled, it was a reasonable concern that they were able to do the same with WordPress.com websites. The original intent of this test was to check actual WordPress.com subdomain websites, however, it was set up the site on the domain and hosted on the same IP range. This will tell us two things about how Google is “filtering” links, by IP range or by domain the link is coming from.
In this test, we check if a nofollow exact match link from a paid WordPress.com site can help or hurt rank.
Transcription below:
So with that is the exact match anchor from wordpress.com, help her and this one it's obvious, exact match, it's in the body of the content in the paid site setups, pretty much the same. There's the link set to REL nofollow. I believe over there, that's kind of default, I didn't set this up.
So, I don't have access to the site so I couldn't check if I could go in there and delete that REL nofollow and make it a dofollow. But that'll be some of the next series of tests that I have Hunter setup, switching these over to dofollow if possible.
Here's the starting point of the page, it actually was right towards the top and you see a drop down. And then when I checked it again, the pages in the search results at all until you turn off that filter. And there it is at the bottom. So pretty much consistent with this right? It's number 9, might as well be number 10 and are gone.
Google clearly saw that page and saw the link and saw the exact match and say, hey, it's no, we're not gonna give you the benefit it as a matter of fact, algorithmically, we're gonna push it down. Considering how long this test started. I think they're all from the same date. They started on March 12. It was April 29. Before, it was April 29th, when these were collected, and then they got a whole another month before I saw them again. So we've clearly waited, I would think long enough to if there was going to be a boost, and it was just messing with us right?
So, does that mean that the links don't count or they're bad? I think there's could be one of three things happening here.
One, the IP range could be the one is being targeted. But if that was the case, then the comment link should probably not have worked, right? And two, it could be that it's a brand new page on a brand new websites linking out. And that could be indicative of spam or web spam or link spam. Because that's 9 times out of 10. If that is happening, it's probably someone that he's building backlinks for something right? And maybe a software or something like that.
So I think programmatically, it'd be easy to point that out. This is a brand new page, the website is brand new, the page is brand new, and it's got a link to it. That's fishy, we're gonna demote you. That is totally within the realm of possibilities in regards to this.
We still can't rule out wordpress.com. But we can say, you don't want to put him in the body of your content. Right off the bat, you gotta want these sites. And what is the time period of that? It's anybody's guess. I mean, Matt Diggety put out a post quite some time ago that expired domains were fine.
This still use for PBNs, but you had to let them sit there for 60 days, is that 60 days of number reply to these sites? Or is there some kind of posting history where you got to post consistently, and then not link out to anything for about two, three months? And then you can actually drop links and get power from it. We don't know that. What the number ranges. But I'm guessing here, but it's probably tied into the dates. Was the date publish when the site show up? When was it first indexed? Is that time period suspicious? How do you teach that suspicion? I don't know. But if I did, I probably run a search engine by now.
